Located: Alberto Sulca poses for the forensic photographer where a mass grave has been identified in the district of of Chungui, Ayacucho, an isolated corner of Peru which is witnessing the biggest exhumation to date of victims of the internal conflict, which claimed an estimated 70,000 lives

Valentin Casa, a 36-year-old farmer, looks on as investigators carefully remove the remains of a hand and two copper rings from a mass grave in the village of Huallhua in Chungui.

The grave contains the long-buried remains of two women and 13 children, and Casa believes the hand the team has just unearth is that of his mother.

Valentin was just nine years old when he was forced to watch as soldiers and their paramilitary allies dismembered and killed his mother and other women and children left behind by fleeing Shining Path rebels.

Civilians suspected of backing the rebels were hunted down and killed. Two weeks later, troops and their civilian confederates caught and killed men from Casa's village, including his father.

Three decades later, this isolated corner of Peru is witnessing the biggest exhumation to date of victims of the nation's internal conflict. The worst of its carnage occurred on these hills between the Andes ridge and Amazon jungle.

‘Everybody here is traumatized,’ Casa says as he watches the work underway. ‘Whoever says he isn't is lying.’

A forensic anthropologist gently lifts one of the five skulls from the Chungui mass grave, a district where at least 1,384 people were killed during the conflict and although the locals are constantly uncovering bones, very few graves have been exhumed by professionals

A turquoise ribbon outlines a sweater in a mass grave where victims of 1986-87 massacres by soldiers and their paramilitary allies of women and children left behind by fleeing Shining Path rebels lie

Ancient culture: A woman reads coca leaves hoping to divine the whereabouts of a forensic anthropologist presumed lost in the mountains of Chungui, but before she finished, the anthropologist appeared at the camp, an 18-hour walk from the nearest road. There are no roads, electricity or phones in nearly all of the isolated region known as 'Oreja de Perro' - 'The Dog's Ear'

Survivor: Ceferino Casafranca, said to be the oldest survivor of the conflict, rests under the shade of a tree in Huallhua, a village in Chungui, an area where health care, schools, police and other institutions barely exist and where the hills are dominated by Shining Path rebels and drug traffickers

Protection: Soldiers stand guard at an antiterrorist military base in Vilcabamba region of Cuzco - the gateway to the Chungui region

At the edge of a shallow pit, Casa provides security for the forensic team while armed with a worn Mossberg 500 shotgun. He watches the technicians uncover a skull here, a swath of clothing there and finds himself overwhelmed by memories.

‘I drank my own urine to survive,’ Casa remembers, having fled into the forest after his mother was killed.

The exhumers gather the diminutive bones of children, 26 found so far in the district, in boxes made to hold sweet bread.

Teresa Vilchez, 52, still suffers from her 1984 horror, when she was gang raped by soldiers at the nearby Mollebamba barracks. After rebels killed her husband, the soldiers came for her and her mother.

Her mother was murdered after the soldiers cut her breasts off, the customary way of marking a raped woman.

No one has been arrested or prosecuted to date for the crimes in Chungui. The survivors are mostly on their own, and villagers say no one has received any mental health counseling

Rebuilding: Aurelia Castro is embraced by her son Raul as his daughter stands by his side in their front yard in Chungui. Aurelia's first husband was killed in 1984 when the couple tried to escape from soldiers who accused villagers of collaborating with Shining Path rebels

Keeping watch: Villager Alberto Sulca has a Mossberg shotgun slung over his shoulder while he keeps am eye on the forensic team exhuming graves in Huallhua

Looking for a solution: Mercedes Castro, right, visits paralegal Liseth Pablo at the one-room schoolhouse in the Huallhua village in the hopes of help to find and exhume the remains of her father-in law

Proof: Felix Pacheco provides a blood sample to a forensic biologist, hoping that his DNA will help identify the remains of his disappeared father

A forensic anthropologist, top left, works in a shallow, tennis court-sized pit where the investigating team unearthed the remains of 13 children and two women

The poor conditions in the area were what prompted the poor farmers of Chungui to initially welcome the Shining Path before the civil war.

In 1965, other Cuban-inspired guerrillas had freed farmers there from grinding servitude, assassinating the two powerful ranchers responsible.

The Shining Path persuaded farmers to abandon their homes and live in forest camps to avoid encounters with soldiers, but their rule soon took a sinister turn.

Wary of being discovered, the rebels prohibited people from lighting cooking fires, forced women to give birth in caves and killed children who did not keep quiet when soldiers neared, said Edilberto Jimenez, an anthropologist who interviewed hundreds of survivors in the 1990s.

Today's Shining Path only numbers in the hundreds, taxes the cocaine trade and still has a reputation for cultivating local farmers.

Priska Palacios, a worker from the German government development agency GIZ, said little has changed for poor farmers in Chungui.

‘The basic conditions that generated the internal armed conflict - poverty, exclusion, discrimination - are exactly the same as they were in 1980,’ Palacios said.