The tracks of the tire began to curve fantastically upon the wet and shining path. Suddenly, as I looked ahead, the gleam of metal caught my eye from amid the thick gorse-bushes.

After I had said my prayers, and the candle had burnt out, I remember how I still sat looking at the moonlight on the water, as if I could hope to read my fortune in it, as in a bright book; or to see my mother with her child, coming from Heaven, along that shining path, to look upon me as she had looked when I last saw her sweet face.

A resurgence of the Shining Path terrorist group threatened the safety of the team and the farmers; terrible inflation of the local currency wreaked havoc with an already tight budget - not to mention constant battles with British and Peruvian bureaucracy.

Over the past decade, Peru's national strategy has fallen short of its stated objective of defeating the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a terrorist organization that controls the principal transportation routes into the valley, provides security to the region's drug cartels, and directly funds its operations through drug trafficking.

LIMA, Peru -- A Peruvian court convicted and gave a second life sentence to imprisoned Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman on Tuesday for a 1992 car bombing in the capital that killed 25 people and injured 155.

This study of the creation of cultural memory of state violence against civilian populations focuses on the period after the Peruvian military committed human rights violations in its efforts to combat the Shining Path (the Communist Party of Peru) in the 1980s-1990s.

Fujimori, 79, was serving a 25-year sentence for the killings of 25 people in a campaign against the leftist Shining Path terrorist group.

Some Peruvians laud him for defeating the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla movement, while others loathe him for human rights violations carried out under his government.

In fact, he coined the phrase "shining path toward revolution," that was appropriated by Abimael Guzman's Maoist-inspired terrorist group during the 1980s and 1990s that led to over 60,000 deaths in Peru during this period of national strife (75).

Peruvian author Claudia Salazar Jimenez's debut novel examines the turbulent mid-1970s during the Shining Path conflict in Peru.