By Dan Collyns
BBC News, Lima
**Dozens of civilian victims of a 1984 massacre in Peru have been buried, 25 years after they were murdered during a bitter Maoist insurgency.**The burials followed a two-day funeral procession for some 90 victims recovered from a mass grave last year.
The killing of more than 120 men, women and children in the highland village of Putis was the worst massacre in two decades of bitter conflict.
A group for the victims’ families says they were killed by the military.
The two-day procession passed through Ayacucho, the Andean region which was at the centre of the violence unleashed by the Mao-inspired Shining Path rebels who sought to overthrow the state.
The response was brutal repression, and the mass grave left at Putis is Peru’s largest - 92 bodies were found but only 28 of them have been identified using DNA testing.
No prosecution
The funeral procession began on the sixth anniversary of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Jose Coronel, who presided over the commission in Ayacucho, said there was still little sign of reconciliation over the massacre at Putis.
“There have been no steps forward in terms of justice because the armed forces refuse to give the names of the officers who were stationed at the military base here in 1984,” he said.
No member of the Peruvian military has been prosecuted for the massacre.
Peru’s Defence Minister, Rafael Rey, has said there’s no way of getting the records.
But Peru’s human rights ombudswoman, Beatriz Merino, has called this unacceptable and says the state has an obligation to see justice is done.
Some 15,000 people disappeared between 1980 and 2000.
The remains of a little more than 1% of them have been exhumed.