In 1993 my country was exhausted after 12 years of internal conflict with the terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso. It was during that year while I was studying at the University, that I received an internship as a photojournalist at Onda newspaper. The photojournalism department was bare bones and no one wanted to cover the police section. That’s why they probably used students whom they didn’t have to pay and the reason I was assigned to that section on my first day.
On one of my first assignments, my editor sent me to Cieneguilla, a town in the outskirts of Lima. For hours I and many other photojournalists photographed the digging and retrieval of human skulls, bones, clothing, keys and other objects. Soon we learned that buried in that clandestine grave amongst bare hills, were some of the corpses of ten people who disappeared the previous year.
In 1992 during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, a university professor and nine students from Lima's La Cantuta University, supposed members of Sendero Luminoso, were abducted, tortured, and brutally killed by the Grupo Colina, a military death squad. In 2009 it was determined by a judicial ruling that none of the victims in La Cantuta massacre was linked to any terrorist organization, it was in the same ruling that condemned Fujimori to a 25-year imprisonment for crimes against humanity.
This was one of my many police assignments during those two months of working at the paper. But this one was the hardest because those innocent people were my age and also university students at the time. Later I learned that their university was constantly patrolled by the army, the students were often harassed and all books related to Marxism were destroyed and people who owned them arrested or sent to prison. In my first years at university, El Capital was a required reading for one my classes, I really enjoyed reading it and used to carry it in my backpack. I still remember feeling uneasy about it.
Cantuta is our national flower and it was also the sacred flower of the Inca culture. The portraits in this body of work are the same ones the relatives of the students use in their annual marches to remember their loved ones. I printed them and used an in-camera double exposure to merge their portraits with an image of Cantuta flowers. These ten people always live in my memory and their names have been forever imprinted in my mind. #CantutaNoOlvida #DiganSusNombres
© 2026 Claudia Ruiz Gustafson . All rights reserved
