Anne Henderson - The Killing of Sister McCormack

Shining Path used romance as a strategy for recruiting womenwomen tended to fulfil logistical tasks rather than those of organisation and leadership.

ISABEL CORAL CORDERO IN WOMEN IN WAR, SHINING AND OTHER PATHS

I t began at dusk on the evening of 21 May 1991. At the Andean town of Huasahuasi, a valley settlement more than 2700 metres above sea level, sixty terrorists drove up in a couple of trucks some reports said it was three trucks which theyd hijacked on a deserted highway. Then they moved on foot through the laneways, terrifying the townsfolk with what had become a common practice that past year and more. They smashed their way into houses, destroying the contents, before forcing a crowd of some 300 to join them at the main plaza. Around three hours later, following a mock trial of five people rounded up from homes at gunpoint, four of the accused were shot at point-blank range. The fifth, who made a run for it, was shot in the leg and head before one of the terrorists put a pickaxe through his eye.

News of the killings was slow to get out. The telephone lines had been destroyed in earlier raids and the hours journey on a winding, dangerous mountain road to the nearest major town, Tarma (Perla de los Andes), could not be driven safely at night. Only at dawn would the local priest and widows of two of the victims set off in the parish car to reveal the atrocity and to arrange for coffins to be sent Huasahuasi had no undertaker of its own. When the news emerged it made headlines beyond Peru. One of the victims was Sister Irene McCormack, a Catholic nun and a member of the Australian Sisters of St Joseph, the religious order founded by Mary MacKillop. She was the first Australian Catholic missionary ever to have been murdered abroad and the first foreign Catholic missionary working in Peru to have been subjected to a terrorist mock trial and summary execution.

Nearly a decade on, I begin piecing together the events of that night in May 1991. I have no links at all with Peru. I live in Australia, one of the few corners of the world that has never experienced political terror in its modern forms: terror which ruled from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, from the totalitarianism of Mao or Pol Pot or Hitler to urban killers like the IRA or Hamas or the Shining Path, from aircraft hijackers to suicide bombers. In Australia we learn of political terror in history books, on television, at the movies or by going abroad. We have difficulty in comprehending the paranoia of closed societies. As I put together accounts of that night in the Peruvian Andes, I come to learn that the truth will probably never be known in full; that many names of those involved will never be revealed; that witnesses will sometimes be, in the words of Human Rights Watch chronicler Robin Kirk, famously slippery.

Small communities like Huasahuasi guard their secrets. A few of the townspeople present on the night of the murders would have had direct or indirect links with the terrorists, the Sendero the compaeros or terroristas, as the locals call them. Contact, open or covert, was not unusual through relatives and friends. Here and there, some of these would be informers themselves. Sendero had positioned members in local municipalities so effectively that even the Church was forced to work with them. You could have had a terrorist for your dancing partner and you wouldnt know it, so strategically had Sendero infiltrated normal networks. Other locals had snippets of intelligence sufficient to predict movements of the military.

The Sendero had held Peru hostage for nearly a decade when they struck Huasahuasi in May 1991. The Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, should not be confused with the MRTA, their rivals among factions of Perus Communist Party. The two organisations competed bitterly in their campaigns of terror. But the message from all Maoist-style groups was similar: join them in destroying non-communist Peru and help rebuild the nation according to pure Marxist ideology, or face the consequences of terror campaigns in which enemies of communism would be eliminated. In a deliberate refocusing of their methods, at their fourth plenary session in May 1981, the Sendero planned to turn the trickle of blood into a flood by radically increasing the violence. In Sendero mythology, as Peruvian investigative journalist Gustavo Gorriti described it in