Menacing Dancers Perform in the Shadow of Terror's Memory

Photo by Nathan Craig. Indigenous Quechua dancers performing on 28 June 2008 at the 180th year anniversary of the community of Pukara, Rio Ramis, Peru. The Iglesia de Pukara is visible in the background. The left hand tower of the church is missing because during the 1990s, it was dynamited by the brutal Maoist revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). These young men would have been young children during the bloody Sendero occupation of the south Andean highlands. While Sendero touted itsself as an agrarian revolution, in an effort to extort them into submission, Sendero terrorized hundreds of indigenous communities and slaughtered tens of thousands of Native Peoples. Armed militias of Indigenous peoples known as Rondas played a critical role in opposing and ultimately expelling Sendero from the Andean highlands.