Details of an event that marred the history of the Peruvian press are coming out in a new book scheduled to release this week.

EIN News reports eight journalists, Eduardo de la Piniella, Jorge Sedano, Amador Garcia, Luis Mendivil, Felix Gavilano, Pedro Sanchez, Octavio Infante, and Willy Retto, their guide, were killed in the southern region of Ayacucho over 30 years ago on Jan. 16, 1983. The slain journalists were about to report on recent military operations against Shining Path guerillas that resulted in over 60,000 deaths of the area, right before the massacre.

Former President Fernando Belaunde Terry started an investigation team to find out exactly how the journalists were killed.

Writer Mario Llosa concluded the peasants of Uchuraccay were responsible for the murders, although family members of the victims disagreed. A witness said military personnel were in the town before the massacre, and Uchuraccay was not such an isolated town as people made it out to be.

The recent book, on the other hand, shows a compact to fight Shining Path that was signed by 123 residents and suggests the town was not isolated.

"The idea that this was an absolutely remote community is a lie," journalist Victor Tipe Sanchez said. "We can say that it was a poor community, just as it is now, very poor. But it was not isolated, unknown or savage as some reports have said."

Sanchez added the town also had a school since the 1950s, according to investigations by Victor and his brother, reporter Jaime Tipe Sanchez. Their reports found people who arrived on foot died. The military usually came to Urchuraccay on helicopter, which is probably where the phrase, "Kill those who come on foot," (or "Uchuraccay, el pueblo donde morian lose que que llegaban a pie") came from.

The book will also feature a testimony from the taxi driver who took the reporters and the guide to the town of Tocto, where they began their trek to Uchuraccay.

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