Pursuing the Perpetual Conflict: Ethnographic Reflections on the Persistent Role of the ‘Terrorist Threat’ in Contemporary Peru (original) (raw)
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In this chapter I reflect upon certain legacies of Peru’s war on terror — and consider some of the legacies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was established to investigate that bloody period of violence, to determine responsibility for human rights violations, and to make recommendations that would promote “sustainable peace and national reconciliation.” I am motivated by three main concerns: What are the consequences of Peru’s war on terror, and how did these consequences inform both the truth the TRC was able to tell, as well as the “communal memory projects” people have forged in former Shining Path strongholds? How does the “logic of innocence” affect individuals, collectives, and political life following the internal armed conflict? Finally, I consider the contentious politics of victimhood and reparations in post-truth commission Peru.
The Testimony of Space: Sites of Memory and Violence in Peru's Internal Armed Conflict
This thesis seeks to contribute to knowledge on Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000), in which the insurgent group Shining Path attempted to destroy and replace the existing Peruvian state, by analysing the key themes of violence, culture and memory through the lens of space. By deploying this spatial analysis, the thesis demonstrates that insurgent and state violence were shaped by the politics and production of space, that cultural responses to the conflict have articulated spatialised understandings of violence and the Peruvian nation, and that commemorative sites exist within a broader geography of memory (or commemorative “city-text”) which can support or challenge memory narratives in unintended ways. Whereas previous literature on the Peruvian conflict, by Carlos Iván Degregori, Nelson Manrique and Peru’s Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, has emphasised the fundamentalist nature of Shining Path’s Maoist ideology, this thesis highlights the ways in which party militants interpreted this ideology in their own way and adapted it to local realities. I also argue that counterinsurgent violence was premised upon a spatialised understanding of Peruvian society which conflated indigeneity with Leftist radicalism. Using a broadly Foucauldian framework, I argue that the state created spaces of exception in order to eliminate political and biopolitical enemies. In approaching cultural responses to the conflict, I use the work of Butler on grievability to argue that the perceived non-grievability of insurgents and indigenous communities has been produced by the vast (and to some extent imagined) cultural distances which exist between Peru’s disparate communities. I also tie these issues of grievability to post-conflict memory practice, arguing that commemorative sites have not only been shaped by spatialised understanding of the conflict and by two distinct memory narratives in Peru, but also by the politics and production of urban space in which each of these sites has been created.
The Violent Andes: Crisis and Cultural Difference in Narratives of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict
In the last three decades of the 20th Century, several Latin American countries experienced political violence, authoritarian rule and a reversal of previous Import Substitution Industrialisation and nationalist economic policies. When Chile, Argentina and Peru had all undergone a transition to democracy and neoliberal economic policies following the Washington Consensus in the mid-1990s, it was taken by some as a sign that Latin America was experiencing a shift towards the Western liberal democracy model of development. The roots of this shift, however, lay in previous authoritarian regimes which derived their legitimacy, and excluded political opposition, by exploiting deep fears of communism, leftist economic reform and the racial Other. In Peru, in particular, President Fujimori presented himself as the saviour of the nation, the sole pacifier of Sendero Luminoso and the captor of their leader Abimael Guzmán. By reinforcing this foundational myth, he retained popular support and legitimised his rule despite a brutal price stabilisation plan and his 1992 autogolpe. This myth, however, was based on representations of violence which created indigenous communities in the interior and the Peruvian Left as an internal enemy, perpetrators of terrorism and obstacles to Peru’s economic modernisation. This paper will highlight the narratives of violence constructed in Peru’s mass media and forms of cultural production, such as literature and film. Examining these sources makes clear the themes, motifs and narratives used when talking about violence, and shows that myths and misrepresentations of violence which occurred during Fujimori’s rule continued into the post-2000 Truth and Reconciliation era. Furthermore, I argue that neither Fujimori nor his successors have brought a new style of governance which solves the structural violence which precipitated the conflict, but rather they have relied on old, entrenched fears to reproduce inequality and legitimise their own elite projects.
The Informe Final of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2003, highlights a distinct geographical dimension to the violence, and established the idea that internal geographical distances in Peru amount to vast cultural divides, with the result many Peruvians remained ignorant for many years, perhaps wilfully so, of the violence perpetrated against their compatriots. Thus, in the Truth Commission’s interpretation of the conflict, Peru’s uneven socioeconomic geography is not only something which conditions vulnerability to violence, but also a factor which demonstrates the fragility of the Peruvian nation. Yet whilst the CVR’s report represents a pivotal moment in Peru’s truth and reconciliation process, and has been an invaluable source for a wealth of studies on the internal conflict, this geographical dimension to the violence, and the forms of constructed or imagined geography which the CVR highlights, remain understudied. In part, my PhD project seeks to rectify this by applying a spatial analysis to this violent period of Peru’s history.
Women, Memory and War. Two Testimonios of the Peruvian Commission for Truth and Reconciliation.
Between 1980 and 2000, Peru experienced a period of extreme violence involving two opposing political groups: the Maoist Communist Party (The Shining Path, PCP-SL) and the Communist Movement (MRTA) on one side, and the forces of the state on the other. The confrontation resulted in 68,700 casualties. A Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (CTR) was formed in 2001 to investigate the causes of the violence and those responsible for human rights violations. The CTR collected 17,000 testimonios (testimonies) from actors on all sides of the conflict including alleged " members of the alleged subversive groups " , victims (mostly rural indigenous civilians), police officers, soldiers, and government officials agents. In this paper, I analyze two testimonios kept in the archive of the Information Center for Collective Memory and Human Rights. I compare testimonios that bear witness to the different way the " years of terror " were lived and interpreted by two Peruvian women: Lucero Cumpa, a high-ranking leader in MRTA; and JG, a middle-rank militant of Shining Path. Cumpa and Galván are currently serving a 30-year and a 20-year sentence respectively at the women's high security prison in Lima. : I analyze the conceptions these women have constructed about their nation in order to avoid social isolation. These women's voices organize a tense, heterogeneous version of history that suggests a new, alternative Peruvian narrative.
The issue of space and geography is crucial to understanding Peru’s period of armed conflict between 1980 and 2000, as well as for identifying its historical precedents and afterlife in cultural memory. Indeed, the Final Report of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2003, establishes a spatial context to the violence, stating that more than 40% of reported deaths occurred in the department of Ayacucho, with a further 45% in the departments of Huancavelica, Apurímac, Junín, Huánuco and San Martín. My PhD project has worked towards producing a spatial analysis of Peru’s internal armed conflict, and asks how this can contribute to current knowledge of this period in a number of ways. Specifically, I assess how space and geography produced, and were produced by, the violence of the conflict. I address how cultural responses to the conflict have been shaped by ideas about geography, and how they have reflected, or tried to bridge, the real and cultural distances between Peru’s disparate communities. Finally, I have used space to approach the theme of memory, analysing how distinct memory narratives have been produced from particular geographical perspectives, assessing the spatiality of numerous sites of memory, and highlighting the existence of a broader geography of memory, taking into account the ways in which different moments in Peruvian history have produced a common cultural heritage in urban and national landscapes.