With a background in pharmaceutical development, Loretta Itri is an avid traveler who recently had the opportunity to explore Southeast Asia on a trip that took her along the Mekong River. Among the stops on Loretta Itri's itinerary were Cambodia’s Phnom Penh and the Genocide Museum, as well as Choeung Ek, the “killing fields” where the country’s tragic late-20th-century history was shaped. 

In 1975, Pol Pot took control of Cambodia, a country that had been wracked by civil war and a covert U.S. bombing campaign. Instead of the promised stability, the military-backed leader followed a strategy of bloodshed as he forced city dwellers to the countryside as part of a Communist vision of creating an agrarian utopia.

During a four-year period from 1975 to 1979, as many as 2.5 million people, comprising a fourth of the country’s population, died from starvation, disease, or execution. In addition, those suspected of being against the regime were summarily executed or sent to reeducation centers, where they often died.

Situated 17 miles from Cambodia’s capital in a pastoral agricultural region, Choeung Ek was the largest killing field and comprises 129 communal graves associated with the Khmer Rouge reign. Today, it serves a grim and sobering reminder of the excesses of which nonelected governments are capable.