Quechua is an indigenous language of South America. Quechua speakers include ancient Maya and Inca, as well as indigenous of today's Andean highlands, Bolivia, Guatemala, and parts of Mexico. The Quechua were one of the largest indigenous groups in central and southern America at the time of the Spanish Conquest. In the 1990s Quechua activists accused Spain of genocide, renaming the conquest the Andean Holocaust, and calling for the return of important indigenous manuscripts which had been collected as artifacts for European museums. The division of the ancient Quechua homeland into Spanish-speaking colonial states was designated the genocide of the Quechuaymara nation. Indeed, the Quechua represent, in this book, the statistical decimation and cultural death of all indigenous groups in the Americas at the hands of the European invaders and subsequent colonists since the fifteenth century.

However, there are also twentieth-century genocides committed against Quechua. As noted in an earlier entry, most of the victims of the Guatemalan Genocide were Quechua. During the twenty-year civil war in Peru, 1980-2000, Quechua were caught between the government armed forces and the Maoist guerrilla group, Shining Path. The most notable massacre took place on 14 August 1985 in the Quechua village Accorrnarca. There, soldiers in the Peruvian Army under the leadership of Lieutenants Telmo Hurtado and Juan Rivera Rondón, rounded up, beat, tortured, and ultimately murdered 69 villagers. Both leaders retired in the United States, but since then have been brought to trial in the United States. Peru requested, and was granted, the extradition of Rondon to face charges of torture and genocide.

At the end of the Civil War period, 1996-2000, under Peruvian President Alberto Fujimoro, more than 200,000 Indian women, mostly Quechua, were forcibly sterilized. More than 16,000 vasectomies were also performed. As Quechua families typically had seen children, the sterilizations could account for a population drop among Quechua of close to 1.5 million. Article 2 (d): "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group": that's genocide.

Today there is a strong international Quechua movement (COICA, or Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indigenas de las CuencaAmazónica), geared toward protecting the Quechua land and culture. The fact that many Quechua now also speak Spanish, are highly educated and politically active, has empowered the group to assert a traditional identity in a contemporary world. Many Quechua continue to wear traditional clothing and perpetuate a rural existence.

Text by Brenda Melendy