March 11, 2009, Huanta, Peru: The Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF) has begun the task of exhuming more than 50 bodies from a common grave in the town of Huanta, thought to contain victims from Peru’s “dirty war.”

Carmen Rosa Cardoza, an EPAF forensic expert, said the work will be carried out between March 9-23, at which time DNA samples will be collected from the bodies to compare them with that of relatives and try to make identifications. The samples will be sent to a lab in the United States, and it is possible that the results will not be known until the end of the year.

EPAF is a partner of The Advocacy Project (AP).

Peru’s internal armed conflict, which lasted from 1980 until 2000, left an estimated 69,000 dead at the hands of Shining Path, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) and the Peruvian police and armed forces.

The current exhumations are from a 1984 incident known as “Pucayacu,” for the town where 50 peasants were slain and buried by Peruvian soldiers, according to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The National Criminal Court investigated the case, but decided to shelve it for lack of evidence, and the bodies were moved to a common grave in the cemetery at Huanta. Huanta is approximately 342 miles southeast of Lima.

This will not be the only case investigated by EPAF experts in the next two weeks. Between March 11 and 12, the remains of two peasants who were supposedly killed by police in the town of Suso, in the Ayacucho region, will be analyzed. At the request of the National Human Rights Committee, EPAF will also examine a skull to determine if it belonged to Angel Escobar Jurado, a human rights defender who disappeared after being arrested by police on February 27, 1990.