In Peru, authorities got rid of an illegal shrine to Shining Path Maoist Marxist guerrillas. Those are the people who turned Peru into a hellhole back in the 1990s.

Here's what the Associated Press is reporting:

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peruvian authorities on Saturday demolished a mausoleum holding eight Shining Path rebels killed during prison massacres more than three decades ago and relocated their remains to a cemetery in a northern part of Lima.

More than 50 police officers and dozens of workers from the cemetery in the Comas district of Peru’s capital participated in the operation, said prosecutor Javier Zapata. The remains of the Maoist rebels will be buried in separate niches.

Permit problems, they said. Ah, the permit problems.

I suspect something more is going on. Peru is the only nation out there I know of that has sought to rub the romance of communism out cold by exposing it for what it is.

When I visited Lima in 2012, I was amazed to visit a place called the "Memory Museum" which was dedicated to exposing the crimes of communism. Apparently it was paid for by the Germans and the European Union, and there was some nod to equalize crimes in the eurotrash style, so that supposedly no one would think communism was any worse than thuggy government soldiers, but it didn't work that way, in effect. The simple reason why is that the museum listed all the atrocities, and did huge news spreads on each, as viewers moved from room to room. The communist atrocities were so much more numerous, so much more expansive in their killing numbers, and so very, very, vile in details, that it was obviously an effort to discredit and de-romanticize communism. (The communists even came into villages and hung people's pets, which shows just what kind of psychopaths these vaunted fighters for social justice really were.) The whole thing was recognizable to anyone, too - the Che tshirts, the university radicals, the press romanticism, the establishment's tolerance ... and the forced marches and death pit massacres. There also were things you never see otherwise, too - such as the news that it was the indigenous people who were brutalized the most by the communists, and those people visited the museum with tears. That doesn't fit the lefty narrative anywhere, and it was clear that the museum's truth-telling was Peruvians refusal to kowtow to those narratives.

Obviously, in this masoleum case, the Peruvians were likely attempting to keep the grave from becoming a shrine to leftists, same way Austria demolished Hitler's birthplace to keep it from becoming a gathering point for Nazis. Peruvians have always been exceptionally sensitive to the importance of culture, and it appears they wanted the guerrillas' reputation to be more closely aligned to the facts than it usually is. I suspect the masoleum shutdown was a bid to erase that culture and eradicate the romanticism, the same way the allies made Nazi culture in Germany positively stink. Andrew Breitbart understood this importance of culture, and apparently the Peruvians do, too. The seat of the old Inca empire has an amazing sensitivity to culture, with an influence that has spread well beyond Peru's borders, from Argentina's gaucho cuisine to international literary lions such as Mario Vargas Llosa, to some of the world's best musical instrument makers and the world's top restaurants. It was striking to me that was an art supplies store seemingly on every corner in Lima. It may be a superficial touristic view, but when I went there, I was struck by how people there were so sensitive to the importance of culture.

I suspect a narrative is being dismantled there, and that is good news for the country and for Latin America. No "Marxist measles" for Peru, because the Peruvians are refusing to stand for it, they know where it leads. I hope that element of Peruvian culture also spreads well beyond Peru.