Valentin Casa can't shake the recurring nightmares. And this day certainly isn't helping.
The 36-year-old farmer looks on as forensic investigators unearth a pair of finger bones and two copper rings from a mass grave in the village of Huallhua on the eastern steppes of Peru's Andes. The grave contains the long-buried remains of two women and 13 children, and Casa believes the bones and rings belonged to his mother.
As a boy 27 years ago, Casa watched from behind trees as soldiers and their paramilitary allies dismembered and killed his mother and other women and children left behind by fleeing Shining Path rebels. Civilians suspected of backing the rebels were hunted down and killed. Two weeks later, troops and their civilian confederates caught and killed men from Casa's village, including his father, whose throat they slit.
Three decades later, this isolated corner of Peru is witnessing the biggest exhumation to date of victims of the nation's 1980-2000 internal conflict. The worst of its carnage occurred on these hills between the Andes ridge and Amazon jungle.
"Everybody here is traumatized," Casa says as he watches the work underway. "Whoever says he isn't is lying."
© AP Photo/Rodrigo AbdIn this Nov. 13, 2013 photo, villager Julio Orihuela, 37, points to the mass grave in the village of Huallhua where his mother and sister were buried as forensic anthropologist Joel Tejada unearths their skeletal remains. The exhumation in the district of Chungui, Peru, bringing back traumatic memories for survivors of 1986-87, when soldiers and their paramilitary allies dismembered and killed women and children left behind by fleeing Shining Path rebels.
Comment: Steaks becoming 'luxury items' is not as crazy as it might once have sounded. If we keep seeing the weather extremes we've been seeing around the world of late, and if the climate continues to go haywire in the same manner the geological record shows it has done prior to the rapid onset of ice ages, you can be pretty sure that grocery store shelves will empty in a matter of weeks and massive food shortages will result.
Heck, forget environmental catastrophe. Steaks became non-existent for most Russians when the oligarchs in Wall Street and Russia plundered the country in the early 90s, so global economic collapse would bring about the same result.