In its 2003 final report, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission calculated the number of dead from the violence that raged between 1980 and 2000 at 69,280. Even though this was more than double the figure usually cited, some specialists believed that the actual number was even higher. Both the Shining Path and the Peruvian Armed Forces hid or disappeared thousands of victims, and many communities and individuals refused to collaborate with the truth commission. Thus, despite the indefatigable work of the commission members, the report left out entire massacres and countless smaller tragedies. Nonetheless, it denounced with rigor and indignation the violence that spread throughout Peru and the shocking silence about it in Lima and beyond.
These two books examine the era of violence and its aftermath. This is not easy reading: gruesome sexual violence, paralyzing personal guilt, and heartbreaking family separations are among the major themes. Both books respectfully and skillfully explore how the primary victims of the violence (the indigenous peasantry of the south-central Andes, in the Ayacucho region) understand the period and seek justice. Both contribute to these efforts as well as the more scholarly examination of how people, communities, and societies remember, forget, and forgive.
De víctimas a ciudadanos studies three communities. In Colcabamba, people from a nearby town assassinated nine people accused of supporting the Shining Path and bringing havoc and repression to the area. In Hualla, the Peruvian military disappeared 65 people in 1983–1984. Family members continue to search for their remains. In Morcolla, the Shining Path burned down much of the town in retribution for efforts to expel militants. Twenty-five people died there and many more were injured as Shining Path members set houses on fire and then shot, stabbed, and clubbed those people who tried to escape. The narratives are complex, as the Shining Path had a presence in each town, imposing its totalitarian project and provoking resistance. The military at times aided those who opposed the guerrillas but often lumped all indigenous peasants together as ‘‘terrorists.’’ Villagers were caught not only between those two external forces but also within local divisions exacerbated by the events of the 1980s.
Led by a team of young Ayacucho anthropologists and historians, all bilingual in Quechua and Spanish, De víctimas a ciudadanos examines how people remember this era and have attempted to rebuild their personal lives and their communities. In all three cases, relatives continue the search for their loved ones, seeking the truth and a respectable burial. The authors depict the tension prompted by the return of former Shining Path members. People discuss the pain of seeing on a daily basis those who they remember murdering—in one case, beheading— their parents or siblings. One former Shining Path member breaks down in an interview and discusses his guilt and the contempt he suffers every day. “Ricardo” deals with his remorse with little success, reminding himself that he was a teenager when recruited. He has frequent nightmares in which the Shining Path punishes him for betraying the cause. These personal stories underline the intricacy of the events themselves, the contradictory versions about who supported which side, and the shadowy interplay between remembering and forgetting. Through extraordinary research, this book illuminates how people have experienced and understood the violence in the Ayacucho countryside, providing insights into the past and present of an area that those in power so willfully overlook. The one drawback of this book is its brevity: I wanted to read more about each of these three cases and the authors’ conclusions.
Kimberly Theidon has written a longer, more academic text that is engaging, provocative, and germane for discussions about memory and justice. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Intimate Enemies focuses on the painful aftermath of the conflict. The strongest sections examine the place in society of widows, those who lost their husbands and partners in the war. These people suffer in multiple ways: the disdain of their neighbors, who fear single women or blame them for the era of violence; the absence of labor and support offered by men; and the daily anguish of not knowing what happened to their loved ones. In a cruel irony also underlined in De víctimas, those who have returned from the war, primarily supporters of the Shining Path, usually find themselves better off than the widows. Theidon also explores sexual violence, moving the analysis beyond a narrow definition of rape. The stories are nauseating: captured senderistas who were brutalized by dozens of men, women who were raped when approaching the military to ask about their loved ones, and young women who were forced to trade sexual favors for the well-being of their families. The author has important insights on a variety of topics, including health, local understandings of trauma, and the curious role of evangelical churches and their members during and after the conflict.
Theidon convincingly critiques conventional arguments on trauma, violence, shame, and aggression. Moreover, she demonstrates courage and persistence. Few anthropologists worked in the area in the 1990s—when Theidon’s research began—and few have posed the painful questions asked here. She is an engaging writer and intrepid researcher. Nonetheless, Intimate Enemies would have benefited from better editing. The book’s final chapters don’t dialogue sufficiently with the initial ones, and Theidon makes minor errors such as deeming Alan García Peru’s current president (he left office in 2011).
More broadly, it is curious that in two books so sensitive to questions of power, the identity of the researchers remains obscure. De vı ́ctimas does not cite a specific author but lists in the acknowledgments the researchers, writers, and collaborators who worked on the project. Theidon relied heavily on assistants. She acknowledges them throughout the text, often describing how they met people in the plaza or interviewed someone after persistent requests. “Juanjo,” “Edith,” and others conducted many of the interviews (some of them are Quechua speakers), and by the end readers will want to know more about them—not only about their contributions to the project but also, in light of the book’s engaging style, what happened to this team after their work with Theidon concluded.
While other scholars have published excellent books in the last decade or so on Ayacucho both before the Shining Path and in the 1980s and 1990s, these two books shift the analysis to the conflict’s aftermath. De vı ́ctimas and Intimate Enemies underline the contrast with Southern Cone violence and other Cold War confrontations in the Americas. In these cases, the vast majority of the victims were urban and middle-class, detained, tortured, or disappeared by the military. In Peru, the Shining Path perpetrated more than 50 percent of the killing, and approximately 75 percent of the victims were Quechua speakers. As these two books show, official Peru not only tried to forget these people in the midst of the violence but also continues to overlook and marginalize them. These important publications challenge the state and civil society, including scholars, to pay more attention to and even learn from those who lived through the violence and suffered the most from it.
Notes
[1] The review was published in The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 94, n. 2 (2014): 345-347.
[2] Equipo peruano de antropología forense (EPAF). De víctimas a ciudadanos: Memorias de la violencia política en comunidades de la Cuenca Pampas. Lima: SINCO Editores, 2012; y Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
* The source of the image is La República (Lima).
