Word: peruvians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hole was blown in a retaining wall from an adjoining house, hand grenades were thrown at the embassy guardhouse and about 25 rebels belonging to a group known as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement stormed into the compound. As the insurgents engaged police in a ferocious gun battle, everyone--Peruvian ministers, blue-chip business tycoons, assembled diplomats and their wives--dropped to the ground. "Don't lift your head," the rebels barked, "or it'll be shot...
...glacier most of that time. Good thing too. Without the deep freeze, she'd have disintegrated long ago. Now she's on display in a cooler in Washington, courtesy of the National Geographic Society. It helped pay for the expedition that found her, high up in the Peruvian Andes. The body screamed "human sacrifice" from the start. Earthen tomb. Religious offerings--statuettes, coca leaves, corn. Typical sacrifice MO for the Inca, which is what she was. The location fits too: a volcano called Ampato. The Inca worshipped it as a god. Funny thing is, it was Ampato's eruption...
...tell the historians. About how the Inca lived. How they dressed. The crazy things they believed in. And all that ice preserved her tissues. If there's any intact DNA, the molecular-biology boys will have a field day. She's important, all right. So important that some Peruvian scientists didn't want to lend her out. Thought traveling to the States might damage the evidence. Lucky for science, it didn...
...that would have been a shame, for this novel marks a return to the high literary intensity that Vargas Llosa had mastered before his temporary detour into Peruvian public life. It is an attempt to track down, through the labyrinth of fiction, experiences that defy rational explanation...
...novel begins with what might have been a simple puzzle: three men have recently disappeared from the remote Andean village of Naccos, and Corporal Lituma and his adjutant, Tomas Carreno, want to find out what happened to them. The two protagonists are members of the Peruvian Civil Guard assigned to this village, where work is inching ahead on construction of a government-financed highway. Although the guardsmen are supposedly there as keepers of the peace, they know the mountain people regard them at best with mistrust. "To tell the truth, you have to be pretty dumb to join the Civil...