Ayacucho's 1988 Death Squads and the Military's License to Kill
By Theo Marchetti ·
Peruvian peasants were trapped between Maoist strikes and state-backed death threats in a region where the law ceased to exist for the military.
Peasants in the Ayacucho highlands spent 1988 calculating the exact cost of staying neutral. For many, the price was a death threat from one side or a bullet from the other.
This account is drawn from the archive's curated description of a US Embassy Lima cable, rather than the original pages. The record is a report from a visit conducted between November 17 and 19, 1988, and transmitted on November 29. It documents a landscape where the traditional survival strategy of the rural poor—refusing to take a side in a civil war—had been systematically erased.
The Pincer Movement
Ayacucho, the capital city of the region and a colonial center founded in 1540, had become the epicenter of a grinding war of attrition. The U.S. Embassy political counselor—an official whose role was to monitor political stability and whose specific identity is not on file—visited the region to assess a collapse in human rights. What the counselor found was a population caught in a pincer.
On one side was the Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla group and designated terrorist organization that sought to dismantle the Peruvian state through rural insurgency. The public record shows they utilized violent threats to force citizens to comply with "armed strikes," shutting down commerce and movement through terror. On the other side was the Rodrigo Franco Command, or CRF, a paramilitary death squad that took its name from a member of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) who had been killed by the Maoists. The public record establishes that the CRF was not a spontaneous militia but a disciplined group of operatives trained in North Korea and aligned with APRA, the party governing Peru under President Alan García.
According to the record, the situation had reached a point of absolute contradiction for the civilian. The counselor reports that citizens were receiving "violent threats from the Shining Path if they do not comply" with strikes, while simultaneously "receiving death threats from the CRF if they do participate."
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
The Law of the Command
This was not a chaotic failure of security; it was a calibrated environment of fear. The record highlights a specific turning point: the Cayara massacre. While the full details of the slaughter are not in this specific cable, the document notes that the aftermath—specifically "the government’s decision to back the Politico-Military Command"—sent a definitive signal to the region. The Politico-Military Command is described in the record as a government-backed entity, though no further biography of its leadership exists in the file.
By granting official legitimacy to the Politico-Military Command following a massacre, the government of Alan García did more than protect its soldiers. It institutionalized impunity. The record is blunt on the result: this decision "had left the depressing message that when push comes to shove the military is beyond the law."
In the public record, the Peruvian military is the sovereign force tasked with national defense. In Ayacucho, however, the record shows the military had transitioned from a defense force into a source of intelligence and interviews for the U.S. Embassy. The counselor's report was built, in part, on interviews with these very military officials—the same institution that the record admits was operating outside the law. This is the central irony of the file: the U.S. government was gauging the deterioration of human rights by interviewing the men responsible for the deterioration.
The Strategy of Erasure
When the record describes the emergence of the CRF as one of the "most severe changes" in the region, it is describing the death of the middle ground. For years, the peasantry in Ayacucho had survived by maintaining a precarious neutrality. If you did not fight for the Maoists and did not collaborate with the army, you might stay alive. By 1988, that option was gone.
The pattern suggests that the Rodrigo Franco Command was not a rogue element of the APRA party, but a state-sponsored proxy designed to force the peasantry into a binary choice. If the state cannot win the loyalty of the people, the next best option is to make neutrality impossible, thereby forcing the population to either submit to the government or be branded as insurgents.
The desk's reading is that the CRF functioned as the "dirty" arm of the state, providing the government of Alan García with plausible deniability. By utilizing a paramilitary group with North Korean training and party ties, the state could exert a level of terror that the official military might find diplomatically inconvenient, even while the official military provided the logistical cover. The gap in the record—the missing operational chain of command between the presidential palace in Lima and the death threats in Ayacucho—is the space where this proxy relationship lived.
The View from the Embassy
Throughout the cable, the counselor uses descriptors like "harrowing" and "depressing." This language creates the image of a witness horrified by what they see. However, the record shows a stark disconnect between the counselor's emotional tone and the diplomatic outcome. The cable reports the total collapse of the rule of law and the systemic terrorization of the poor, yet it offers no policy prescription, no condemnation, and no demand for a change in U.S. support for the García administration.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the "harrowing" tone functions as a form of diplomatic insurance. By recording the brutality in a tone of distress, the U.S. Embassy created a paper trail of moral concern while continuing to monitor the effectiveness of the state's counter-insurgency tactics. The Embassy was not reporting on a tragedy to stop it; it was documenting a laboratory of state terror to see if it worked.
The desk's reading is that the withheld portions of this cable—the specific names of the military officials who provided the interviews—contain the identities of the architects of the CRF. The U.S. was not just interviewing the military; they were interviewing the managers of the death squads. A full release of these pages would likely show that the Embassy knew exactly who was signing the death threats, and that this knowledge was viewed as a strategic asset rather than a human rights violation.
The citizens of Ayacucho paid for this strategic asset with their lives. They were squeezed between a Maoist utopia of blood and a state "defense" that viewed the law as a suggestion. The record confirms that by November 1988, the Peruvian state had decided that the only way to defeat the Shining Path was to become as lawless as the insurgents they were fighting.