The Killing of Sister McCormack

By Anne Henderson

Was Irene McCormack a martyr for her Christian beliefs or merely one of Peru's many victims of terrorism? By May 1991, one of the world's most ruthless terrorist groups, the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, had left 30,000 known dead in its ten-year guerrilla war against the Peruvian government. On 21 May 1991, as dusk settled upon the Andean town of Huasahuasi, a silver-haired Australian woman became part of this horrifying death toll. Sister Irene McCormack, a Catholic nun and member of the religious order founded by Mary MacKillop, was executed after a mock trial that saw a young woman terrorist label Sister Irene a Yankee imperialist before firing a bullet at point-blank range into the back of her head. What makes a woman leave the safety of Australia and travel to an impoverished mountain village in rural Peru, an area where threats and violence are a daily reality, to teach the village children to read and write? Anne Henderson has gone beyond the headlines to uncover just who was Irene McCormack.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730492146

Anne Henderson

Anne Henderson was born in Melbourne and now lives in Sydney. She is a graduate of Melbourne University and worked as a teacher for seventeen years before taking up her current position as Deputy Direction of The Sydney Institure and editor of The Sydney Papers. She is the author of From All Corners: Six Migrant Stories (1993) and Educating Johannah: A Year in Year 12 (1995).

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THE MURDERS

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

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

It 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 they’d 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 hour’s 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.

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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 compañeros 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 wouldn’t 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 Peru’s 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 The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, ‘Shining Path militants had to be convinced of two things: the need to kill in a systematic way as part of an agreed upon strategy; and, as a necessary premise, not just the willingness but the expectation of giving up their own lives.’

At first, highlanders in regions of Sendero influence were compliant, especially in the years now called Peru’s millenarian war (1980–82), when Sendero targeted hacienda administrators, landlords, animal thieves, even wife-beaters. Many highlanders joined as supporters. The enemy and the targets were one, relatively speaking – deserving abusers, exploiters over generations. Let them get what was coming, was the cry. Then, when the excessive bloodshed of the terrorists might have encouraged repulsion, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, acting with reluctance, chose to send in the military. The ‘dirty war’ (1983–84) followed. The violence meted out by Peru’s army offered little mercy to those they engaged, not even to the innocents unfortunate enough to get in the way.

The tactics continued with a brutalising of communities where the terrorists, so hard to detect, had closely integrated with the ordinary people. In May 1988 a Sendero unit ambushed an army convoy in the Cayara district in the southern part of Ayacucho Province, birthplace of the Shining Path. The terrorists killed four soldiers and wounded fourteen others, with the result that the army was ordered to converge on the area and punish the locals. Seven patrols entered Cayara on 14 May to find the townsfolk sheltering, terrified, in a church. The soldiers separated the women and children from the men, then killed five men on the spot. Other patrols, combing the countryside, pinned down a group of locals, rudely interrogated them and again separated the women and children from the men. On this occasion some twenty-four men were beaten, axed or knifed to death. Other suspects who were caught simply disappeared, one an eighty-year-old woman. In spite of the terror, there was outrage in Lima when news of the army’s retaliation came through.

Sendero had begun by recruiting people in areas close to the Andean town of Ayacucho – especially from among the students at the university. Here, gurus like Abimael Guzman, leader of the Shining Path, easily indoctrinated unsophisticated first generation scholars, the sons and daughters of highlanders, descendants of indigenous populations occupying the lowest rank in Peru’s social order. In time, rough handling of locals as suspects was standard practice for the Peruvian military, who saw them as ignorant, all much the same, their sullen faces foreign-looking and suspicious. Understandably, such official retribution quickly became more like Sendero tactics to the highlanders. Whichever side invaded a region, at this stage increasingly the army, highlanders paid dearly. Thanks to the men of the military, they witnessed rape, rough justice, thrill killings and worse – all inflicted on suspected locals, some guilty, some not. And this helped shore up many a highlander’s support for the guerrillas. In Steve Stern’s Shining and Other Paths, human rights activist Carlos Basombrio Iglesias has calculated that the five provinces around the Sendero’s stronghold in Ayacucho saw some 5645 deaths in two years.

But then the targets changed. Sendero narrowed its focus and widened its areas of influence. It moved north into Junin and towns like Huasahuasi. It overtook large tracts of the country’s capital, Lima, and faculties at Peru’s number one university, San Marcos. With increasing evidence of psychotic leadership, Sendero developed the tactics of totalitarian persuasion; death threats were the standard outcome for any who resisted. Blood sacrifice of victims lay on one side and martyrdom to the cause on the other. So widespread was the campaign of Sendero violence that – as in other societies made dysfunctional by urban guerrilla warfare – robberies, hijackings and holdups were sometimes carried out by ordinary delinquents or criminals and disguised as political action.

Sendero sentiment was steeped in Marxist ideology and university theory. As its targets shrank, it wasn’t hard for its leaders to develop contempt for the peasantry as backward. Younger and younger recruits were taken on, many of them just teenagers. Some were abducted from villages; others were seduced in university meetings, text books abandoned back in the locker room. To the Sendero, dissent was unthinkable, as it is to terrorist groups worldwide – the IRA for one. Defectors from the compañeros were hunted like enemies and, if found, were murdered. The Sendero was by now at war not only with Peru’s elites but also with the poor and unempowered it claimed to champion. It closed market outlets for agricultural products and snubbed local customs and authorities. Its ritual killings sickened highlanders, who found themselves caught in a trap of conflicting tides and loyalties spun from years of hostility and subterfuge. Most would, over time, come to view the Sendero as human monsters.

In the rare photos of the Sendero the men wear army-style boots and commando-issue shirts and dungarees. The women carry automatic rifles over knotted shawls and heavy skirts. In the 1980s and 1990s the Sendero was an ‘army’ whose munitions supply was secure, being financed from the drug trafficking rife among highland coca areas it controlled.

Coca, the shrub from which cocaine is extracted, is used by Peru’s Andean communities to counter altitude sickness. The leaf is chewed as a stimulant during the day’s work and is popular as a tea. Peru’s Huallaga valley was the first area to grow the crop domestically, as much as 10 000 years ago. But thanks to the demand for hard drugs in affluent societies like the United States, Peru’s coca growers found new markets. Drug planes flying north from the Peruvian Andes multiplied in the 1980s – planes that would later be shot down over the vast mountain range in the escalating drug war. In that same decade the Sendero fought bloody battles with the drug mafia and took control of coca areas, winning the support of locals when they protected that market. Thereafter, Sendero and select officials from such areas were able to line their coffers and arm their cadres. They themselves were not immune from its effects. Many of the locals in Huasahuasi on the night of 21 May 1991 noted that the younger terrorists ravaging their town showed signs of being high on drugs. Blood and fire and coca had a new reality in the Andes.

On that May evening the lanes of the pueblo had yielded up the unwilling extras needed as an audience for the ghoulish performance about to be enacted. It would be a display of Sendero justice, for which the guerrillas had rounded up their victims. The message would be loud and clear so that it would be taken back to the rest of the district, and this time, even to the world. The revolution demanded no less.

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Huasahuasi, some 270 kilometres east of coastal Lima, is home to hundreds of commercial gardeners and small farmers. Some of them work strips of land along the town’s river, only metres wide but fast flowing as it winds to join the Tarma and eventually find its way into the Amazon. On the steep mountainsides of the valley, earlier farmers long ago sent their donkeys ahead to test the ground before tying themselves to a rock or tree and hacking out terraces for planting. Potatoes and oats grow on the slopes above this town, famous for its potato seed. ‘Viaje a la semilla’ (‘Trip to the seed’), say the promotional brochures. Peru, the first to grow the potato, la papa, domestically, is a country where the word in the masculine form means Pope or, with an accent, papá, father. Potatoes are the people’s life blood. In highland regions an adult will eat around 120 kilograms of la papa a year. The dim interiors of local houses are an ideal storage space for hoarded potatoes. Families sleep close to their stores, oblivous to the rats that rummage at night in the potato piles. Huasahuasi’s fertile valley, though, is a food bowl. The farmers on the river flats harvest peas, broad beans, corn, onions, cabbages, lettuces, capsicum, flowers and much more.

Six thousand people live in Huasahuasi, where at night the street lamps give a poor view of dirt lanes dividing off the adobe and cement-brick houses of a town that is squat and closely settled. The town nestles in a slim fold of mountains whose peaks reach 4000 metres above sea level. In the clear air of the mountains, sounds are amplified – the barking of dogs, the crying of a baby, a family argument, voices calling children in from the night; perhaps a song, even music or radio coming via the connection afforded by a car’s battery when the normal power supply fails; occasional grunts from a donkey or llama in a hut or field. But at dusk it’s too early to hear a husband beating his wife after a drinking bout.

On 21 May 1991, a Tuesday, the evening was chilly. The town’s square, however, would soon be warmed by a huge inferno lighting up the sky spectacularly – so brightly in fact that some people would later recall the events as having occurred in daylight. The two-storey municipal building, substantial by Huasahuasi standards, was to be set on fire as a farewell act of destruction when the Sendero had finished the killings. And when the time came, sparks landed on adjacent shop fronts and the buildings, their occupants huddled behind their walls. The hundred-year-old church opposite played silent witness, perhaps awaiting its turn to be torched. But the church was untouched. Its massive doors remained closed, with just the elderly sacristan and the much younger priest’s driver, Raul, watching from the safe enclosure, peeping through cracks. When those doors opened a few hours later, they would usher in another day on which the church received bodies for burial – the five victims lying in pools of blood just metres away.

On that Tuesday evening young Hector Obregon was on a visit to Huasahuasi, his home town, to check the price of potatoes. Hyperinflation had wrecked family budgets, the cost of potatoes soaring like the price of everything else. Hector and a friend had found a car blocking the entrance to the town and three people armed with automatic rifles greeting them.

‘As we reached our destination a voice called out Halt,’ Hector recalls. ‘I realised immediately they were terrorists. They ordered me to put my hands behind my head and to walk towards the plaza. They were different from us…from another area.’ But they spoke as if they owned the town.

When Hector entered the square he noticed about twenty terrorists, with guns and sticks, standing around a group of locals by the church door. Then he and three other young men were forced at gunpoint to break the lock on the municipal building, the town hall. Although he was then let go, he huddled among the bystanders in the square, fearful of retribution for what he had been made to do – an act that could be reported to the military as assisting the terrorists in their acts of destruction. Yet that night everyone would, in a sense, be trapped and beyond help – some caught by their allegiance to an ideology that had unravelled, like many an ideology, to become a murderous code, others by the violence inflicted on them. Still others, themselves unaffected physically, would be haunted for the rest of their lives by the sheer horror of what had happened – carrying, as one of the reluctant witnesses I spoke to put it when I asked about that time, ‘more than enough pain without someone trying to stir the coals’.

This was the price of isolation shared by scores of other towns in Peru’s central Andes for a decade and more. By order of the local Sendero, there was no telephone or radio transmitter in Huasahuasi. The organisation commanded the town like a bandit government. One of my interviewees would later tell me it operated from a camp high above the village, near the peak of the mountainside that borders the valley. Another would scoff at this and say that it was more likely to have been based in the main street of Huasahuasi. Wherever they were commanded from, the terrorist bands could make sporadic forays into town at will. They had forced themselves on the local football team for a game; they had lynched and killed on occasion. A group of terrorists had once invaded the town to insist that the locals assemble in the square to appoint new municipal leaders, officials who would in time be fresh targets for Sendero justice – a perverted notion of justice deriving from book-learned and twisted reasoning about revolution and freedom.

By May 1991 Peru’s ten year guerrilla war had left more than 30 000 known dead. In time, before the end of the twentieth century, this impoverished nation would witness more violent deaths from the guerilla campaign than occurred during the Spanish conquest led by Francisco Pizarro in the 1530s. But Peru’s Sendero terror became increasingly counterproductive, if hard to counter-attack. And, by May 1991, in spite of the fear and the silence of traumatised people, Sendero campaigns had hardened most Andeans’ resolve against the organisation.

Communities had formed civil defence groups to fend off the Sendero’s invasion of their towns. These rondas campesinos, or ronderos – 4000 or so of them by the mid-1990s, in hamlets all over the Andes – were poorly funded and ill armed against the Sendero’s AK-47s. They were later criticised for heavyhanded tactics and for their less than professional approach, which could involve anything from vigilante-style tactics and stealing from government funds to exempting relatives from life-risking patrol duty. And their newly found importance often clashed with the aspirations of local government figures. Yet in some instances they could outfox the Sendero. In The Monkey’s Paw, human rights activist Robin Kirk gives a brief but sympathetic account of an incident in the Andean village of Purus at some 4000 metres on the edge of the puna in northern Ayacucho. With just five Winchester rifles, a World War I era Mauser and rocks from the barren land they stood on, the men of Purus ambushed a column of guerrillas from a mud and straw lookout above the Huanta valley. The guerrillas fled and the townsfolk feasted on the supplies left behind on the trail.

But on the night of 21 May 1991, in Huasahuasi, the Sendero had the upper hand. There was a local night patrol, the ronderos, formed by volunteers and first assembled in late March 1990 by the army. The idea was to make up three watches each night – more than thirty men in all. But in an ignominious beginning to the plan the army had moved out of the town on a Wednesday, only to have the Senderos enter Huasahuasi the next Friday, send the ronderos home, blow up the doors of the two banks in town and break some windows. All this was just as a small reminder of who was really in charge. So the army had returned and the night patrol assembled again. But the ronderos of Huasahuasi were not at their posts on the evening of 21 May 1991. Either that or the speed of the assault had left them, once again, impotent and on the sidelines.

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In town after town in the Andes, a visitor will travel between rows of shops lying either side of the narrow thoroughfare that forms the main road into the centre of town. Then suddenly there will be a main square, opening on one side of the road, where public meetings and community assemblies are held. Even small towns have their main squares, or plaza de armas. They have a church on one side, shops on another, public buildings on a third, and the road completes the square. In Huasahuasi, the panelled doors of the side entrance to the church of St John the Baptist, whose massive red-brown tin roof towers over the square, open on to the swirls of the plaza’s white and charcoal tiles. The entrance forecourt has something of the appearance of a stage, one step up at the main street end and three at the town hall end, which is lower. It often serves as a terrace for the church congregation to spill out on to after services. It was here that the guerrillas left the bodies of their victims on the night of 21 May 1991.

Just over a year before, the Sendero had murdered a Huasahuasi man believed to have told the military of a killing perpetrated a few days earlier. The ‘traitor’ was identified because he was the only person in town to have a radio device with which to make a distress call. As the military had learned quickly of the first killing, the terrorists, reliably informed by someone with local knowledge, concluded that the man with the radio device must be the informer. So they returned at night, seized the suspect at gunpoint, tied him to a pole near the square, cut out his tongue after the usual accusations and left him to bleed as a spectacle for passers-by. An hour or so later they slit his throat, shot him and dumped his body outside the church.

By morning children were playing with marbles a metre or two from the corpse and its vast pool of congealing blood. No one dared remove it for fear of further terrorist revenge. As people began emerging into the streets, Sister Edith Prince tried to cover the bloodied corpse with a scrap of plastic. She was staying at the convent with Sister Irene McCormack and they had come with a handful of parishioners to conduct prayers, to recognise the victim’s memory in some sacred way. As she covered the body, Sister Edith was warned that her action might provoke further terrorist attacks on his family. In time, relatives living an hour’s drive away, distant enough from Huasahuasi to avoid reprisals, quietly recovered the body for burial in Tarma.

Drama of this kind had been played out many times across the Peruvian Andes over a decade. It was repeated in the years that followed, even after the Fujimori government captured Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman in Lima during September 1992.

Years later, as I leaf through newspaper clippings and articles on Huasahuasi, I find the words of Father Leo Donnelly, the parish priest there at the time. He writes intermittently for the Columban Catholic missionary magazine The Far East. During his years in Huasahuasi he buried many of the terrorists’ victims, including Sister Irene McCormack. The terror had not stopped that night but continued until the mid-1990s. In June 1993 Donnelly had written of the execution of ten men from Huasahuasi on 4 February of that year: ‘Shining Path, Peru’s most feared terrorist group, ambushed a truck carrying people returning to the valley from market day in Tarma…The crime of the victims was to belong to the ronda.’ In March 1992 the people of Huasahuasi had been warned by the terrorists that to stay with the ronda was to invite death. When the people said they had no choice, that the military would punish them if they gave up their civil defence role, the terrorists had replied that this counted for nothing. They must give up the ronda even if it meant leaving town and their small plots of land. The ten men killed in February 1993 had risked all to stay on their land, in their mountain town. No more, no less.

So Father Donnelly led the townsfolk once again to the Huasahuasi cemetery high above the pueblo. I look at a picture of him sprinkling coffins with holy water, blessing them for burial, his imposing build taller than his much shorter flock, his hair and beard greying, his robes, which I would have imagined to be purple, appearing to be white in my photocopy. It is hard to make out the coffins, there were so many people crowded in the avenues of the cemetery. The whole town must be there, I think.

Father Donnelly had just returned from ‘home leave’, he wrote in the article. Before he left he had conducted the town’s fourth multiple burial – on this occasion for two women whose throats had been cut by the terrorists. In March 1992 he had recorded the killings of Antonio and Basilia Yachachin, parents of his friend Manuel, a catechist: ‘Manuel’s mother lost her life trying to defend her husband, Antonio. They were an exceptional couple.’ They were returning with fruit bought in Chanchamayo. The terrorists were busy that day: they killed seven others in the raid, one a young mother, Lucia, who had been told to pass her baby to a companion before they shot her in the back of the head.

You won’t find Huasahuasi on maps of Peru. You won’t even find much about it on a google.com Internet search, except for two references – one to the potato and another to Sister Irene McCormack. The foreign missionaries in Huasahuasi in May 1991 were all Australasian: Irene McCormack and the parish priest Leo Donnelly from Australia and Sister Dorothy Stevenson from New Zealand. On the night the Sendero set fire to the town hall Sister Dorothy was in Lima and Sister Irene alone at the convent in Huasahuasi.

Irene McCormack had had a career