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The region is just northwest of Ayacucho, where the Shining Path was founded in the 1960s and from where it has operated for more than two decades.
The Shining Path rebel group conducted a brutal insurgent war with some 7,000 guerrillas in an attempt to overthrow the government and install communist rule in the 1980s and 1990s.
The insurgency left 70,000 people dead, or missing and presumed dead, in the armed campaign between 1980 and 2000, a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in 2003.
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