Original subtitles

In Peru, a remote island scarred by a violent revolution.

With the world watching, this group chose their moment to strike.

A peaceful refuge in Nevada that offered hope to its occupants.

This place attracted women from across the country

in search of a better life.

In France, a workers' paradise seized by an invading force.

Facing annihilation, they didn't give in,

but instead turned to resistance.

And a rural Italian settlement trapped in a downward spiral.

It became an idyllic home for many,

but would be destroyed by a disastrous event.

Off the Peruvian coast, an isolated compound

tells the story of a country held captive by fear.

In the Pacific Ocean,

about five miles west of Peru's capital city, Lima,

you come across a barren mountainous island.

We can see buildings here. They have not been looked after.

They have not been properly used in a very long time.

In one of the roofless structures,

we can find crumbling remains of tables and benches.

Perhaps this had some type of institutional purpose.

Take a closer look and you start to see evidence

that those who lived here didn't do so by choice.

Bars on the windows and the secluded island location

expose this site's true purpose.

This is a bit like Alcatraz.

This is where you're going to put the people who must never escape.

This rocky outpost was designed to house

Peru's most violent offenders.

They were members of a militant organisation

that terrorised the Peruvian people in the name of communism.

The Shining Path were well-organised all over Peru,

and that included this prison.

As you look around, these buildings,

they've not just been destroyed by wind and by waves.

You can see there are bullet marks here.

It looks as though a full-scale war took place.

There are hostages being held on this island.

The Peruvian government had to make a decision.

They launched an attack, and what followed was a massacre.

This island was uninhabited for most of its history,

but in the early 20th century,

the government found a perfect use for it - they built a prison.

Initially, it was just used to house violent criminals,

but in this turbulent world of Peruvian politics,

it was soon the place where political prisoners were sent to.

Those prisoners were members of a communist organisation

that formed in the 1970s.

It was called the Shining Path.

The terrorist group was able to exploit

Peru's poverty-stricken rural population,

which had suffered greatly under a succession

of weak civilian governments and military dictatorships.

The Shining Path were anti-government insurgents,

and they organised themselves

according to Mao Zedong's principles

of revolutionary warfare.

They were a highly militant organisation

and established a guerilla army.

Fabrizio Tealdo is a local historian

familiar with the Shining Path's dramatic rise.

By the early 1980s,

the Shining Path's ranks had swelled to around 10,000 members.

Their reign of terror included intimidation, public executions,

and bombings throughout the country.

The ultraviolence of the Shining Path

was designed to frighten the Peruvian people

into shifting their support from Peru as a state

to the Shining Path as a movement.

As the Peruvian government started to succeed against the Shining Path,

they knew it was very important to separate the Shining Path members

from the general population of Peruvian prisons.

In 1982, the facility here was repurposed

to lock up the growing number of Shining Path radicals.

This is El Fronton prison island.

By 1986, there were over 160 presumed members

of the Shining Path who were imprisoned at El Fronton.

They were all housed in the Blue Pavilion block.

But segregating the prisoners proved to be a fatal mistake.

The Peruvian government were creating the ideal conditions

for a new revolutionary cell on this little island

only five miles away from Lima, the capital of Peru.

At 6am on June 18th, 1986, prison guards opened up the cells

of the ground floor of the Blue Pavilion block.

But, suddenly, they rushed the guards,

taking them by surprise

and attacking them with homemade weapons.

They took hostages.

Rapidly, they controlled the prison. Rapidly, they controlled the island.

The Peruvian government soon discovered

that the seizing of El Fronton was part of a much bigger plan.

On the same day, members of the Shining Path

had rioted in various other prisons throughout the country.

This was a coordinated operation.

This all took place when President Alan Garcia

was hosting an international congress in Lima.

This was an act of propaganda

to humiliate the Peruvian government in front of the whole world.

Armed police were immediately sent out to El Fronton,

along with a negotiating team

who tried to communicate with the rebels via loudspeaker.

Holding three prison guards as hostages for leverage,

they issued a long list of demands

that included better prison conditions.

It becomes very clear to the Peruvian government

that they're going to have to use military force against this island.

This was no easy task.

The rioters had smuggled in dynamite,

they had gotten guns from the guards,

and they had even made their own crossbows.

Throughout the night, the military pounded

the Blue Pavilion with heavy gunfire.

But their initial attacks were repelled by inmates

who fired back at them and threw explosives in retaliation.

With the attack failing, the president took an extreme step -

he issued a supreme decree

declaring the prison island a restricted military zone.

This enabled President Garcia

to ban civilian and judicial authorities

from the island, which meant that

the world would not see what happened next.

The consequences were swift and brutal.

The Peruvian government would wreak their revenge

on the prisoners at El Fronton.

As darkness fell, the special forces prepared themselves for an assault.

Government troops were able to rain down artillery shells

onto the defences that the prisoners had established.

In the Blue Pavilion, the structure is starting to go to pieces,

and the Shining Path are going to move into the cellar.

2pm on June 18th,

the remaining inmates shouted out that they wanted to surrender.

By now, only around 30

of the Shining Path prisoners were still alive.

More than 100 had already died during the battle.

But there were even greater acts of violence to follow,

the shocking truth of which

would not be revealed for many years.

Their bodies were disposed in the trenches below the pavilion,

covered in gasoline, and burned.

In the aftermath of the massacre, witnesses came forward.

The military's actions came under increasing scrutiny.

The conflict with Shining Path eventually came to an end

around the year 2000.

It left some 70,000 people dead.

El Fronton's haunting remains now serve as a grim reminder

of one of Peru's most troubled and violent eras.

In Southern Nevada, USA, on the edge of Las Vegas,

a scenic park contains the remnants of a revolutionary sanctuary.

From the sky, this place stands out as a lush, green oasis,

set against the backdrop of this dusty, dry desert.

We can see a cluster of white buildings

with a vaguely Spanish style, like a ranch or a hacienda.

Smaller structures dotted around the site

suggest this was a place where people once resided.

When you look in these rooms,

they're kind of time capsules of the mid-20th century.

You see wood panelling, pink tile in the bathrooms,

kitchens that look like something out of the I Love Lucy show.

The question is, who were these buildings for?

So, this is a part of Las Vegas history

that many people are not aware of, including locals.

This is a place that offered women a freedom

they did not have access to before.

Las Vegas has always been famous for the quickie wedding,

but this place tells a different side of the story.

And it wasn't long before major celebrities

started coming to Nevada to stay at sites like this.

Dr Diane Siebrandt is a historic preservation officer

for the city of Las Vegas.

Her job is to protect culturally important sites like this.

Many people believe that

Las Vegas history starts and ends with gambling,

but there was another tourist industry

that is less well-known.

This property was a major part of that industry,

and its origins are closely connected

to the creation of Las Vegas itself.

Today, we think of Las Vegas

as a huge city of glitz and shameless wealth,

but 100 years ago,

it was a little rough-and-ready outpost in the desert,

a place for travellers to stop in the midst of a gruelling journey.

This all changed with the construction

of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

This was America's biggest engineering project

since the Panama Canal,

and it required thousands of workers.

Almost overnight, Las Vegas turned into a boom town.

At the same time,

the impact of the Great Depression began to hit hard,

and it became obvious that drastic action was needed

to stimulate the state's struggling economy.

On March 19, 1931,

the state governor signed Assembly Bill 98,

which legalised gambling in the state of Nevada.

One man, who had come to Las Vegas from the Midwest in 1928,

was quick to capitalise on the liberal new law.

Prosper Goumond was a businessman,

and he, along with other businessmen,

they purchased the Boulder Club,

one of the first of four establishments

that received legalised gambling licences in Las Vegas.

Goumond made a fortune from his new venture

and quickly looked for additional ways to make money.

In December 1941, he found the perfect place.

Prosper Goumond was a man who could see an opportunity.

He saw that this region of Nevada

might be a place of economic growth.

He invested in a huge piece of property

around these natural springs

and this natural oasis in the desert.

He developed this site from empty fields

to a successful working ranch known as Tule Springs.

Soon, it would be transformed into a prime holiday spot.

So, it initially was a working ranch,

but it started taking on guests as a dude ranch.

This was a time

when America was fascinated by all things western.

So, the notion of a dude ranch -

a place where you could go and ride horses

and spend time side by side with real working cowboys

and maybe even come home with a cowboy hat.

Though families seeking an authentic western experience

were not the only guests.

If you were staying at Tule Springs Ranch in the 1940s,

you wouldn't just see cowboys and horses roaming around.

You'd probably also see a few glamourous young women.

The reason they were here was because of legislation

passed on the same day gambling was legalised in 1931.

This new law introduced the concept of a quickie divorce,

and to qualify, all you had to do

was become a resident of Nevada and live there for six weeks.

But you also had to have witnesses that attested that

you had stayed in the same place for six weeks.

So, Prosper Goumond recognised that opportunity

and he opened up his ranch to a divorce ranch.

At this time, ending a marriage was still very much taboo

and difficult to achieve.

Divorce ranches were an attractive option

to speed up the process.

Nevada's liberal divorce law

was a dramatic contrast to most of the rest of the country.

In other states, you'd have to prove all these difficult things -

that your husband had abandoned you,

or that some kind of abuse had taken place,

or various indiscretions.

For women especially, this was a difficult, arduous legal process.

In Nevada, it was more like

what today we would call a no-fault divorce.

You could claim mental anguish or mental cruelty,

irreconcilable differences,

and this allowed the women to get out of a marriage

that perhaps was not healthy.

Nevada openly advertise themselves as the divorce capital of the US.

The remote location of Tule Springs made it an appealing choice.

It was still very far from Downtown Las Vegas,

so you had your privacy,

and I think that was one of the most important aspects of it.

Women can enjoy themselves and relax before they get their divorce.

There was a pool here.

They could go fishing. There was also a shooting range.

But divorce ranches were not an option for all women.

A Nevada divorce required money,

so this was really only accessible to women who were well-off.

It could only really accommodate about a dozen people,

so because this did really cater to a small clientele,

it was very exclusive.

In 1951, an up-and-coming movie star checked in.

The space we are in right now,

there was a young Hollywood starlet named Terry Moore,

and we can just imagine that she's in this space here

doing her make-up, maybe doing her hair,

and getting ready for her day.

Terry Moore was a relatively minor star,

but her secret boyfriend was anything but obscure.

So, Terry Moore was here

because she was having an affair with Howard Hughes.

At the time, she was married to a football star named Glenn Davis

and the marriage didn't work out.

Howard Hughes arranged for her to come here

to seek her six-week residency

in order to file for that quick Nevada divorce.

Howard would have definitely visited her here,

or even stayed with her here.

But Moore didn't stay for the full six weeks.

It's rumoured her husband, Glenn Davis,

refused to agree to a quickie divorce

and wanted to use this as leverage to secure a big payout from Hughes.

Their divorce was finally issued in 1952.

But here's where things get complicated.

As it turns out, when Terry Moore arrived at Tule Springs,

she was already married to Howard Hughes.

The two had had a secret wedding offshore years prior.

So, her marriage to Glenn Davis was, in fact, a bigamous marriage.

And in the ultimate Hollywood plot twist,

none of this became public knowledge

until after Howard Hughes's death in 1976.

In 1954, three years after Hughes and Moore left Tule Springs,

its owner, Prosper Goumond, died.

By 1959, the property was no longer being used

as a divorce ranch.

Divorce tourism to the state was in decline

and it made no financial sense to continue.

After Prosper Goumond's death, the ranch had several owners,

but, fortunately, it eventually wound up

in the hands of the state, which converted the ranch

and the beautiful springs around it into a state park.

We would love to do a large restoration project

and get all these buildings restored,

maybe turn them into some type of a period museum.

In a fitting twist of irony, this site has done a full 180,

as it's now a site to many weddings.

In north-east France, 90 miles from Paris,

stands a monument intended as a force for good

that was hijacked by evil.

This small town, built along the banks of a river,

really looks like it's seen better days.

But across the bridge is something that looks grand and ornate

compared to the main street.

These three vast wings of a building

make up what looks like a palace fit for a king.

The scale of this is grand, but when we look closely,

we see that this is not a place of great riches.

One empty unit after another is lined up around these courtyards.

There must be hundreds of them in total.

Only a few clues remain as to what these were.

A narrow bathroom, remains of a kitchen -

all of this suggests they were modest apartments.

When constructed, this place was part of an innovative vision

to improve workers' lives.

In time, that dream turned into a nightmare.

The German jackboot comes to this corner of France

twice in the early 20th century.

They arrived at these doors

and the inhabitants' lives were plunged into chaos.

During World War II, an individual act of extreme courage

helped the Allies force out the Nazi occupiers.

He knew he was taking his life into his hands,

but that he had to do it to save the lives of others.

The grandeur that we see today

is all the result of one man's vision.

He set out to change the way that French people worked and lived,

but it had a modest beginning.

In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Andre Godin

was a young apprentice travelling around France,

learning the trade of iron production.

While he perfected his craft, he couldn't help but notice

the terrible conditions in the factories,

and that workers around the country were suffering.

Godin had grown up in relative poverty

and was driven by a desire

to help those even less fortunate than himself.

Amelie Godbert works at this site today.

Part of her role is to make certain

the memory of the man who built it is never forgotten.

He knows what it is not to eat every day,

not to have a nice, clean place to live in,

not to go to school.

His idea is to make the workers' lives better.

But before Godin could make his mark,

he needed to make his own fortune.

Godin develops a new way of making stoves.

He builds a stove that can be cast out of molten iron.

Godin's got the potential to make stoves better,

and more efficiently, than anyone in Europe.

The design was a hit and production boomed.

And he's got a lot of money

cos he's got the monopoly on the stove market.

By 1859, Godin had amassed enough wealth

to finally make his dream

of helping the people who worked for him a reality.

He set out building a collective settlement

for his workers, across the river from his factory.

It's his own vision and he tries to transmit this philosophy.

It's like an experiment.

Godin called his utopian concept the Familistere.

It was also known as the Social Palace of Guise.

This was going to be a genuine community,

focused not only on production,

but on productive living.

The centrepieces were these three great apartment blocks

built around central courtyards.

They could house 2,000 people in 500 apartments.

There was a theatre, a swimming pool,

restaurants, stores, and a nursery.

There was even a school that provided free mandatory education

for the workers' children.

It was more than a high standard of living

because even the richer people in the town wouldn't have that.

Godin continued to perfect his workers' utopia

for the next 25 years.

Godin even kept an apartment for himself.

It's important to him if he wants to be the example,

so he has to live here.

Your job is not related to the size of your flat.

You could be a manager.

If you're single, you will have the smaller one - two rooms.

If you're just a worker with a family of six kids,

you will have a four-bedroom, four-room flat.

So, your job has nothing to do with the life in the Familistere.

But in 1888, at the age of 71, Godin passed away.

Fortunately, he died knowing his legacy was safe

in the hands of his workers.

But soon, Godin's creation would face a threat

he could never have imagined,

one that would bring the social experiment

to a shuddering halt.

In 1914, when Germany attacks France,

their plan is a rapid advance and they're going to take Paris,

and that means the German army comes to Guise

early in the First World War.

About 200 factory workers were mobilised in defence.

It's said that some of them were firing at the approaching army

from the left wing of the residential complex.

The battle would not last long,

and after two days, the Germans overran the Familistere

and began a long occupation.

Under German control,

the theatre was converted into a military prison

and the courtyard became a hospital for wounded soldiers.

A place that was built for peaceful, communal family life

turns into a place of misery.

And then, when Germany exits the war with the armistice,

it becomes possible to try to re-establish

the dream here in Guise.

The Familistere's residents reclaimed their homes

and, eventually, the factory began to operate once again.

But the fragile peace did not last for long.

Across the border,

another malevolent power was mobilising.

On September the 1st, 1939, Germany invaded Poland,

and soon turned the full force of its army against France once more.

During the Second World War,

Germany ruthlessly exploited France for the Nazi war economy.

This factory is repurposed to support the German war effort.

For many of the workers and families,

the memories of occupation were all too fresh.

The residents of the Familistere that worked in the factory

were urged to collaborate or face brutal reprisals.

They were instructed to continue making cast-iron stoves,

but this time, chiefly for the German market.

It rapidly became clear to a lot of French people

they could not accept the horror of Nazi occupation.

So, all over France, including here in Guise,

those who were fit enough

would become part of the French Resistance.

Maxime Potier is a historian at the Familistere

and an expert on Jamart's heroics during World War II.

On June the 6th, 1944 - D-day -

the Allied forces landed in Normandy.

Over the coming months,

Hitler's troops were forced back towards the German border.

By the end of August 1944,

the US army was edging closer to Guise.

The Allies had liberated Paris,

and all across France, the German army was retreating,

sabotaging what it could as it went.

Here in Guise, as the Germans were getting ready to leave,

they packed the bridge with explosives,

preparing to blow it up behind them.

If they succeeded, it could have slowed down

the Allied advance in this region.

When the American forces arrive,

they were able to cross the bridge over the Oise and liberate the town,

thanks to the bravery of one young man.

At the end of the war, Godin's factory reopened,

but its days as a workers' paradise were numbered.

In 1970, it was purchased by a cookware company

who had no need for the Familistere.

The apartments were sold to private owners,

and by the early 2000s, many of them were abandoned.

Today, after much careful restoration,

visitors can walk the rooms and hallways of the Familistere

and see Godin's vision in all its glory.

The school and theatre are still in use,

and there are even plans to convert one wing into a hotel.

In Sicily, Italy,

an isolated settlement charts the tragic tale

of a rural paradise forever lost.

Agricultural fields stretch for miles around,

and with mountains off in the distance,

it's beautiful, but eerily quiet.

In the centre of all this rises a strange collection

of crumbling buildings.

The lines are symmetrical, simple, and clean-cut.

The architecture is unusual for rural Sicily.

On each of the buildings are signs

that indicate their original purpose -

school, laboratory, salon -

evidence that this was once a residential village.

But it's peculiar to label each building

in such a functional way, which suggests whoever built this

was trying to impose some kind of order.

Created to revitalise Sicily's countryside,

this settlement was part of a vision of Italy's famous fascist dictator.

But none of this explains why it's abandoned.

For many years, this was a peaceful home

until a disastrous event began its slow demise.

The final nail in this village's coffin

would be a tragic descent into violent crime.

Luigi Solazzo lived in this rural village

for almost 40 years.

To understand why this place exists, you'd have to go back

quite some time into Southern Italy's history.

Prior to the 20th century, most of Sicily's agricultural land

had been divided up into vast private estates,

owned by local nobility.

These were known as latifundia

and dated back to Roman times when Rome conquered Sicily

and turned it into the bread basket of Rome, alongside North Africa.

This system of feudal landed estates

persisted well into the 1800s,

and at the bottom of this socioeconomic pyramid

were the penniless peasants

that did the backbreaking labour on the land itself.

When an economic crisis hit Sicily in the 1880s

and made things even harder, people started leaving.

Over the next 30 years,

around one million Sicilians emigrated,

many to the United States.

The mass exodus left Italy without the means

to produce enough food for the remaining population.

Something drastic needed to be done before it was too late.

Political upheaval and World War I delayed things.

Then, in 1922, Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party

forced their way into power.

Mussolini's ideology was ultranationalist

and all about self-sufficiency.

He didn't want Italy to have to rely on any other country for food.

At the beginning of 1940,

they started building eight new villages

spread across the island.

This one was called Borgo Schiro, "borgo" meaning village

and "Schiro" the surname of a fascist martyr

killed by left-wing agitators in the 1920s.

On the 18th of December 1940,

it was officially unveiled during a grand opening ceremony.

The village was designed to have everything

that a growing community needed,

and the goal was to encourage peasant families

to move into the farmhouses that dotted the fields.

Geared towards serving these new local farmers,

there was a school, a post office,

a medical centre, and a general store.

But, soon, the government was thrown into chaos

as Mussolini's alliance with Hitler

brought World War II to Sicily in 1943.

When peace was restored to the island,

the new government continued the land reform policy

and Borgo Schiro could finally meet its potential for prosperity.

At Borgo Schiro's peak during the 1950s,

about 100 people lived in the village

and its surrounding farmhouses.

Life was simple, and it was hard work,

but for many, it was idyllic.

But just as life seemed perfect,

a catastrophe would hit Borgo Schiro and usher in its downfall.

In 1968, a violent earthquake struck the valley of Belice,

and the epicentre was a mere 17 miles

from the village of Borgo Schiro.

The powerful tremor, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale,

devastated the Belice valley area of south-west Sicily.

Four towns were completely destroyed,

leaving 100,000 homeless,

and killing or injuring over 1,200 people.

The government response was quite tepid.

There was a lack of disaster planning,

an excess of bureaucracy, and a lack of necessary supplies.

The region was struggling,

and many families left in the aftermath of the earthquake.

That included the residents of Borgo Schiro.

But Luigi and his parents refused to leave.

This was their home

where three generations of Solazzos had built their lives.

By the late 1980s, in a village where some 100 people used to live,

they were the last family left.

But living in a virtually abandoned town

has its risks, and Borgo Schiro became a target for criminals.

After the Solazzos departed in 1995,

Borgo Schiro's abandonment was complete.

It has continued to crumble ever since.

There are currently no plans to demolish Borgo Schiro,

so you can happily walk around its ghostly streets

and bear witness to an extraordinary remnant

of Italy's fascist past.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media