Decades after the country’s internal conflict, Peruvians lay murdered family members to rest – a photo essay

Relatives mourn the dead during a funeral during which 14 people were buried, more than quarter of a century after they were murdered. Photograph: Musuk Nolte/Panos Pictures/Panos Pictures Panos

In the long and brutal conflict fought largely in Peru’s rural Andes, most of the victims were peasant families trapped between fanatical fighters of the Mao-inspired Shining Path bent on creating a proletarian utopia and the Peruvian armed forces’ brutal counterattack.

Between 1980 and 2000, nearly 70,000 people were killed in the intense conflict; Shining Path fighters were responsible for about 54% of the deaths and the military for the rest.