Barrios Altos

Grupo Colina goes to a Lima tenement to hit a Sendero meeting and shoots up a working-class barbecue, killing an eight-year-old.

On the night of 3 November 1991, members of the Peruvian army intelligence detachment known as Grupo Colina raid a chicken-and-beer fundraiser in a Lima tenement courtyard. They have been told the gathering is a Shining Path cell. It is not. Fifteen people are killed, including Javier Manuel Ríos Rojas, eight years old. The mechanism doesn't malfunction when it sweeps up the innocent. That is the mechanism running normally. Anyone in Lima who supports Fujimori's counter-insurgency on the theory that it'll only touch the guilty — the same bargain Santiago accepted in 1973 — has misunderstood the engineering. Barrios Altos is not the system breaking. It is the system working.