The Assault of the Ayacucho Prison, March 2-3, 1982. The Night that Changed Peru

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About the presentation:  On March 2, 1982, approximately seventy-five Shining Path guerrillas neutralized the police and attacked the Ayacucho jail. This stunning raid allowed about eighty of their comrades to escape as well as 175 common prisoners. Two police and ten suspected guerrillas died. Two hours later, dazed and frustrated police murdered three patients, Shining Path suspects, in the Ayacucho hospital. They left another for dead while the one female target was able to hide. The attack provided important fighters for the Shining Path as well as a morale boost. It was a catastrophe for the Peruvian state. I contend that this event prompted the Belaúnde government to send the military in to Ayacucho to lead the battle against the Shining Path and to invest heavily in modern penitentiaries. The scandal prompted by the hospital massacre led to the creation of a national human rights movement. This presentation seeks to use a microhistory of the event to highlight broad themes in Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict.

About the presenter: Charles Walker is professor of history at the University of California, Davis. He teaches courses on all aspects of Latin American history as well as natural disasters, truth commissions, social movements, and human rights. His books include the graphic history, Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru (Oxford University Press, 2020); The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Harvard University Press, 2014); Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru and its Long Aftermath (Duke University Press, 2008); and Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Transition from Colony to Republic, 1780–1840 (Duke University Press, 1999), all translated into Spanish. With Carlos Aguirre, he published Alberto Flores Galindo: Utopía, historia y revolución (La Siniestra, 2020). He recently published Tu ausencia ha sido causa de todo esto. Cartas de amor y guerra (Túpac Amaru, Tomasa Tito Condemayta, Micaela Bastidas. He has also coedited several volumes in Peru, introduced and translated with Carlos Aguirre and Willie Hiatt, Alberto Flores Galindo’s Buscando un Inca/In Search of an Inca (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and introduced and translated with Michael Lazzara José Carlos Agüero’s Los rendidos/The Surrendered (Duke University Press, 2021). Walker has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, University of California (President’s Fellowship in the Humanities), American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, and the Tinker Foundation. From 2015 to 2020 he held the MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in Global Human Rights. He has served as director of the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas and of Global Centers in Latin American (Global Affairs).