Qualla: Putis massacre

Putis massacre: Introduction

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Portugal, CC BY-SA 4.0. The soldiers told them to come home. Since 1983, the people of Putis — a remote hamlet in the Santillana District of Peru's Huanta Province — had been hiding in the surrounding mountains, driven from their homes by the violence of the Shining Path insurgency. The guerrillas had murdered their lieutenant governor, Santos Quispe Saavedra, and terrorized neighboring villages. When the Peruvian Army established a military base in Putis in November 1984, it called on the refugees to return. Most of them did. They walked down from the mountains, back to the settlement they had fled, trusting the army's assurance of safety. In December 1984, the soldiers gathered the returned villagers, ordered the men to dig a pit, and then executed the entire community.

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Image: Adrian Portugal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Putis massacre: Caught Between Two Fires

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lapalabranecesaria, CC BY-SA 4.0. Peru's internal conflict, which began in 1980 when the Maoist Shining Path launched its insurgency in the Ayacucho region, devastated the country's rural highlands. The Huanta Province, where Putis was located, was one of the hardest-hit areas. Shining Path established control th...

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Image: Lapalabranecesaria | CC BY-SA 4.0

Putis massacre: The Pit

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Portugal, CC BY-SA 4.0. By December 1984, most of the population had returned to the Putis settlement. What happened next was methodical. The military ordered the men of the community to dig a large pit. Then soldiers gathered the entire population — men, women, and children from the settlements of Cayr...

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Image: Adrian Portugal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Putis massacre: Decades of Silence

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Portugal, CC BY-SA 4.0. A handful of people from Putis survived by staying in the mountains, never answering the army's call to return. They remained in hiding for years. A few returned to the hamlet in 1997, more than a decade after the massacre. As of 2002, only about ten families lived in Putis. The ...

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Image: Adrian Portugal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Putis massacre: Unearthing the Dead

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Portugal, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2003, Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended the investigation of mass grave sites across the country, including Putis. It took five years for forensic investigators to begin exhumations. In May 2008, a team began carefully excavating the graves behind the chur...

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Image: Adrian Portugal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Putis massacre: The Unfinished Record

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Portugal, CC BY-SA 4.0. Criminal accountability for the Putis massacre has moved slowly. In December 2011, the Ayacucho public prosecutor filed charges against four high-ranking military officers who commanded operations in the region at the time. In 2012, a judge found sufficient evidence to put them o...

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Image: Adrian Portugal | CC BY-SA 4.0