In the long and brutal conflict fought largely in Peru’s rural Andes, most of the victims were peasant families trapped between fanatical fighters of the Mao-inspired Shining Path bent on creating a proletarian utopia and the Peruvian armed forces’ brutal counterattack.
Between 1980 and 2000, nearly 70,000 people were killed in the intense conflict; Shining Path fighters were responsible for about 54% of the deaths and the military for the rest.
Top: relatives wipe clean their only portrait Catalina Limaco during her funeral 33 years after she was murdered by members of Shining Path. Above: relatives of victims of the so-called ‘Rio Blanco’ case, one of the period’s many mass murders, take part in a wake for their family members whose remains have been returned many years after their deaths and disappearances. All photographs: Musuk Nolte / Panos Pictures.
Forced disappearances were common and committed by both sides – often to hide their other atrocities. As of November 2023, 22,551 were still missing from the 1980-2000 period, according to Peru’s national register of disappeared people.
In a decade-long project, Musuk Nolte, 35, has documented the various stages of restitution, mourning and burial performed by relatives of the victims, aiming to build a visual record that can strengthen the processes of historical memory.
Top left: A woman places a candle on a table during the communal wake commemorating the victims of the so-called Rio Blanco case. Top right: Alejandrina Valenzuela cries as she stands in front of the coffins of her parents during a memorial service for 74 people from the district of Chungui. Above left: Urbano Huamani Vegara during a burial service for his brother Elihoref, murdered along with 13 others in what became known as the Santa Barbara case. Above right: Zósimo Hilario, whose father was murdered in 1991 along with 12 other family members by an army patrol in the Santa Barbara case.
In one of his first jobs as a young photographer, Nolte photographed families whose relatives had been killed by a military death squad in 1992 in Pativilca during the regime of Alberto Fujimori, who was released from prison last month.
From that moment, he says, he knew he wanted to portray the lives of people in Peru who were waiting for restitution of the bodies of their loved ones who had been disappeared either by the security forces or the insurgents.
Residents of the town of Pujas accompany the remains of their friends and relatives murdered and disappeared during Peru’s insurgency of the 1980s and 90s to the town cemetery for their burial, 37 years after their disappearance and 11 years after their bodies were exhumed.
“It was a very moving experience,” he recalls. “For the families, there was a cry of relief but [there was also] much anger and sorrow. It left a big impact on me,” he said.
Spending long periods in remote parts of the Peruvian Andes, Nolte chose black and white photography to portray the emotion of the subject matter.
“[It was] a subjective response to give it a visual character that can express the density, the mourning, the mournfulness of the situation,” he said.
Top: people accompany a funeral procession to the Pujas cemetery. Middle left: Diógenes Palomino Pizarro, the brother of Antonio Espinoza Palomino, during the wake at the house from which he was kidnapped 37 years ago. Middle right: Antonio Espinoza’s mother at the wake for her son. Antonio was kidnapped and then murdered by Shining Path in 1983. Above: relatives attend a wake for those murdered in what became known as the Rio Blanco case.
“The common thread running through all cases is the interminable wait,” he added, recalling that in some cases relatives died before the restitution of their loved one’s remains.
The largely poor, rural and often Quechua-speaking inhabitants of the region face huge obstacles because they have little experience dealing with state bureaucracy. They also face discrimination and neglect as a part of Peruvian society continues to deny the facts of what took place.
“They find themselves in a mourning which has been suspended [in time],” Nolte said.
Above: the remains of 17 missing persons are taken to the cemetery after a funeral mass for victims of the massacre which became known as the ‘Death Express’, at the community church in Soras. Right: members of the forensic prosecutor’s office prepare the remains from the Soras case to be handed over to their relatives. Far right: a funeral procession during a burial ceremony in the town of Soras. Below: relatives mourn the dead during a funeral.
His subjects include some of Peru’s most notorious massacres, including the 1984 “Death Express” in which Shining Path insurgents hijacked a bus and murdered more than 100 people who refused to join their ranks in the towns of Chaupishuasi, Doce Corral and Soras. More than 27 years later, the remains of 17 of those killed were finally put to rest in the Soras cemetery.
Top: Cirila Baldeón, a survivor of the Accomarca massacre, stands in the remains of a building that was once a military base, after a mass burial of people killed by the army. Above left: burning candles at a mass wake. Above right: the remains of clothing from a disappeared person are displayed in the Museum of Memory.
In 1985, a military patrol under the command of Telmo Hurtado killed almost all the residents of the town of Accomarca, alleging that they were members of the Shining Path terror group. Hurtado, nicknamed “the butcher of the Andes”, is now in prison after being extradited from the United States where he lived.
The “Grupo Colina” military death squad killed nine people in the Santa district in 1992. After 20 years, their remains were found and returned to their families.
A statuette at the wake held for the dead of the ‘Disappeared of Santa’ case in which the Colina paramilitary group kidnapped nine people from the Santa district in 1992. After almost 20 years, their remains were found and returned to their families. Right: Alejandro Castillo and Rosa Chávez hold a picture of Castillo’s son Denis, one of the Santa victims.
The 10-year photographic project came to an end last year on the 20th anniversary of the findings of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For Nolte, it was an “opportunity to tell the story as a whole. I felt I had come full circle,” he said.
He was 14 when the original findings were published in 2003. Twenty years on, he feels slow progress has been made in restoring remains to the families, noting that a “formal bureaucratic process which acknowledges your grief, your pain, was important for the victims”.
Top: a withered maguey plant in the town of Pujas. Above left: a shrub lies in a field near the cemetery in Pujas. Above right: a moth found during the wake for those killed in the Rio Blanco case. In Andean mythology, the presence of moths is believed to be closely associated with an encounter with death.
However, Nolte says he was distressed to see a resurgence in military violence a year ago as 49 people were killed by the state security forces in anti-government protests that gripped the country in December 2022 and January 2023.
“It was unbelievable to see the tanks on the streets of Ayacucho and families mourning relatives killed by the state,” he said. The Andean region bore the brunt of the violence in the 1980s and 90s, accounting for half the total number of deaths in the two-decade period.
Relatives of Catalina Limaco Cisneros pose for the official judiciary registry photo during the return of the remains of four members of the Morales family, who were murdered by Shining Path in 1984.
“To see the vicious cycle of violence repeated, with the same actors, like the army, the state, it made a lot of sense to close [my story] there,” he said.
Musuk Nolte is a photographer based in Peru. His work is supported and produced by Panos Pictures, a photo agency representing an international network of documentary photographers specialising in global social issues, which was founded in London in 1986
