Punishment and Extermination: The Massacre of Political Prisoners in Lima, Peru, June 1986[Note 1. All translations in this chapter are by the author. ...]

On 18 June 1986, prisoners accused of belonging to the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla movement known as ‘Shining Path’ organised a synchronised mutiny in three prisons in or near Lima (two for men and one for women), took a few hostages in each of them, and presented the authorities with a 25-point petition that included demands ranging from ending abuses and mistreatment inside the prisons to stopping the ‘disappearance’ of persons, an already common practice in the state’s counter-subversive campaign. By the time of the riots, the revolutionary war launched by Shining Path was about six years old, had already caused thousands of victims and millions of dollars in damages, and had triggered a brutal response on the part of the state, with widespread human rights violations, including extra-judicial detentions and executions, the ordinary use of torture and the massacre of innocent people, mostly in highland and Indigenous communities. The ongoing war had also produced thousands of prisoners accused of belonging to the Maoist group, and prisons had become potentially explosive scenarios of the war. Although the worst moments in the confrontation between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state were yet to come, Peruvian society was under considerable stress in June 1986. The mutinies organised by Shining Path prisoners were carefully planned not only to occur simultaneously but also to coincide with the presence in Lima of dozens of foreign leaders who were coming to participate in an International Congress of Socialist and Social-Democrat parties, scheduled to start on 20 June, an event that the ruling party, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, or American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), and its young leader, President Alan Garcı́a Pérez, expected to use as a showcase for their still young administration and the aspirations that Garcı́a Pérez had of