Founded as a teacher-training college in 1822, La Cantuta had a long history as an institution that educated Peru's rural poor. Its remote location on Lima's eastern edge and its student body drawn from the country's most marginalized communities gave it a reputation for radical politics stretching back to the late 1950s. When the Maoist insurgent group Shining Path launched its brutal campaign in 1980, Peru's universities became battlegrounds — places where the state saw subversion behind every blackboard. The government closed La Cantuta in 1977 under military rule. It reopened in 1980, but the suspicion never lifted. Two days before the massacre, the Shining Path detonated a car bomb on Tarata Street in Lima's Miraflores district, killing more than 40 people. In the atmosphere of terror and reprisal that followed, soldiers came for the students of La Cantuta.

Grupo Colina operated as a death squad within Peru's military intelligence apparatus, directed by Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's intelligence chief. On July 18, 1992, its members entered the La Cantuta campus, pulled Professor Muñoz Sánchez and nine students from their dormitories, and took them to an unknown location. Forensic evidence later revealed that at least some of the victims had been tortured before being executed with shots to the base of the neck. Their bodies were buried in clandestine graves. The discovery of those graves came only after a map was leaked to the Peruvian press. Mariella Barreto, an intelligence service agent believed to have helped expose the burial sites, was herself murdered in 1997 — her body found decapitated and dismembered. Her colleague Leonor La Rosa appeared on television from a hospital bed, declaring she had been tortured for leaking information about Grupo Colina's operations.

When military and civilian prosecutors both opened investigations in 1993, a jurisdictional conflict landed before the Supreme Court, which deadlocked. Congress responded by changing the law overnight, allowing a simple majority to decide such disputes. The case went to military courts. In February 1994, ten perpetrators received prison sentences ranging from one to twenty years. But the convictions were short-lived. After Fujimori's landslide re-election in April 1995, Congress passed the Amnesty Law in an all-night session on June 14, 1995, ordering the release of all military and police personnel convicted of or charged with crimes during the internal conflict. The men convicted for the La Cantuta killings walked free on July 15, 1995. It would take five more years, the collapse of the Fujimori government, and an international human rights court to begin undoing the damage.

After Fujimori fled to Japan in 2000, the Amnesty Law was repealed. Attorney General Nelly Calderón filed charges in 2001 accusing Fujimori of co-authoring the La Cantuta and Barrios Altos massacres. The evidence showed that Fujimori and Montesinos exercised direct control over Grupo Colina, and that the death squad's operations were part of a systematic counter-insurgency policy built on human rights violations. Detained in Chile in 2005 and extradited to Peru in 2007, Fujimori stood trial. In 2007, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the Peruvian government to formally apologize to the victims' families and pay US$1.8 million in compensation. On April 7, 2009, a Peruvian court convicted Fujimori and sentenced him to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity. The ten people taken from La Cantuta that July night became central to the most consequential human rights prosecution in Peru's history.

What happened at La Cantuta was not an anomaly. It was one event in a twenty-year internal conflict that killed an estimated 69,000 Peruvians, the vast majority of them rural, indigenous, and poor. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented how state security forces and the Shining Path alike treated entire communities as expendable. The La Cantuta case matters in part because the victims were given names in the legal record — Muñoz Sánchez, Ortiz Perea, Amaro Condor, Mariños Figueroa — and because investigators, journalists, and whistleblowers risked and sometimes lost their own lives to ensure those names would not be forgotten. A memorial at the university campus now marks the site where the abductions took place, a reminder that these were people with families, ambitions, and futures that were stolen from them.