In Adiós Ayacucho [Farewell Ayacucho] Julio Ortega recounts from the perspective of Alfonso Cánepa, a community leader from the department of Ayacucho, the travails of finding postmortem justice in a country that offers little justice for the living. When he was accused of being a terrorist—rather than a peasant leader—the military mutilated his body and threw what was left of it into a pit, leaving out many of his bones and thus denying him the possibility of a proper burial and eternal peace. Since his death Cánepa has worked to reconstruct his body, trying to get a sympathetic hearing from the president of the Republic in the hope that the head of state will return his bones to him. Rejected, he climbs into the tomb of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and takes some of Pizarro’s bones to complete his own skeleton. Written in 1986, this novella evokes the tragedy and brutality of the war in highlands Peru, the racism and indifference that lay at the heart of the conflict, and the long-standing historical violence dating back to the arrival of the Spanish.