Authority, Discourse and the Construction of Victimhood (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.
Human Rights Quarterly, 2013
Research on the (promised) effects of transitional justice efforts on victims of civil conflicts remains rare. This article seeks to advance the field of research in two ways. First, this article focuses on how Peruvian victimhood became politicized as a consequence of a promised transitional justice mechanism: the Peruvian reparation program. Second, by highlighting the diverse motivations of members of grassroots victims' organizations, it brings to the fore important lessons on the successes and challenges of this transitional justice mechanism. I. INTRodUcTIoN As one of the mechanisms of transitional justice, the right to reparations for victims of gross human rights violations such as undocumented deaths or "disappearances," internal displacement, arbitrary detention, torture, and rape * Mijke de Waardt is a Ph.D. candidate at inter-university Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA) and the Free University of Amsterdam. The data upon which the results of this article are based were collected in the course of Ph.D. research. However, the author has also been a participant-observer in research and volunteer projects in Peru since 2002. Much of the basis of the Ph.D. research is based on these experiences, as subjected to later reflection and analysis. The research for this article has been supported by CEDLA, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the Society for the Advancement of Research in the Tropics. I am exceedingly grateful to the members of Reflexión, ANFASEP, and ARDCP, along with the many Peruvians who shared their time, experiences, and opinions with me. I want to thank Vicky Rojas and Miguel Amaya for their research assistance. I wish to express my gratitude to Michiel Baud, Ton Salman, Arij Ouweneel, and the anonymous reviewers of Human Rights Quarterly for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.
Inhabiting Unfinished Pasts: Law, Transitional Justice, and Mourning in Postwar Peru
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2013
Humanity Spring 2013 As a contribution to this discussion, this essay examines the project of transitional justice through which the post-conflict Peruvian state seeks to address legacies of mass death among Quechua-speaking people in the south-central Andes. More specifically, it focuses on forensic exhumations of clandestine mass graves conducted at Los Cabitos, the headquarters of the counterinsurgency campaign of the s and s in Ayacucho, the region most heavily affected by Peru's internal conflict. These forensic procedures were intended to recover the bodies of the desaparecidos (disappeared) during the worst moments of the war in the early s. The forensicarchaeological exhumation provided hard evidence to demonstrate the patterns of extermination of terrorism suspects and uncovered Nazi-like technologies of body disposal used by the military in its headquarters, which made impossible the identification and individualization of victims of state terror. Death in Transition In August , after two years of work, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) presented its final report to then-president Alejandro Toledo. The TRC established that approximately , people, including both civilians and combatants, died in twenty years of internal war (-) between the Peruvian security forces and the guerrilla groups Shining Path and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). According to the TRC, such a figure meant that Peru had suffered more deaths during this twenty-year period than in all the wars fought since independence from colonial rule in . Even more disturbingly, the TRC found that over percent of these victims were Quechua-speaking peasants from the highland department of Ayacucho. Of these, percent lived in rural areas. The TRC situated these disturbing figures in the context of a national population in which only percent speak Quechua or some other native language and only percent live in rural areas. To emphasize how devastating this violence was, the TRC projected the number of fatalities at national scale in the following terms: ''If the ratio of victims to population reported to the TRC with respect to Ayacucho were similar countrywide, the violence would have caused ,, deaths and disappearances. Of that number, , would have occurred in the city of Lima.'' 1 Yet in the view of the TRC, more disquieting than these figures themselves was the fact that this experience of mass death among Quechua-speaking people was not only unaccounted for but also unnoticed by mainstream Peruvian society-to the point that there was not even memory of it. Salomon Lerner, the Peruvian TRC's former chairman, said that this fact demonstrated how exclusion in Peru was so absolute that it was possible for tens of thousands of citizens to disappear without anyone in the broader society even noticing it. ''In effect,'' he said, ''we Peruvians used to say, in our previous worst-case scenarios, that political violence caused , casualties. What does it reveal of our political community to know now that , more people are missing, our brothers and sisters, and nobody missed them?'' 2 In that the TRC's new figures nearly doubled prior estimates, Lerner said that the TRC's final report exposed a double scandal: the huge number of murders, disappearances, and torture, and the ''ineptitude, slackness and indifference of those who could have stopped this humanitarian catastrophe from happening, but didn't.'' 3
"We are not good victims": Hierarchies of Suffering and the Politics of Victimhood in Colombia
PhD Dissertation, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 2019
"This is the era of the victims,” declared the High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia in his June 2014 address to the Colombian Senate. Yet, not all victims are created equal. Victimhood does not merely describe an experience of harm; it is also a political status and identity that invites particular performances from the state, human rights actors, and conflict-affected individuals. Those who identify as victims have expressed a perceived sense of hierarchy among their claims, with one family member of a disappeared person telling me, “we are not good victims.” In this research project on the politics of victimhood in Colombia, I draw from fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork to ask: What does it mean to be a “good victim”? How is victimhood produced and performed—by representatives of the state and those who identify as victims alike —in order to be legible in the context of transitional justice processes? And what are the implications of these constructed hierarchies for theories and experiences of justice during transitions from violence? This project is grounded in anthropological literature on violence, complemented by insights from the fields of transitional justice, feminist theory, and critical humanitarianism. The goal of this inquiry is to trouble, rather than reify, the category of ‘victim’ and to examine its use and effects on experiences of justice during transitions from violence. NOTE THAT THIS IS THE INTRODUCTION TO MY PHD THESIS. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN READING THE FULL MANUSCRIPT, PLEASE CONTACT ME. THANK YOU.
The Politics of Testimony and Recognition in the Guatemalan Peruvian Truth Commissions
2011
This text analyzes the politics of testimony in the Truth Commissions in Guatemala (the Historical Clarification Commission -CEH) and Peru (the Truth and Reconciliation Commission -CVR) and its effect on the narratives contained in their respective final reports. Recognition for victims involves taking into consideration the narratives established to interpret the process of violence, which decisively influence the production of ideas and practices of citizenship central to the discourse of both Commissions. In these narratives, ideological representations of the "subversive Indian" directly affect the status of the main victims/individuals affected by the conflict (the indigenous peasant populations) as well as the role which ethnic and racial inequality, and racism in particular, plays in the interpretation of the armed conflicts offered by the Commissions. Thus, the work of both Commissions and the preceding academic debates reveal the complex relationship -deeply rooted in history -between Indian-ness and politics.
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.
Engendering Transitional Justice: Reflections on the Case of Peru
This article probes the conceptual and methodological challenges of engendering transitional justice mechanisms, drawing referentially upon several years of research on Peruvian transitional justice initiatives. Most women affected by the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980Peru ( -2000 were Quechuaspeaking campesinas, or peasants, who have been commonly reduced to a single story of victimhood. The article asks whether it is possible for state and civil society actors to design and implement transitional justice mechanisms without reifying race, class and gender inequalities through this type of limited representation. To venture an answer in the affirmative would demand a significant broadening of the transitional justice mandate in ways that test the limits of the liberal framework. Engendering Transitional Justice: Reflections on the Case of Peru 62 62 62 62 62 Journal of Peacebuilding & Development ramifications of violent conflict' (Nagy 2008:278). In addition, these liberal assumptions of individualism, linear temporality and binary logic devalue other ways of knowing, including relational logics based on collectivity.