Abstract
On January 23, 1983, eight journalists from Lima, Peru entered the village of Uchuraccay. Mistaken for terrorists, they and their guide were murdered by the natives of the village.
There exists a photograph of the bodies of the journalists after they were exhumed a few days later. In it, their eyeless sockets are clearly evident.
Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called this event “an emblematic referent of the violence and pain in the collective memory of the country.” In this article, I take this final image of the journalists as a disclosure of the communal blindness that engulfed Peru. I relate this blindness to the violence that was its tragic correlate.