According to the agreement, the EU has committed to provide 2 million Euros ($2.8 million) that will be administered by the United Nations Development Program for the implementation of the museum.

The museum is being built overlooking Lima’s Costa Verde ocean front on a lot donated by the Miraflores municipal government.  A bid was called for the architectural design in 2009 and the building is scheduled to be completed in February 2012.

The museum is to honor the 70,000 people who died and the hundreds more reported missing during the 20 years of political violence in Peru between the Maoist Shining Path insurgents and government security forces.

The current exhibition, Yuyanapaq (To Remember, in Quechua), was originally opened in 2003 — after the presentation of the Truth and Reconciliation Report– and is temporarily housed on the 6th floor of the Museo de la Nacion.  It includes videos, audio tapes of victims at public hearings, and a rich photographic archive of images taken by some of Peru’s leading investigative journalists at the time.

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was headed by Salomon Lerner Febres, the former rector of the Universidad Catolica, 54 percent of all deaths in the conflict were attributed to the Shining Path rebels. The armed forces and police were found responsible for 30 percent, and most of the remaining fatalities were blamed on government-backed peasant militias. The greater number of the victims, by both sides of the conflict, were Quechua-speaking peasants in rural Andean communities.