The Violent Andes: Crisis and Cultural

Difference in Narratives of Peru’s Internal

Armed Conflict

A dissertation submitted to the University of Manchester for the

degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Humanities

2013

Daniel Willis

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

2

Contents

List of Abbreviations and Terms Used p.3

Abstract p.4

Declaration and Intellectual Property Statement p.5

The Violent Andes: Crisis and Cultural Difference in

Narratives of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict p.6

- Chapter 1: Violence in the Media and Fujimori’s Popular Support p.12

- 1.1 Method of Violence p.14

- 1.2 Fujimori and the Crackdown on Sendero p.16

- Chapter 2: Violence in Cultural Production p.23

- 2.1 Literature p.23

- 2.2 Cinema p.31

- 2.3 Constructing Violent Narratives p.35

- Chapter 3: Memory Projects and the Politics of Forgetting p.37

- 3.1 Truth and Reconciliation p.38

- 3.2 Talking about Terrorism p.40

- 3.3 Remembering and Forgetting p.42

- Conclusion p.49

Bibliography p.52

Word Count: 14,933

3

List of Abbreviations and Terms Used

Abbreviations

APRA - Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana

APRODEH - Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos

CIDH - Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos

CVR - Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación

FARC - Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia

Movadef - Movimiento por Amnistía y Derechos Fundamentales

PCP-SP - Partido Comunista del Perú – Shining Path

Other Terms

Autogolpe - Self-coup, name given to President Fujimori’s dissolution of Congress

Campesino - Peasant

Caviarada - Derogatory collective term used for Leftist politicians and intellectuals,

similar to “champagne socialists”

Comunero - Member of the community, in this case in reference to members of

indigenous communities

Foquismo - Style of revolutionary guerrilla warfare used by Che Guevara

Fujimorista - Supporter of former President Alberto Fujimori

Pishtaco - An evil figure from Andean folklore, usually a tall, white outsider

who comes to kill and steal the body fat of campesinos

Rondas campesinas - Peasant militias or self-defence groups

Senderista - Member or follower of the Shining Path

Terruco - A terrorist

Translations Where there are direct quotes from a source in Spanish in the main body of

the text, English translations have been included in the footnotes. All translations in

footnotes are the author’s.

4

Abstract

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.

5

Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in this dissertation has been submitted in support of an

application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other

institute of learning.

Intellectual Property Statement

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dissertation) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has

given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for

administrative purposes.

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without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property

and/or Reproductions.

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6

The Violent Andes: Crisis and Cultural Difference in Narratives of Peru’s

Internal Armed Conflict

As crowds gathered in the streets of Lima to protest, General Jaime Salinas walked free

from prison on June 19th 1995. He was the beneficiary of a document, signed 5 days earlier

by President Fujimori, which granted amnesty to those who were imprisoned, charged or

currently being investigated for human rights abuses committed since 1980 as part of the

counter-terrorism offensive against Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path).1As he left, he

told a news reporter: “What is gone is gone and should be forgotten. What Peru needs is

that all Peruvians look ahead and not dig out dirt so this or that person can be blamed”.2

Many other essays on this subject open with one of two preferred departure points; with

either the burning of ballot boxes in Chuschi by Sendero in 1980, or Fujimori’s resignation

from office in 2000. These give the impression that Peru’s civil war exploded from

nowhere in 1980 and ended with Fujimori’s downfall in 2000, binding the events into a

neat period of crisis. However, these events fail to highlight what has been consistent

throughout the conflict and reconciliation process, which are the efforts of state and

military agents to encourage the forgetting of the conflict and its primary cause; the

structural violence of Peruvian society.

Whilst it has been elsewhere shown that the causes of political violence were far more

historically rooted than has previously been argued, the purpose of this essay is to

demonstrate that there are great levels of continuity from 1990 to the present in the ways in

which violence has been represented by the state, mass media outlets and in wider forms of

cultural production in Peru. These representations of violence have shaped the relationship

1 Catherine M. Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere (Pittsburgh, 2005), p.105. 2 ‘Peru: Amnesty Law for Military Officers Causes Outrage’, APTV, 19th June 1995.

7

between the Peruvian state and victims of violence and have highlighted the socio-political

conflicts which have been fought continually since the Shining Path’s emergence.

Several recent studies and conceptualisations of violence have thrown a new perspective

on the violence of the Shining Path and the Peruvian military. Slavoj Žižek’s model of

subjective and objective violence is particularly useful because, whilst current

historiography on the Shining Path focuses primarily on the visible effects of subjective

violence, very little time has been devoted to the invisible, systemic violence of Peruvian

social relations.3 Žižek’s work suggests that violence is not so much an explosion or

spontaneous combustion, as it is often represented, but more like a coiled spring where

force is both applied to maintain the status quo (through discriminatory laws, poor

provision of resources) and dramatically unleashed when stability can no longer be

maintained. Tilly’s work on the development of sporadic violence into concentrated waves,

often fuelled by heavy-handed repression, also turns the spotlight away from small groups

and towards the role police and the military play in turning disparate, isolated actors into

larger groups with convergent objectives.4 Both of these works involve a reconstitution of

the causality of political violence and, when applied to the historiography of Peru,

highlight agencies and responsibilities for violence which lie beyond groups like the

Sendero.

Rather than being seen as an anomaly or an aberration, subjective violence should

therefore be seen as the physical enactment of the divisions which exit in all societies, and

the different ways in which violence is represented are vital for understanding a wide range

of issues and identities. In Peru, violence was carried out along ethno-social boundaries

with the vast majority of victims belonging to indigenous communities in Ayacucho,

3 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, 2009), pp.9-11. 4 Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge, 2003), p.220.

8

Huancavelica, Apurímac and Junín.5 This study will therefore show that violence was not

only caused by huge inequalities between Peru’s urban coast and Andean interior, but that

it reproduced these inequalities, and that the way that violence was talked about also

reproduced stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs about indigenous peoples.

It is worth here outlining briefly the specific nature of systemic violence in Peru. In 1928,

José Carlos Mariátegui argued that Peru’s ethnic dualism was based on economics and

illustrated the vast differences in wealth, infrastructure and opportunity between the rich,

urban coast (centred on Lima and Callao) and the poor, rural Andean interior.6

Economically peripheral areas of Latin America are typified by low levels of literacy, poor

calorie intake and minimal electricity supply as well as negligible industrial production and

consumption of manufactured goods.7 Education in these departments of Peru has

historically been highly valued by all but strictly limited to those who could afford it.8 This

poverty is the persistent legacy of colonialism and the commodity chains of global

capitalism which have consistently extracted wealth from Latin America.

Furthermore, O’Donnell has highlighted how areas such as the Peruvian highlands have

their own “power circuits”, often based on clientelism, with little functional bureaucratic

presence. Local elites in such areas can petition state institutions for more resources, but

peasants have minimal access to democratic claim-making and must either remain silent,

or find other ways to make their demands heard.9 These conditions correlate precisely with

Barash and Webel’s definition of structural violence which they argue is widely

unacknowledged as violence, yet acts as a forcible underdevelopment of particular

5 Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe Final (Lima, 2003) < http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/conclusiones.php> [Accessed

20 August 2013], (para. No. 4). 6 José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (London, 1971), p.22. 7 Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley, 1973), p.23. 8 Jaymie Heilman, Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895-1980 (Stanford, 2010), p.119. 9 Guillermo O’Donnell, Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization (Notre Dame, 1999), p.140.

9

populations, usually separated from the privileged by race, gender or any number of social

reasons.10 Although it could be argued that Sendero’s party intelligentsia were primarily

from non-indigenous backgrounds (and thus protected from the full effects of structural

violence), the party’s success came from persuading local elites, radical youths and

indigenous communities to all commit resources to their cause, so that together they could

wage war against the structural limitations which frustrated them all.

The current historiography, however, emphasises ideological motives for the emergence of

the Shining Path who are often described as “hardcore orthodox bolcheviques”.11

Anthropologists, such as Orin Starn and Carlos Iván Degregori, have emphasised that

Gang of Four Maoism was the central column of Sendero ideology, and have argued that

Guzmán’s “prefabricated narrative about class struggle and capitalism” showed no regard

for the issues faced by Quechua Peruvians.12 However, these works downplay the role of

Andean communities who supported Sendero, and the deeper historical motives which

encouraged extralegal forms of claim-making, and so a purely ideological explanation of

violence is insufficient.

For example, McClintock has asserted that subsistence crises, animosity with the Civil

Guard and anger at the ineffectiveness of democratic institutions are significant factors in

the distrust and resentment felt by indigenous communities towards the state and urban

coast.13 La Serna and Heilman have also traced much longer histories, from the late-

nineteenth century up to the 1980s, of political unrest, local disputes and protest in

10 David P. Barash and Charles P. Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies (London, 2002), p.7. 11 Rodrigo Montoya Rojas, ‘Power, Culture, and Violence in the Andes’ in Christine Hunefeldt and Misha Kokotovic (eds.), Power, Culture, and Violence in the Andes (Brighton, 2009), pp.9-28 (p.22). 12 Orin Starn, ‘Maoism in the Andes: The Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path and the Refusal of History’, Journal of Latin American

Studies, 27:2 (1995), pp.399-421 (p.413). 13 Cynthia McClintock, ‘Why Peasants Rebel: The Case of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso’, World Politics, 37:1 (1984), pp.48-84 (p.83).

10

Ayacucho.14 Current research, therefore, has arrived at a point which accepts that Sendero

are part of a long lineage of protest movements articulating frustration with the country’s

violently unequal structural relations.

However, it is yet to be fully explored how themes of these resistance movements (Leftist

politics, peasant resistance) have been symbolically combined with recent national

concerns (hyperinflation, drugs trafficking, collapse of law & order) to make senderistas a

scapegoat for all of Peru’s ills. In the 1990s, narratives of crisis and of Fujimori’s

pacification of Sendero served to justify massive counterterrorism operations, authoritarian

rule and economic restructuring; since 2000, it has been used to justify further economic

projects and has remained the dominant narrative of Peru’s civil war, despite a long truth

and reconciliation process which has produced alternative accounts of violence.

The case of Peru highlights the two major contradictions of neoliberalism as outlined by

Brown: that market liberalisation was often combined with the demolition of democratic

institutions; and that whilst promoted with a rhetoric of modernisation, Fujimori’s

neoliberalism sought to reverse previous modernisation projects based on protectionism

and nationalisation.15 Research by Drinot has assessed the links between the Shining Path

and neoliberal governmentality in the post-Fujimori era, but links between forms of

governance and representations of Sendero violence from 1990 to the present have yet to

be fully demonstrated.16 In this respect, I argue that there is a direct relationship between

the way that violence is represented culturally and the neoliberal programmes which have

been introduced to Peru from 1990 to the present.

14 Heilman, Before the Shining Path, p.158; Miguel La Serna, ‘To Cross the River of Blood: How an Inter-Community Conflict is

Linked to the Peruvian Civil War, 1940-1983’ in Christine Hunefeldt and Misha Kokotovic (eds.), Power, Culture, and Violence in the Andes (Brighton, 2009), pp.110-144 (p.136). 15 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Oxford, 2005), p.38. 16 Paulo Drinot, ‘The Meaning of Alan García: Sovereignty and Governmentality in Neoliberal Peru’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 20:2 (2011), pp.179-95 (p.180).

11

The first part of this thesis will examine how Shining Path violence was reported in the

mass media during the 1990s. I will show that themes of hyperinflation, civil unrest and

drugs were interwoven into a combined crisis of political and economic instability from

which Fujimori, with his swift, decisive programmes (the autogolpe and Fujishock

austerity plan) is portrayed as the only saviour. Secondly, it will be necessary to look at

wider cultural representations of Sendero violence in cinema and literature to see how the

primacy of Fujimori in this narrative has faded, whilst different symbols and narratives

have emerged. In particular, these narratives link modern crises to Peru’s ancient past.

Finally, I will examine how the nature of violence has been dealt with during the truth and

reconciliation process and show that explanations for the conflict which do not describe the

criminality and illegitimacy of Sendero’s actions are still highly controversial. Whilst the

Informe Final of the Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación and the El Ojo Que Llora

monument have opened up spaces for contested memories of the Shining Path, there are

still attempts to silence unofficial versions of the past.17

The implications of these conclusions lie not just in Peru’s future, but in that of Mexico,

Guatemala, Ecuador, and the other countries in which human rights violations against

indigenous peoples are recorded in the same period.18 The implications on how neoliberal

regimes legitimise their rule are also important and may go some way to further explaining

the rise of the Latin American New Right in the 1990s. Only by using concepts of

subjective and objective violence can these structural tensions be recognised, the silences

be heard, and the tightening of the spring alleviated before violence is once again

unleashed. Peru’s internal armed conflict should not be forgotten, nor should the violence

which caused it.

17 ‘Peru to punish “negationism”, denying a past of killings and destruction by terrorist gangs’, MercoPress, 21 August 2012. 18 Amnesty International, ‘Human Right Violations against Indigenous People’, 1 March 1991

<http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR01/003/1991/en/01cf3f63-f942-11dd-92e7-c59f81373cf2/amr010031991en.pdf> [Accessed 12 July 2013] (p.2).

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Chapter 1: Violence in the Media and Fujimori’s Popular Support

Despite carrying out the 1992 autogolpe to wrest power from Congress, presiding over vast

human rights violations and introducing a drastic economic austerity programme (which he

had campaigned against prior to his election), Alberto Fujimori enjoyed high levels of

popular support throughout most of his Presidency. The key to this popular support, as

Crabtree and Tanaka have highlighted, was the appeal made by Fujimori directly to Peru’s

urban poor and to the military.19 By presenting himself as an outsider to the established

political class responsible for the “bad old days”, Fujimori established a populist delegative

democracy which respond to the deepest needs of his supporters; the need for stability.20

The importance of television as a means of mass communication should not be

underestimated in this era. Firstly, as Conaghan has highlighted, collusion between TV

networks (such as Frecuencia Latina, América Televisión and Panamericana Televisión)

and the Fujimori regime was so strong that most channels served as the direct voice of the

President.21 However, television has been used by other regimes as a means of targeting

the “atomized” masses of illiterate urban migrants in favelas and barrios and, Boas argues,

this method provided huge support for the emergence of the Latin American New Right in

the 1990s.22 The constant recreation of danger through television images and news reports

allows populist regimes to establish their legitimacy by promising security against an ever-

present internal enemy. All forms of mass communication have technological limits,

however, and it is important to remember that TV news bulletins in Spanish would have

been difficult to access or understand for the indigenous population. Similarly, it is much

harder to conduct broadcasts from, or carry recording equipment around, the Andean

19 Martín Tanaka, ‘From Movimientismo to Media Politics: The Changing Boundaries Between Society and Politics in Fujimori’s Peru’ in John Crabtree and Jim Thomas (eds.), Fujimori’s Peru: The Political Economy (London, 1998), pp.229-64 (p.235). 20 John Crabtree, ‘Neo-Populism and the Fujimori Phenomenon’ in John Crabtree and Jim Thomas (eds.), Fujimori’s Peru: The Political

Economy (London, 1998), pp.7-23 (p.7). 21 Catherine M. Conaghan, ‘Cashing in on Authoritarianism: Media Collusion in Fujimori’s Peru’, The Harvard International Journal of

Press / Politics, 7 (2002), pp.115-25 (p.118). 22 Taylor C. Boas, ‘Television and Neopopulism in Latin America: Media Effects in Brazil and Peru’, Latin American Research Review, 40:2 (2005), pp.27-49 (p.32).

13

interior, so there is pre-existing technological bias towards the urban coast to consider with

this medium at all times.

Similarly, newspapers had an important impact on public opinion in this period. Peru’s

prensa chicha (tabloid press) also had corrupt links to the Fujimori government as

publications including El Tío, El Chino and La Chuchi rendered payments related to the

scale and content of their coverage.23 Their sensationalist tone, however, has also been

shared at times by more respectable titles (El Comercio, Diario Correo) showing that

hysterical representations of violence are not limited to those papers taking bribes.

Gargurevich argues that the lines between the prensa chicha and broadsheet press were

increasingly blurred in the 1990s as Diario Correo, La República and Expreso became part

of a new, non-chicha, sensationalist press which commanded a large circulation across

broader socioeconomic groups. Because of this, these publications will be more generally

referred to as the prensa sensacionalista from here on in.24

Through these media outlets, a strong message was formed about what was wrong in Peru

and what needed to be done. As Crabtree has highlighted, Alan García’s APRA party were

blamed for failing to deal with Sendero and leading the country into greater debt, but in a

more general sense the party’s own history of violence and socialist rhetoric was presented

as a precursor and inspiration to the Shining Path.25 Central to this message were

representations of which types of violence were legitimate: on the one hand Sendero

violence was presented as illegitimate, barbaric, and a threat to social stability; on the

other, state repression was portrayed as legitimate, valiant and necessary for the stability of

the nation. The idea of legitimate violence is especially important because, Tanaka argues,

the key goal of Fujimori’s regime was to ensure national and macroeconomic security, so

23 Conaghan, ‘Cashing in on Authoritarianism’, p.118. 24 Juan Gargurevich Regal, La prensa sensacionalista en el Perú (Lima, 2000), p.232. 25 Crabtree, ‘Neo-Populism and the Fujimori Phenomenon’, p.17.

14

violence must appear as the means to an end.26 In this way, despite being often described

as an autocratic President, Fujimori was able to legitimise his rule and command a high

enough level of support to win the 1995 election convincingly. As Žižek has argued,

tyranny does not always come through authoritarianism, but through democracy as well.27

1.1 Methods of Violence

First, it is important to consider the differences and similarities between the ways in which

violence was carried out by the state and by Sendero. Amnesty International’s

investigation into violence carried out by the Fujimori regime concluded that rural

communities were judged to be collectively responsible for the continued actions of the

Shining Path, and that mass reprisals were carried out under the justification that they were

an “inevitable consequence of counter-insurgency operations”.28 However, in TV

programmes such as Laura en América with Laura Bozzo (later found out to be on the

intelligence services’ payroll), soldiers and policemen were revered and treated as heroes.29

It has also been argued by Montoya that although the CVR attributed 54% of deaths in the

conflict to Sendero, further investigation into disappeared persons who were not included

in the report may position the military and associated paramilitary forces as the primary

perpetrators of violence during the war.30

Further Amnesty reports highlight disappearances and executions carried out by the rondas

campesinas; peasant militias who were themselves coerced into action at pain of

26 Tanaka, ‘From Movimientismo to Media Politics’, p.239. 27 Žižek, Violence, p.24. 28 Amnesty International, ‘Conspiracy of Terror: Political killings and "disappearances" in the 1990s’, 19 October 1993

<http://www.amnesty.org/pt-br/library/asset/ACT33/035/1993/en/58879de8-f8fd-11dd-92e7-c59f81373cf2/act330351993en.pdf> [Accessed 18 August 2013] (p.5). 29 William P. Mitchell, Voices from the Global Margin: Confronting Poverty and Inventing New Lives in the Andes (Austin, 2006),

p.200. 30 Montoya Rojas, ‘Power, Culture and Violence in the Andes’, p.19.

15

reprisals.31 However, this is rarely reflected in the television coverage which shows the

rondas as voluntarily-arming, self-defence groups working as part of a co-ordinated

counterterrorism operation with the military.32 In this sense, indigenous communities were

presented as being protected by, or co-operating with, the military whilst facing constant

attacks and reprisals from both sides.

Sendero, on the other hand, present a strong test to Tilly’s argument that it is an “error to

assume that a class of people called terrorists, motivated by ideological extremism,

perform most acts of terror”.33 Senderistas, McClintock describes, went through rigorous

ideological training to believe in Peru’s class war and the necessity of blood to bring about

political change.34 Not only does the CVR describe Sendero as “el principal perpetrador de

crímenes y violaciones de los derechos humanos”, but Guzmán himself argued that “blood

does not drown the revolution, but irrigates it”.35

However, Sendero were a far more disparate group than has often been argued. As Tilly

has argued, Sendero violence was largely opportunistic or tactical rather than ritualistic,

and had clearer tactical goals when compared with the blanket reprisals carried out by the

state.36 La Serna has corroborated this point by highlighting how Andean communities

took advantage of the breakdown of order to fight their own local rivalries.37 Furthermore,

Rénique has demonstrated the possibility that the conflict did not claim so many lives

31 Amnesty International, ‘Ten Settlers Massacred by Civil Defence Patrol’, 10 November 1993

<http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR46/038/1993/en/5ef8058c-ec34-11dd-8d9d-a7825928c0bf/amr460381993en.pdf>

[Accessed 19 June 2013] (p.3). 32 ‘Peru - Threatened Culture’, Peru TV, 28 April 1995. 33 Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, p.237. 34 McClintock, ‘Why Peasants Rebel’, p.51. 35 “PCP-SL was the principal perpetrator of crimes and violations of human rights” – CVR, Informe Final, para. no. 13; Central

Committee of the Communist Party of Peru, May Directive to Metropolitan Lima (Lima, 1991) <http://www.blythe.org/peru-

pcp/docs_en/dire.htm> [Accessed 12 August 2013]. 36 Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, p.221. 37 La Serna, ‘To Cross the River of Blood’, p.135.

16

because of Sendero’s innate violence, but because of a series of retaliations by the state and

the guerrillas which eventually spiralled out of control.38

The CVR concluded that “existió una notoria relación entre situación de pobreza y

exclusión social, y probabilidad de ser víctima de la violencia” in violence carried out by

both sides, whilst Boesten has highlighted the widespread rape and murder of women by

the state and Sendero.39 Overall, the way that Sendero violence was carried out was not

overwhelmingly different from state violence, with mass killings, brutal executions and

reprisals carried out by both sides. However, the complexities of both types of violence

were flattened and polarised in the media to show state violence as valiant and Sendero

violence as cruel and ideological. By understanding this, we can now examine the ways in

which these types of violence were represented differently, and how that was used as a

political tool.

1.2 Fujishock and the Crackdown on Sendero

In July 1991, Fujimori enforced 126 Presidential decrees to reorganise the military,

establish emergency powers and introduce an economic package of deregulation and

austerity. A nationwide state of emergency was introduced under the pretext of cracking

down further on the guerrillas, after members of trade unions, student societies and peasant

groups were all systematically harassed by security forces in the days prior.40 As part of the

“decrees bomb”, there was a law which stated that any Peruvian who was critical of the

38 Gerardo Rénique, ‘“People’s War”, “Dirty War”: Cold War Legacy and the End of History in Peru’ in Greg Grandin and Gilbert M.

Joseph (eds.), A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham,

2010), pp.309-337 (p.324). 39 “There was a significant relationship between poverty and social exclusion and the probability of becoming a victim of violence”,

CVR, Informe Final, para. no. 4; Jelke Boesten, ‘Analyzing Rape Regimes at the Interface of War and Peace in Peru’, The International

Journal of Transnational Justice, 4 (2010), pp.110-29 (p.128). 40 Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms (London, 1997), p.206.

17

military’s new powers or counter-insurgency programme would be deemed a traitor.41

These movements, along with the 1992 autogolpe, are described by Burt as foundational

moments of violence which rebuilt Peru’s political landscape and suppressed opposition to

economic reforms.42

Later in the 1990s, as more and more senderistas were imprisoned and urban

unemployment began to rise again, it became harder to justify such authoritarian rule. The

civil unrest which Fumerton highlights prior to the 2000 Presidential elections indicates

that fears of Sendero violence had begun to recede and could no longer legitimate the

Fujimori regime.43 From this, it is clear that the crackdown on Sendero made Fujimori’s

rule possible and that a strong foundational myth was needed to legitimise his continued

power. The myth, that Fujimori alone had pacified Sendero, was convincingly put together

and reiterated in mass media to the point, Carrión argues, that it both legitimised the

Fujimori administration and shielded it from criticism for other areas of policy.44

Specifically, this myth was utilised to exclude opponents politically and push through the

neoliberal economic reforms (including deregulation, public expenditure cuts and price

stabilisation) which, Chossudovsky argues, “went far beyond what was normally expected

of an indebted country”.45

For example, one report on the surrender of 61 guerrillas at Tarapoto alternates images of

the senderistas handing over their weapons with shots of Fujimori sternly watching the

41 Sarah Barrow, ‘Political Violence, Cinematic Representation and Peruvian National Identity: La Boca del Lobo (Francisco Lombardi,

1988) and La Vida es una Sola (Marianne Eyde, 1993)’ in Will Fowler and Paul Lambert (eds.), Political Violence and the Construction of National Identity in Latin America (Basingstoke, 2006), pp.131-48 (p.144). 42 Jo-Marie Burt, Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society (Basingstoke, 2010), p.169. 43 Mario Fumerton, From Victims To Heroes: Peasant Counter-Rebellion and Civil War In Ayacucho, Peru, 1980-2000 (Amsterdam, 2002), p.279. 44 Julio F. Carrión, ‘Public Opinion, Market Reforms and Democracy in Fujimori’s Peru’ in Daniel Castro (ed.), Revolution and

Revolutionaries: Guerilla Movements in Latin America (Wilmington, 1999), pp.126-49 (p.133). 45 Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, p.216.

18

proceedings and shaking hands with soldiers.46 In a report on Fujimori’s 1994 visit to

Argentina, he declares that the Shining Path will be completely finished before he leaves

office.47 Even in reports looking back on the autogolpe, the primary images are on the

damage caused by Sendero car bombs and the hero’s reception Fujimori receives from his

supporters.48 When Guzmán was captured, the President made sure he announced the

capture, whilst other footage focused on images of senderista prisoners, bombed out cars

and dead bodies in a message which emphasised the government’s successes but also

reinforced the persistent threat of violence.49 El Comercio declared that the capture was

“un tremendo éxito que no se le puede negar a la administración del president Fujimori”.50

All of these images were repeated again during the run up to the 1995 Presidential

elections when reports showed the captured Guzmán, fire in the streets of Lima and

Fujimori personally painting over hammer and sickle graffiti.51 In this respect, Peruvians

were not allowed to forget what Fujimori had done for them, nor would they forget the

threat of terrorism which was recreated for them daily in the mass media.

Whenever members of the Shining Path were captured, the government took full advantage

by parading them in front of the media. Margie Clavo Peralta (a.k.a. Comrade Nancy) and

Boris Taipo Castillo were just two of many senderistas to be paraded in front of the media,

hysterically shouting Marxist slogans whilst cuffed and dressed in prisoners’ pyjamas.52

Perhaps most famously, the captured Abimael Guzmán was kept in a cage as he was

revealed to reporters. By allowing Guzmán to march around, dishevelled but continually

46 ‘Peru: President Alberto Fujimori Presides Over the Surrender of Shining Path Guerrillas’, Visnews, 19 November 1992. 47 ‘Argentina: Alberto Fujimori Visit’, APTV, 19 December 1994. 48 ‘Peru: Fujimori’, APTV, 1 May 1992. 49 ‘Peru: President Fujimori Determined to Eradicate Terrorism’, APTV, 23 August 1996. 50 “A tremendous success you can’t deny the Fujimori government”, ‘Califican de gran paso para la pacificación del país’, El Comercio,

13 September 1992, quoted in Victor Peralta Ruiz, Sendero Luminoso y la Prensa, 1980-1994: La violencia política peruana y su representación en los medios (Cuzco, 2000), p.230. 51 ‘Peru: Fujimori Seeks Another Five Years’, WTN, 10 April 1995. 52 ‘Peru: Captured Shining Path Leader Paraded In Front of Media’, APTV, 29 March 1995.

19

railing against the government, he was presented as an animal capable of great physical

danger, but who was now visibly captured and pacified. Not only do these images

dehumanise the captured guerrillas, they both reinforce their potential for danger and

present state of harmlessness, thanks to the effort of the military and government.

Images of the captured Guzmán are particularly powerful because of the way in which

Sendero were written about before his capture. For example, Strong described Guzmán as

the “expert strategist…he measures the excess of a massacre with the precision of a

geometrist”.53 Gustavo Gorriti, a journalist who was kidnapped by the Fujimori

government for his criticism of military abuses, described Sendero’s “arbitrary homicidal

emotion” and argued that Guzmán saw the excesses of Stalinism as the “pinnacle of

humankind”.54 By caging Guzmán and showing the images on TV however, often

interwoven with footage of Fujimori’s 1990 election victory, the government were able to

emphasise the former’s helplessness and the latter’s success.55

Perhaps the most common accusation levelled at the Shining Path was that they were the

world’s first narcoterrorists. Research into Sendero’s drug-links has largely been

conducted by US intelligence agencies who highlighted how a 10% tax was excised on all

coca paste by the guerrillas and that drug cartels co-operated with senderistas to provide

each other with transport, arms and protection from law enforcement.56 Reports showed

huge piles of cocaine being thrown onto the fire together with footage of uncovered

guerrilla arsenals, thus establishing the link between drugs and terrorism.57 Others reports

introduced drugs into the background more surreptitiously, alternated with images of

53 Simon Strong, The Shining Path: The World’s Deadliest Revolutionary Force (London, 1992), p.45. 54 Gustavo Gorriti Ellenbogen, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru (London, 1999), p.103. 55 ‘Peru: Captured Shining Path Leader Paraded In Front of Media’, APTV, 29 March 1995. 56 Library of Congress Federal Research Division, A Global Overview of Narcotics-Funded Terrorist and Other Extremist Groups

(Washington, 2002), p.67. 57 ‘Peru: Lima: Authorities Burn Tons of Drugs’, APTV, 11 April 1995.

20

destruction, dead bodies and crying families, to reinforce the perceived moral degeneracy

of Sendero.58 El Comercio also condemned Sendero’s “inmoral alianza con el

narcotráfico”.59 Cocaine trafficking was used in this way as a major indicator that the

Shining Path were an illegitimate force, with illegitimate means of finance. Later in

Fujimori’s reign, even Presidential candidate Alejandro Toledo was accused of having

links to narco-traffickers as it was such an effective way of discrediting political

opposition.60

However, it is rarely reported that the Shining Path often ousted drug cartels from towns,

imposed a strict moral order by punishing drug users, and protected individual growers

from the harsh conditions imposed on them by traffickers.61 This suggests that Sendero

links to traffickers were highly opportunistic and that the two parties remained distinct, yet

media portrayals were highly successful at combining these two evils into one supergroup

of narcoterrorists. The moral tone of many who condemned the cocaine trade also fails to

convey how cocaine prices were 30% higher than the price of other crops in the 1980s or,

as Mitchell argues, that communities were forced into growing cash crops by national and

global commodity systems.62 The media, however, were only interested in showing

Sendero as cruel drug lord whilst ignoring the economic and social systems which

encouraged Andean communities to revolt.

The media also played a primary role in representing urban residents as the primary

victims of Sendero violence, in stark contrast to the CVR’s conclusion that “la población

58 ‘Peru – Shining Path Guerrillas Kill Six Men’, Canal 4, 27 December 1996. 59 “Immoral alliance with narco-traffickers”, El Comercio, 16th September 1992, quoted in Peralta, Sendero Luminoso y la Prensa, p.233. 60 Conaghan, ‘Cashing in on Authoritarianism’, p.120. 61 Bruce H. Kay, ‘Violent Opportunities: King Coca and the Shining Path’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 41:3

(2008), pp.97-127 (p.103). 62 Mitchell, Voices from the Global Margin, p.204.

21

campesina fue la principal víctima de la violencia”.63 In particular, footage taken after car

bombs or explosions outside government buildings was repeated regularly, whilst the

damage to rural areas was shown rarely if at all.64 By focusing on the violence suffered in

urban areas, which was proportionately far less than that suffered in the sierra, the media

created an automatic justification for policies such as price stabilisation, which was highly

beneficial to urban residents but devastating to rural farmers. Tanaka has argued that this

policy acted as a form of political compensation to the urban coast for the violence they

had suffered during the conflict, but, by unifying the nation in victimhood, this portrayal

forgot the extra burden of violence shouldered by the interior.65 This forgetting is vital

because, by silencing the suffering of indigenous communities during the conflict, the

media negated the need for compensation to be provided for those communities and used

the violence carried out against the interior as a justification for enforcing further economic

inequality against them.

The evidence in this chapter demonstrates that, in the face of violence, the Peruvian

government retained their legitimacy by reinforcing the legitimacy of their own violent

actions. Violence and morality became a central theme, Gargurevich argues, to both the

prensa sensacionalista and TV talk shows which created wild speculation and

exaggeration of Sendero activity.66 Challenging this official version of events, Burt

contends, was considered a subversive challenge to the Fujimori regime.67 In condemning

Sendero violence outright, however, the Fujimori government and the prensa

63 “The peasant population was the principal victim of violence”, CVR, Informe Final, para. no. 5. 64 ‘Peru: Lima: Car Bomb Attack’, Peru TV, 7 February 1992. 65 Tanaka, ‘From Movimientismo to Media Politics’, p.241. 66 Gargurevich, La Prensa Sensacionalista en el Perú, p.270. 67 Jo-Marie Burt ‘Unsettled accounts: Militarization and memory in Postwar Peru’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 32:2 (1998), pp.35-41 (p.35).

22

sensacionalista were performing an ideological action, as Žižek has argued, to make the

structural violence of Peru invisible.68

However, by 1997 Fujimori was increasingly under pressure and losing popular support,

unable to continue justifying his corrupt government. Mass media portrayals of violence

were therefore weakened and insufficient to justify neoliberal rule in the later 1990s, yet

the anti-Sendero discourse returned stronger than ever in the reconciliation era. To

understand this, we will now examine how the portrayals of Sendero violence in the

Fujimori era were developed into coherent, structured narratives in forms of cultural

production.

68 Žižek, Violence, p.174.

23

Chapter 2: Violence in Cultural Production

2.1 Literature

Literary works on the Shining Path provide an interesting counterpoint to mass media

portrayals of violence because it is possible to see a far wider range of narratives

constructed for different purposes. Whilst the first chapter looked at a narrative which

legitimised state actions, cultural representations of violence have been highly critical of

the military and of the Fujimori regime. However, as the majority of these sources are

produced by white, bourgeois, coastal residents, there are very few indigenous voices

involved and the primary concerns are those of the urban middle-class. In particular, these

works reproduce stereotypes of Andean communities as inherently violent, whilst

Sendero’s Maoist ideology and a resurgence of violent pre-Columbian cultures are

presented as explanatory factors for the eruption of violence. As Burton has argued in

relation to Émile Zola’s La débâcle, the stigmatisation of sectors of society in this way can

provide a justification for mass slaughter with a sacrificial logic, as Zola portrayed the

Communards as a degenerative cancer which had to be excised.69 This also raises the

possibility, as Dennis has done, that narratives constructed in literature can lead to further

conflict as negative images of an internal enemy become a powerful catalyst for “overt

political violence”.70

The internal conflict has inspired many literary works in Peru and their authors, Alonso

Cueto, Santiago Roncagliolo and Mario Vargas Llosa included, have received praised for

their realistic interpretations of violence, yet they have also been criticised by the Peruvian

Right for focusing on the military rather than the terrorists. Vargas Llosa in particular has

been criticised by Aldo Mariátegui (grandson of José Carlos Mariátegui) for justifying

69 Richard D.E. Burton, Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945 (London, 2001), p.144. 70 Marisol Dennis, ‘National Identity and Violence: The Case of Colombia’ in Will Fowler and Peter Lambert (eds.), Political Violence and the Construction of National Identity in Latin America (Basingstoke, 2006), pp.91-110 (p.100).

24

terrorism, promoting European (rather than Peruvian) culture, and for being part of the

caviarada (“caviar left” or “champagne socialists”).71 However, Vargas Llosa’s literary

works evoke a suspicion of indigenous communities with themes of Andean violence,

savagery and superstition. Roncagliolo and Cueto, however, conceive of Sendero violence

as only part of the problem, as it is the abuses carried out by the military which come back

to haunt the protagonists of their novels.

The key works for understanding Vargas Llosa’s attitudes towards Sendero are Lituma en

los Andes and Historia de Mayta. In Lituma en los Andes, Corporal Lituma from the

coastal town of Piura is sent to the Andean town of Naccos to investigate the

disappearance of three local men whilst staying on the lookout for senderista attacks. The

novel calls into question the meaning of murder during a civil war and presents several

different forms of violence. For example, Sendero are depicted as cold-blooded killers who

believe in violence as a means and an end; their killings “no tienen explicación racional”.72

Sendero make two key appearances at the very start of Lituma en los Andes when they

stone two French backpackers to death and slaughter all of the vicuñas on an isolated

farm.73 There is no logic, asides from ideology and savagery, behind the killings.

Meanwhile, it transpires that the three men have been communally murdered by the

Naccos community who engage in ritualistic self-defence to protect themselves from

terrucos (terrorists) and pishtacos (a figure from Andean folklore, often a light-skinned

man from outside the region suspected of stealing the body fat of comuneros).74 The

murders committed by the comuneros are presented as irrational and without justification.

71 Aldo Mariátegui, ‘¿Y Sus Monumentos?’, Diario Correo, 15 June 2011. 72 “Have no rational explanation”, Mario Vargas Llosa, Lituma en los Andes (Barcelona, 1993), p.178. 73 Vargas Llosa, Lituma en los Andes, p.14. 74 Vargas Llosa, Lituma en los Andes, p.120.

25

Kokotovic argues that they appear to act out of “savage, prehistoric instinct” which makes

them akin to wild animals.75 To further undermine indigenous culture, Vargas Llosa makes

constant reference to polygamy, head shrinking and animism in ways which, López-Calvo

argues, represent indigenous beliefs as “anachronistic, naïve fictions and dangerous

ideologies”.76 It is possible that Vargas Llosa took his inspiration for this episode from the

deaths of eight journalists at the hands of the Uchuraccay community in 1983. A

commission, headed by Vargas Llosa, determined that the comuneros had mistaken the

journalists for senderistas, destroyed their cameras in the belief they were weapons and

then killed them, although the case has since been re-opened after accusations of a military

cover-up.77 Whilst the truth is remains unclear, it seems likely that these experiences had

made Vargas Llosa suspicious of indigenous culture in which he sees, as Cohn puts it, a

“level of savagery from whence the human race had supposedly long evolved”.78

Vargas Llosa’s perspective on the Andes should, perhaps, not be surprising. Having grown

up between Piura and Magdalena del Mar (a middle-class suburb of Lima), he studied at

Lima’s University of San Marcos and further in Madrid; in short, he represents Peru’s

creole elite.79 Regularly in his novels he juxtaposes images of civilised, ordered and literate

Spanish society against chaotic, oral Quechua culture, which Kokotovic argues is a result

of his belief, articulated before the 1990 Presidential elections, that Peru’s indigenous

cultures were holding the country back from modernisation.80 Cohn believes that Vargas

Llosa therefore sees violence as a product of ancient, chaotic cultures and argues that

“historical cause and effect are short circuited” to blame Peru’s indigenous past for present

75 Misha Kokotovic, The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative; Social Conflict and Transculturation (Eastbourne, 2007), p.185. 76 Ignacio López-Calvo, ‘Going Native: Anti-Indigenism in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Death in the Andes’ in Juande Castro and Nicholas Birns (eds.), Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics (Basingstoke, 2010), pp.103-24 (p.116). 77 ‘Hace 29 años se perpetró la masacre de Uchuraccay’, La República, 26 January 2012. 78 Deborah Cohn, ‘“Regreso a la Barbarie”: Intertextual Paradigms for Peru’s Descent into Chaos in Lituma en los Andes’, Latin American Literary Review, 28:55 (2000), pp.27-45 (p.28). 79 Raymond L. Williams, Vargas Llosa: otra historia de un deicidio (Mexico City, 2001), p.44. 80 Misha Kokotovic, ‘Mario Vargas Llosa Writes Of(f) the Native: Modernity and Cultural Heterogeneity in Peru’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 25:3 (2001), pp.445-67 (p.448).

26

violence.81 However, Vargas Llosa also blames previous Leftist movements for Sendero

violence, and this can be shown through a reading of a reading of Historia de Mayta.

In Mayta, Vargas Llosa merges the past with the present by presenting two timelines (one

leading up to the 1962 insurrection in Jauja and one set amidst the internal conflict in the

1980s) so tightly interwoven that dialogue often switches between the two from sentence

to sentence. This gives the impression that history is repeating itself and that the old Leftist

insurrection in the foquismo tradition is re-emerging as political violence in the 1980s.

However, Vargas Llosa makes light of the poor organisation, doctrinal pedantry and

churlishness of the socialists. One telling scene involves a meeting of the RWP

(Revolutionary Worker’s Party) committee to decide whether they should add a (T) to their

name to separate themselves from the non-Trotskyists in another RWP, before the meeting

is interrupted by the elderly owner of the building and they quickly have to hide their

revolutionary pamphlets.82 Away from the doctrinaire, jaded leaders of the RWP there is

Vallejos; a young and passionate activist who is desperate for revolutionary action.83 These

figures represent the two worst elements of Leftist politics in Vargas Llosa’s mind; the

religious adherence to ideology of the older members, and the young radicals who are

frustrated, angry and out for blood. In the same way that the indigenous population is

depicted as an inherently violent sector of society, Vargas Llosa depicts socialists and

communists as the forces of violence and chaos.

Vargas Llosa has therefore created two narratives in which Peruvian heritage is to blame

for the emergence of violence. His Uchuraccay commission blamed cultural difference and

misunderstanding for the deaths of the journalists, and Kokotovic argues he also blames it

81 Cohn, ‘“Regreso a la Barbarie”’, p.39. 82 Mario Vargas Llosa, Historia de Mayta, (Barcelona, 1984), p.36. 83 Vargas Llosa, Historia de Mayta, p.63.

27

for Peru’s sluggish economy.84 He discredits Leftist opponents to capitalist modernisation

as poorly organised ideologues, but he reveals his distaste for Andean culture when

describes the “ponchos and vests with llamas embroidered on them” amongst the “stink

and scum” of the Lima slums.85 Vargas Llosa’s characterisation of violence, therefore,

highlights contradictions between the universal values he believes are essential for

Peruvian modernity, such as liberty and democracy, and his belief that the destruction of

indigenous culture is necessary for this modernity to occur.

There are also clear themes in literature on the Shining Path which exoticise the Andean

population in a way which portrays them as savage creatures as well as individuals capable

of extreme cold-bloodedness. Nicholas Shakespeare’s The Dancer Upstairs has recreated

the conflict for an English-speaking audience and has been adapted for cinema by John

Malkovich. The novel depicts the real story of the ballerina who helped Guzmán to hide in

Lima by hiding him her upstairs room. Yolanda is from the sierra; she is passionate,

sexually attractive, and a dancer who, supposedly, left the Metropolitan Ballet because she

did not like its prescriptive European style.86 Although human rights abuses by the military

are highlighted in the novel, the lasting impression is of Yolanda’s betrayal of Detective

Rejas (who has fallen in love with her) when he discovers her secret. She won’t accept his

help and only opens her mouth to shout “Viva el Presidente Ezequiel!”.87 Despite living in

Lima and having been taught discipline at the Metropolitan, the irrepressible Indian

eventually erupts from Yolanda and her treachery is exposed, making her an allegory in

herself for the Shining Path.

84 Enrique Mayer, ‘Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa's "Inquest in the Andes" Reexamined’, Cultural Anthropology, 6:4

(1991), pp.466-504 (p.468); Misha Kokotovic, ‘“¡piruanos, carajo!”: Mario Vargas Llosa, Violence, and Modernity’ in Christine Hunefeldt and Misha Kokotovic (eds.), Power, Culture, and Violence in the Andes (Eastbourne, 2009), pp.99-109 (p.105). 85 Vargas Llosa, Historia de Mayta, p.53. 86 Nicholas Shakespeare, The Dancer Upstairs (London, 1995), p.105. 87 Shakespeare, The Dancer Upstairs, p.219.

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In comparison, Alonso Cueto’s La hora azul and Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo are

clear attempts by the authors to redefine the conflict and suggest that the legacy of military

abuses, not revolutionary violence, is the real danger to Peru’s future. In this respect, the

authors are also using memories of Peru’s “latent war” to fight present day political battles;

the similarities between President Humala, himself charged with human rights abuses

during counterinsurgency operations in the 1990s, and Ormache’s father are particularly

noteworthy.88

Protagonist Adrián Ormache is a peaceful and prosperous Limeño lawyer at the beginning

of La hora azul until he learns about the rape, abductions and mass killings committed by

his father’s regiment during the conflict. As a result of these hidden memories and a

resurgent guilt for his father’s actions, Ormache’s family life starts to disintegrate and his

practice begins to suffer. He starts to have outburst of rage and frequent nightmares in

which he feels “free to act on my desire to indulge in wanton violence”.89 These can be

interpreted as the legacy of his father’s violence, but also as a personal burden and guilt for

the prosperity of Ormache’s family, emerging particularly at times when his wife questions

him about dance lessons and preparatory school for their two daughters.90 As Ormache is

continually reminded that the violent crimes of his father laid the foundations for his

wealth, Cueto suggests that the greatest threat to Peru’s future are the unresolved memories

and unpunished perpetrators of military abuses during the conflict. In contrast, indigenous

characters are seen as hard-working and industrious as references are made to bodegas

owned and staffed by indigenous people, as well as the businesses created by Miriam (a

girl from Huanta who both Ormache and his father fallen in love with) and Ormache’s

88 Simon Romero, ‘Past War and Cruelty, Peru’s Writers Bloom’, NY Times, 29 October 2006

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/weekinreview/29romero.html?_r=0> [Accessed 2 August 2013]. 89 Alonso Cueto, The Blue Hour (London, 2005), p.6 90 Cueto, The Blue Hour, p.239

29

servant Justina as a means of alleviating their poverty.91 The key agents of Peru’s

prosperity in this narrative are not the agents of international finance capital and Lima’s

elites, but the industrious indigenous communities who work so that they can eat.

The optimism which builds throughout the novel, and Ormache’s attempt to right his

father’s wrongs, are, however, dashed. Increasingly he gives money to Miriam and her

family as a way of assuaging his guilt but repeatedly refuses their requests for him to find

them a job.92 Eventually after Miriam’s death, Ormache is resigned to forgetting the “affair

with some chola” and tells the readers “It is obvious I will do nothing to rectify this

injustice which is ingrained in our society, there’s nothing I can do. I cannot help them and

I don’t really want to”.93 Therefore, whilst he has temporarily transgressed the boundary

during the novel’s narrative, Ormache’s story highlights how vast cultural and

socioeconomic boundaries have been maintained throughout the process of remembering

the internal armed conflict. Whilst rich Limeños’ lives have temporarily been disturbed by

violence, they soon forget the inequalities which caused it and return to their daily lives.

Abril rojo, however, presents the idea of a permanent, ongoing war waged against the

Peruvian interior by the coast’s political elite. Set during the 2000 Presidential Elections,

the novel follows the attempts of local government and military officials to solve a series

of murders whilst hiding the possibility of a Sendero resurgence from the press (to aid

Fujimori’s chances of re-election). Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar is born, and lives,

in Ayacucho but is not recognised as a local because of his fastidiously bureaucratic

manner and taste for the poetry of Chocano.94 Whilst it is clear that Sendero are still

91 Cueto, The Blue Hour , p.212 92 Cueto, The Blue Hour, p.275 93 Cueto, The Blue Hour, p.310; p.282 94 Santiago Roncagliolo, Red April (London, 2009), p.176.

30

partially active in remote areas such as Yawarmayo, the biggest danger to Chacltana is his

search for the truth which sets him at odds with the military. Lieutenant Aramayo warns

Chacaltana that Lima simply doesn’t want to know what goes on in the Andes, they only

want to hear that everything is safe again.95

Similarly to Ormache, Chacltana emerges as an agent of persecution and violence. Having

courted a local girl called Edith throughout the novel, he then brutally rapes her and talks

about murdering her.96 It is also revealed that Chacltana is keeping all of his late mother’s

possessions in a locked room as a way of suppressing his guilt for having set the fire which

accidentally killed her. In this way, Roncagliolo shares Cueto’s message that there is a

level of hidden guilt and violence built into Peruvian society and, if not ameliorated, it will

only serve to cause further eruptions of violence in the future.

Sendero violence in Abril rojo is portrayed, perhaps most realistically, in a number of

ways. Although Sendero atrocities from the past are described vividly and in horrific

detail, the attacks which occur in the novel’s present are opportunistic, often motivated by

personal revenge rather than by ideology. Chacaltana meets the senderista Hernán

Durango González who tells him he has a “mania for distinguishing between terrorists and

innocents, as if this were heads or tails”.97 This highlights the principal message of Abril

rojo; that violence is not simply about heroes and terrorists and that, for indigenous

communities, a perpetual war is being fought against hunger, poverty, and illiteracy. From

this perspective, Roncagliolo shows that there are terrorists and innocents on both sides of

the conflict, and that death is the only eventuality when people must kill or be killed; by

hunger or by guns.

95 Roncagliolo, Red April, p.102. 96 Roncagliolo, Red April, p.224. 97 Roncagliolo, Red April, p.119.

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2.2 Cinema

Film is another medium which has been used increasingly to recreate the internal conflict

for a national and global audience. Barrow argues that Peruvian cinema was heavily

limited in the 1990s by anti-terror legislation and the need to attract funding, and so instead

of overt criticism of the state, most films embed political statements into traditional

narrative structures through the use of signs and symbolic language.98 These create, Reber

tells us, a “coded aesthetic of political critique”; a common language of symbols and

motifs which has come to the fore in cinema and other modes of cultural production.99

Marianne Eyde’s La vida es una sola went through a long period of censorship and

restriction before it was released in 1993 as it condemns both state and Sendero violence

alike.100 Unlike many of the films and novels about Sendero, La vida places senderistas at

the centre of the narrative and gives them faces and personal identities, immediately

portraying them as complex individuals rather than an invisible enemy. However, the film

also shows senderistas carry out executions and attacks on villages; one particular scene

sees an unmasked guerrilla ignore the pleas of comuneros to spare a man who has been

coerced into helping the military. In this way, Eyde highlights the tragic circumstances

faced by indigenous communities as they suffered attacks from both sides, and has been

praised for granting agency to the indigenous communities who have been “representadas

con mucha frecuencia como meras comparsas en los conflictos socials”.101 Barrow argues

that the film’s key message is to show “the degradation of an ancient way of life by the

forces of modernity” suggesting that tensions between local elites and the urban coast were

98 Sarah Barrow, Peruvian Cinema, National Identity and Political Violence, 1988-2004 (Sheffield, 2007), p.5. 99 Dierdra Reber, ‘Love as Politics: Amores Perros and the Emotional Aesthetics of Neoliberalism’, Journal of Latin American Cultural

Studies, 19:3 (2010), pp.279-98 (p.281). 100 La vida en una sola, dir. by Marianne Eyde (Kusi Films, 1993); Barrow, ‘Political Violence, Cinematic Representation and Peruvian

National Identity’, p.144. 101 “Represented very often as mere extras in social conflicts”, Salvador Velazco, ‘La vida es una sola by Marianne Eyde’, Chasqui, 33:1 (2004), pp.197-99 (p.197).

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a major factor in causing the conflict. 102 As Velazco argues however, La vida’s prime

success is in avoiding stereotypes (prevalent in the prensa sensacionalista) of Sendero as

hysterical, bomb-throwing anarchists and of indigenous communities as helpless and

without the ability to defend themselves.103

Lombardi’s 1996 release Bajo la piel, however, takes on a different narrative.104 Here, as

with Lituma en los Andes, violence is interpreted as a legacy of Peru’s ancient past and as a

release of tension created by the clash of old cultures with the new. Human sacrifice and

suicide are key motifs in this context as they represent a violence which is both self-

destructive and necessary for the maintenance of stability. Both of these are represented by

the character Catalino Pinto who is arrested for decapitating and gouging out the eyes of

several victims with a tumi (a ceremonial sacrificial axe used by Inca and pre-Inca

cultures) before killing himself in custody. Pinto has detailed knowledge of Incan sacrifice

rituals and through him, as Barrow argues, sacrifice and blood-letting are portrayed as

necessary elements to the maintenance of social order, particularly through ethnic

cleansing.105 By constructing a symbolic narrative of cultural violence, and showing

repressive counterviolence as essentially necessary, Lombardi seems to accept that cultural

violence is a natural, almost mystical, part of Peruvian society, without dissecting its

manmade causes. In his study of Amores perros, Sánchez-Prado describes the Mexican

film’s “profoundly erroneous” portrayal of Latin American violence which illuminates

exoticised fears of indigenous culture.106 Violence is unleashed only as a consequence of

individual actions rather than social causes and is blamed for disintegrating national unity

and citizenship; a citizenship increasingly defined by the cultural and economic power of

102 Barrow, ‘Political Violence, Cinematic Representation and Peruvian National Identity’, p.174. 103 Velazco, ‘La vida es una sola by Marianne Eyde’, p.198. 104 Bajo la piel, dir. by Francisco Lombardi (Inca Films S.A., 1996). 105 Barrow, Peruvian Cinema, National Identity and Political Violence, p.216. 106 Ignacio M. Sánchez-Prado, ‘Amores Perros: Exotic Violence and Neoliberal Fear’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 15:1 (2006), pp.39-57 (p.51).

33

the urban middle-class.107 Bajo la piel can be seen in the same way; as a moralistic

narrative which establishes violent agents as enemies of modernity and civilisation.

Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada, winner of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film

Festival in 2009, portrays the intense pain inflicted on indigenous communities during the

war.108 It tells story of a woman, Fausta, who suffers from a disease called the “milk of

sorrow”, transmitted by the breast milk of women who were raped or abused during the

conflict. Not only does it highlight the heavy burden shared by women who were abused

by the military and by senderistas, it also illuminates the ethno-social boundaries which

Boesten argues shaped the rape regimes of the conflict.109 This is most prominently shown

by the Limeño doctor’s refusal to believe that the milk of sorrow exists because the

widespread rape of communities primarily took place in the interior. The film is also

notable for its long silences, often punctuated by lamenting songs in Quechua sung by

Fausta and her dying mother. La teta has received a huge reception and critical praise in

Peru and internationally, and approximately 2.44m Peruvians tuned in to watch the 2010

Oscars ceremony in which the film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.110 By

bringing the tragedies of the conflict to such a wide audience, and by juxtaposing the

scenes of Fausta’s isolation with everyday events, such as a village wedding, La teta’s

success has been interpreted as an optimistic sign for post-war Peru’s healing and

reconciliation.111 The key to Llosa’s narrative, however, is the milk of sorrow’s ability to

pass from generation to generation. The systematic rape carried out by both sides in the

conflict is still barely talked about in Peru today, and Llosa’s interpretation is that it cannot

107 Sánchez-Prado, ‘Amores Perros’, p.40. 108 La teta asustada, dir. by Claudia Llosa (Oberón Cinematográfica, 2009). 109 Boesten, ‘Analyzing Rape Regimes at the Interface of War and Peace in Peru’, p.117. 110 ‘Los 10 momentos más sintonizados en la TV peruana de los últimos años’, El Comercio, 4 March 2012. 111 John Frosch, ‘Film Review: The Milk of Sorrow’, Film Journal International (2010)

<http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/reviews/specialty-releases/e3i9b820010dbb05bb5fab847341221af19> [Accessed 9 August 2013].

34

be consigned to history, because if left undiagnosed the ethnic boundaries which made

violence permissible during the war will continue to tear Peru apart from the inside.

Finally, Rocío Lladó’s Vidas paralelas presents a completely different view of the war.112

Here, in a film which has proved popular in Peru and internationally, the abuses of the

military are completely obscured by circumstances which leave Felipe, an officer in the

army, imprisoned for a murder he has not committed. Vidas paralelas draws on Zola’s La

débâcle by putting two members of the same family (Felipe and his twin brother Sixto) on

either side of the conflict. In Zola’s tale, the soldier has to kill the revolutionary as part of a

process of societal bloodletting, to purify France of the degenerate Communards who

freely mix red wine with red politics.113 Lladó uses the same narrative to condemn Sendero

for turning brothers against each other, as well as to attack Peru’s political elite who cannot

capture Sixto and falsely imprison Felipe. Milton calls the film a “quasi-denialist rewriting

of the war years” which tries to counteract the international reception of La teta

asustada.114 Senderistas are characterised as depraved, hedonistic sex addicts whilst the

military are represented as heroes. The memories of indigenous communities here are

completely silenced in this one-sided narrative which lays all of the blame for violence at

Sendero’s door. Sánchez-Prado argues cinema has the capacity to reflect the imaginary of

the urban middle classes and “invent myths about marginalised sectors as a means of

conveying their fears”, and it is these fears and insecurities which come to the fore in Vidas

paralelas.115

112 Vidas paralelas, dir. by Rocío Lladó (Universidad Alas Peruanas, 2008). 113 Burton, Blood in the City, p.141. 114 Cynthia Milton, ‘Parallel Lies? Peru’s Cultural Memory Battles Go International’, E-misférica, 7:2 (2008)

<http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-72/milton> [Accessed 14 July 2013]. 115 Sánchez-Prado, ‘Amores perros’, p.39.

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2.3 Constructing Violent Narratives

This chapter has primarily focused on cinematic and literary representations of violence as

these media have recreated the conflict for a large national and international audience.

There are, of course, many other ways in which violence has become a central theme in

cultural production for different purposes. Ritter, for example, has highlighted how Andean

protest songs have had a longer history of articulating comunero demands and concerns, as

well as local rivalries and friendships, and thus place Sendero in a lineage of conflict

between the interior and the state going back decades, if not centuries.116 Songs like ‘Flor

de Retama’ articulated regional activism as a response to previous suppression, such as the

military massacre of a student protest in Huanta in 1969, and thus produce a narrative in

which it is essential for their voices to be heard to prevent further violence in the future.117

These songs, however, are almost exclusively produced and consumed by indigenous

communities at carnivals and festivals, and so while it is a useful counterpoint to other

forms of cultural production, it is not a voice which is strongly heard in urban areas or

across the country as a whole.

The Yuyanapaq (Quechua for “to remember”) photographic exhibition, however, has

reproduced images of the violence for the urban population with an authenticity, Poole

argues, that novels or films cannot possess.118 Opened by the CVR in 2005, the collection

included over 200 images of the victims of violence, destruction caused by senderistas and

military attacks, captured guerrillas and of the rondas campesinas. It would be tempting to

say that the exhibition offers the most direct representation of violence, but photographs

cannot be treated as a replacement for sight or as mere nuggets of historical reality. That

116 Jonathan Ritter, ‘Siren Songs: Ritual and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 11:1 (2002), pp.9-42 (p.38). 117 Ritter, ‘Siren Songs’, p.21. 118 Deborah Poole and Isaías Rojas Pérez, ‘Memories of Reconciliation: Photography and Memory in Postwar Peru’, E-misférica, 7:2 (2008) <http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-72/poolerojas> [Accessed 17 July 2013].

36

which remains outside of the lens remains silenced, and what is captured is often

constructed into a linear narrative for the purposes of exhibition. As Poole has also

highlighted, the captions which accompany each photo create their own story, at some

times presenting the Peruvian Left as the “antecedent to violence”, at other constructing a

“moral story of violence and the wounded nation”.119

In film, song, photography, literature and every other representation of the conflict,

narratives are constructed to make sense of events and the depiction of where violence

originated from is central to the source’s meaning. This chapter has highlighted a multitude

of narratives which interpret violence in conflicting ways, but many key themes, such as

the culpability of the Peruvian Left, innate Andean violence and the destructive force

which state violence will have on Peru’s future, have been repeated and reproduced. Many

of these themes are consistent in the sensationalist media and in forms of cultural

production, illustrating that audiences in the barrios of Lima and suburbs of Magdalena del

Mar are being exposed to the same myths and narratives about Sendero violence. Because

of this exposure, the crisis narrative of the Fujimori era has persisted beyond his rule and

has become idiosyncratic within the way Peruvians talk about reconciliation, the

socioeconomic structure of the country and the prevention of political violence in the

future.

119 Poole and Rojas, ‘Memories of Reconciliation’.

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Chapter 3: Memory Projects and the Politics of Forgetting

In the same way that a number of narratives have been created to explain the emergence of

the Shining Path, there a number of different memory projects which have emerged from

the truth and reconciliation process in Peru. The state and Movadef have supported the idea

of an amnesty for military personnel and those accused of terrorism respectively, in

contrast to the CVR who see the process of remembering and talking about the past as a

healing process in itself. Milton supports this idea by using the concept of memory

“knots”; a lingering memory of the war which can be slowly overcome, but only through a

collective process of talking and remembering.120

As Drinot illustrates, there are two predominant interpretations of Sendero violence which

have prevailed in the Reconciliation era. The first suggests that had the Shining Path not

“initiated” the armed struggle in 1980 then no violence would have occurred, that

repressive state violence is therefore legitimate because it is defensive action against

criminals and terrorists, and that no-one associated with Sendero should be memorialised,

nor their families paid compensation. The second interpretation does not justify terrorism

but inserts the censure of senderista violence within a broader censure of the society that

produces that violence.121 This perspective suggests that all who died in the conflict should

be remembered and that tackling the inequalities which precipitated violence is the best

way to prevent violence reoccurring in the future. Whilst the CVR’s Informe Final has

expressed conclusions which are similar to or in agreement with the second interpretation

of violence, the first interpretation of violence has by no means been abandoned. This has

prompted Milton to argue that reconciliation in Peru is progressing in fits and starts, as a

120 Cynthia Milton, ‘Defacing Memory: (Un)tying Peru’s Memory Knots’, Memory Studies, 4:2 (2011), pp.190-205 (p.194). 121Paulo Drinot, ‘For Whom the Eye Cries: Memory, Monumentality, and the Ontologies of Violence in Peru’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 18:1 (2009), pp.15-32 (p.26).

38

struggle continues between those who encouraging remembrance and those who want to

silence the past forever.122

However, these memory struggles are about more than simply how to remember the war.

In the act of being remembered, or compensated for the pain they suffered in the conflict,

there is the potential for indigenous communities to achieve rights and recognition they

have never before been afforded by Peruvian society. By having their names inscribed on

El Ojo Que Llora, Drinot has argued that many became “actually existing Peruvians” for

the first time, yet there are plenty in Peru fighting hard to negate the tragedies which

affected the peasant population during the conflict, and who continue to deny rights to

those who suffered most.123 Optimism over Peru’s post-Fujimori governments has been

tempered though a series of export-led, market-based economic policies which, Ewig

demonstrates, have entrenched existing class and racial inequalities.124 Even President

Humala, voted in as part of a Leftist-nationalist coalition, has since installed a conservative

cabinet and moderated his socioeconomic policies to appeal to broad range of moderate

voters.125 Because of this, remembering the pain suffered by the poorest socioeconomic

groups in the conflict is more important than ever.

3.1 Truth and Reconciliation

First of all, it is necessary to consider the progress that has occurred in bringing justice to

Peru since 2000. Alberto Fujimori has fallen from power and is now serving a 25-year

prison sentence; the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación produced its Informe Final in

122 Milton, ‘Defacing Memory’, p.194. 123 Drinot, ‘For Whom the Eye Cries’, p.18. 124 Christina Ewig, Second Wave Neoliberalism: Gender, Race, and Health Sector Reform in Peru (Pennsylvania, 2010), p.200. 125 Coletta Youngers and Jo-Marie Burt, ‘Peru: What’s Next for Humala?’, Foreign Policy in Focus, 17 June 2011 (2011) <http://fpif.org/peru_whats_next_for_humala/> [Accessed 20 August 2013].

39

2003 and all major Sendero leaders have now been captured and imprisoned.126 Insofar as

the goals of a truth and reconciliation process should be to assign accountability for

violence, allow alternative accounts to be heard and recommend compensation for

families, the Informe Final appears to be a successful document. The CVR attributed

blame for deaths in the conflict fairly evenly between Sendero and the state, highlighted

the ethno-social dimensions of the conflict and have provided a range of recommendations

for compensation and to prevent future violence.127

However, the CVR’s website also states that “un país que olvida su historia está condenado

a repetirla” and on this level those successes are very limited.128 For example, many

compensation payments for families, which would have been a minimum recognition of

their rights, are yet to be paid.129 So are infrastructural development grants, designed to

relieve some of the structural inequalities which affected many victims of violence through

the provision of specialised health care and education.130 Perhaps most problematic of all

are the constraints that were in place on the CVR itself; Milton highlights that the

Commission was given very little time to extend its investigations and, that there remained

strong linguistic barriers between the commissioners and the victims giving evidence.131

Whilst the truth and reconciliation process in Peru has allowed for the emergence of some

alternative versions of the conflict, it is difficult to argue, as Stern has in relation to Chile,

that dissident memory makers are now the new voices of society.132

Following the conclusions and recommendations of the CVR are central to its memory

project as they remember and reinforce the structural inequalities which caused the

126‘Peru Shining Path leader Comrade Artemio Captured’, BBC, 13 February 2012 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-

17005739> [Accessed 19 August 2013]. 127 CVR, Informe Final, para. no. 167. 128 “A country which forgets its history is condemned to repeat it”, CVR, Informe Final, < http://www.cverdad.org.pe/pagina01.php>

[Accessed 7 August 2013]. 129 ‘Victims of Peru’s Internal Conflict Still Await Reparations’, International Center for Transitional Justice, 26 June 2013

<http://ictj.org/news/victims-peru-civil-war-still-await-reparations> [Accessed 1 August 2013]. 130 Drinot, ‘For Whom the Eye Cries’, p.16. 131 Cynthia Milton, ‘Public Spaces for the Discussion of Peru’s Recent Past’, Antípoda, 5 (2007), pp.143-68 (p.149). 132 Steve Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-88 (London, 2006), p.383.

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conflict. Failure to do so has caused Burt to argue that the CVR’s central goals largely

remain unfilled in post-war Peru.133 By ignoring these conclusions, the state has effectively

stuck to a narrative of violence in which it is not culpable for anything and has stalled the

CVR’s attempts to prevent further violence in the future.

3.2 Talking about Terrorism

Many debates on the conflict have focused on the nature of the terrorist, rights abuser or

hero, but the controversy over the El Ojo Que Llora monument raised the question of who

was allowed to be a victim. For commentators like Aldo Mariátegui it is tantamount to

subversion to suggest that prisoners who died during the Castro Castro prison massacre

should be represented on the monument, as the Comisión Interamericana de Derechos

Humanos (CIDH) ruled they must be. When it was revealed that those awaiting trial at

Castro Castro were memorialised on the monument, Expreso infamously claimed “Existe

un monumento a terroristas!”.134

The sculptor, Lika Mutal, has since stated that it was a mistake to include those names on

the monument, as has the Mayor of Jesus María who suggested donating money for further

development of the monument to charity.135 For Mutal to acquiesce in this way suggests

that she has clear and legitimate concerns that the supposed neutrality of the monument

may be exploited by Sendero sympathisers still fighting for amnesties for the guerrillas.

Considering the purpose of the monument and the CVR, however, it should be seen that to

remember is, at times, a subversive act and that by remembering some deaths and not

others the monument will be making a highly ideological statement. Drinot argues that

133 Jo-Marie Burt, ‘Still Waiting’, E-misférica, 7:2 (2008) < http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-72/burt> [Accessed 18

July 2013]. 134“There is a monument to terrorists!”, ‘Existe un monumento a terroristas!’, Expreso, 3 January 2007. 135 Drinot, ‘The Eye That Cries’, p.23.

41

battles over memory between the state and human rights organisations began in the 1990s

with attempts to silence criticism of the state, yet it is clear that the fujimorista impulse to

silence the past remains.136 In this sense, whilst Mutal created El Ojo Que Llora as an

impulse against the myth which saw Fujimori as the state’s saviour, she has also in part

contributed to it by suggesting that senderistas are incapable of being victims of the

conflict.

In talking about the monument, the prensa sensacionalista have tried to re-establish their

narrative events, whilst declaring human rights campaigners to be supporters of terrorism.

In Diario Correo, it was declared that supporters of the monument “no comprenden que la

sociedad peruana vivió una tragedia histórica, en que los terroristas fueron los causantes de

ello”.137 Furthermore, the paper has stated that Sendero were working “en complicidad con

los de la izquierda caviar” as “parte de su estrategia para rescribir la historia del Perú”,

suggesting that human rights organisations and liberal intellectuals are working to

legitimise Sendero’s actions through the reconciliation process.138 Poole and Rojas

highlight this reaction against the monument as part of a “seemingly endless rightwing

chorus” which denounces human rights supports as apologists for terror.139

As Žižek has argued, the press are here taking part in an “ethical illusion” whereby the

recording of state violence is deemed inappropriate, or pro-terrorist, but the fascination

with and constant recreation of revolutionary violence is seen as absolutely necessary.140

As in the 1990s, senderistas are portrayed as inhuman criminals, the sole causes of the

conflict who are undeserving of any sympathy. Fujimori may no longer be President, but

the myth that he was Peru’s salvation from a savage and unstoppable enemy is still

136 Drinot, ‘For Whom the Eye Cries’, p.19. 137 “They don’t understand that Peru lived through a historical tragedy and that terrorists were the cause”, ‘El ojo para llorar’, Diario

Correo, 21 January 2007. 138 “In complicity with the caviar left”, ‘Pago y homenaje a terroristas, nica’, Diario Correo, 7 January 2007; “Part of a strategy to

rewrite the history of Peru”, ‘Los redentores de Sendero Luminoso’, Diario Correo, 8 September 2012. 139 Poole and Rojas, ‘Memories of Reconciliation’. 140 Žižek, Violence, p.38.

42

perpetuated by the prensa sensacionalista who see any challenge to their version of history

as subversion.

In contrast, policeman and soldiers from the conflict are still portrayed as heroes by the

sensationalist press and by the state. Correo regularly praised the “Muchos valientes

soldados del Ejército, marinos, aviadores y policies” fighting the “los traidores terroristas

Sendero Luminoso”.141 The military have been declared the “new heroes of the nation” by

Alan García and in 2009 Defense Minister Rafael Rey denounced the CVR, El Ojo Que

Llora and the Yuyanapaq exhibition for not suitably representing the sacrifices of

soldiers.142 This is a clear illustration of the use of memory as a political tool, termed

“memory politics” by Theidon.143 Soldiers are homogenised into masculine heroes and

defenders of the nation whilst their critics are accused of supporting terrorism. By accusing

human rights organisations of persecuting heroic soldiers, Burt argues, Alan García

attempted to silence accusations of human rights abuses during Fujimori’s rule and his first

government (1985-90).144 In this way, opponents of El Ojo Que Llora have employed

strategic notions of legitimate violence to defend the role of the Peruvian state throughout

the conflict and legitimise the actions of the military and police who maintain social order.

3.3 Remembering and Forgetting

Narratives of Sendero violence have also been used to politically exclude or delegitimize

potential political opposition. These arguments, mainly from the prensa sensacionalista,

manage to conflate the two great enemies of the Peruvian Right: senderista guerrillas on

the one hand, and la caviarada, a combination of Leftist intellectuals, human rights

141 “Many valiant soldiers of the army, navy, the pilots and policemen fighting terrorist traitors Sendero Luminoso”, ‘¡Los peruanos estamos perplejos!’, Diario Correo, 2 October 2009. 142 Milton, ‘Public Space for the Discussion of Peru’s Recent Past’, p.161; ‘"Reconozcan a PNP y FF.AA."’, Ojo, 18 December 2009. 143 Kimberley Theidon, Traumatic States: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Ann Arbor, 2002), p.25. 144 Burt, ‘Still Waiting’.

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advocates and APRA politicians, on the other. La caviarada is considered to have double

standards by complaining about military abuses and human rights violations whilst

“siempre benevolentes con la violencia de la izquierda”.145 In this narrative, Peruvian

politics is also placed within the geopolitical climate of South America as columnists raise

fears about Sendero links to FARC and to the “expansión Chavista”.146 In this way, the

prensa sensacionalista creates opposition to reconciliation and social reform by accusing

its supporters of promoting terrorism, illegitimate violence and foreign invasion, all of

which threaten Peru’s hard fought security. Granted, arguments of this kind have not been

successful in preventing García or Humala from winning the Presidency, but neither have

these Presidents implemented the kind of Left wing economic reforms expected from their

party history or election pledges, García instead continuing the process of deregulation and

liberalisation which is “anathema” to APRA supporters.147 The political climate created by

the prensa sensacionalista has ensured that Keiko Fujimori (Alberto’s daughter) remains a

powerful presence in Congress and President Humala has struggled to find the overall and

two thirds majorities he needs to implement economic change or make key

appointments.148 University lecturers, students and journalist who were suspected of

having Leftist sympathies were regularly targeted by the Fujimori government, and the

idea persists in the reconciliation period that Peru’s Left is to blame for the emergence and

persistent threat of Sendero.149 However, as much as Peru’s Left is presented as the internal

enemy, it is the indigenous population which is still considered the greatest threat to Peru’s

national security and economic modernisation.

145 “Always happy with Leftist violence”, Aldo Mariátegui, ‘¡Promperú bote a ese!’, Diario Correo, 25 August 2012. 146 “[Hugo] Chavez’s expansion”, ‘Uribe, no lo hagas’, Diario Correo, 29 June 2008. 147 Drinot, ‘The Meaning of Alan García’, p.179. 148 Youngers and Burt, ‘Peru: What’s Next for Humala?’. 149 ‘Peru: University Professor’s Conviction for Terrorism is Quashed’, APTV, 18 October 1997.

44

This was most clearly demonstrated in 2006 when President García declared that

indigenous communities were acting as “el perro del hortelano” (“the dog in the manger”)

in reference to a fable of Greek origin in which a dog prevents access to grain for others

but does not eat any himself.150 García was making reference to Peru’s natural resources,

particularly Amazonian oil, which he wanted to exploit for economic gain, but by using the

fable he represented indigenous communities as backwards, selfish, and as barriers to

Peru’s prosperity. He also denounced anti-capitalist environmentalist, who he presents as

naïve and subversive, but Bebbington shows a more forceful attack is made on the

“retrograde primitivism” of indigenous communities who are described as “natives”

instead of Peruvians, thus excluding them from García’s vision of the modern Peruvian

nation.151 Similarly, when a road project in the Cusco region was delayed because of local

fears that the projects would destroy ancient terraces, indigenous communities were

accused of naïve conservationalism and interfering to improve their own tourism revenues.

152 The main objective of García’s article, however, was to use indigenous communities as

a scapegoat, as Fujimori had previously done, through which he could delegitimize all

opposition to Amazonian oil extraction. This has prompted Drinot to argue that García is

using “primitive fear” of backwardness and economic stagnancy to rule against all the

groups who oppose his plans.153 The rhetoric of el perro del hortelano can only work,

however, because of the idea, built upon in mass media and cultural discourses on Sendero

violence, that the Andean interior is ancient, chaotic and violent.

García issued 99 decrees to put land and oil resources in the Peruvian Amazon into the

hands of private developers, but protests by environmentalist and indigenous communities

150 Alan García, ‘El syndrome del perro del hortelano’, El Comercio, 28 October 2007. 151 García, ‘El syndrome del perro del hortelano’; Anthony Bebbington, ‘The New Extraction: Rewriting the Political Ecology of the Andes’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 42:5 (2009), pp.12-40 (p.13). 152 Annabel Pinker, ‘Double-dealing Papers: The Politics of Documentation in a Public Engineering Project in Highland Peru’, Center

for Research on Socio-Cultural Change Lecture Series, University of Manchester, unpublished. 153 Drinot, ‘The Meaning of Alan García’, p.183.

45

resulted in the death of 34 civilians and 32 police officers.154 The government’s response

was to produces echoes of the war by establishing a state of emergency and closing down a

radio station which reported the events.155 Four years on, very little progress has been

made in determining who was responsible for the violence, or in legal proceedings against

the accused.156 This highlights the ways in which, even in the reconciliation period, the

Peruvian state has attempted to evoke and silence memories of the internal conflict

simultaneously. Having performed an about turn to the Right, García has utilised fears of a

communist threat to justify himself and denounce opposition to his resource exportation

plans.157 However, using the same institutional methods that Fujimori did, García is also

trying to silence dissenting account of violence and prevent the truth from emerging. It is

also very possible that by writing so aggressively about Sendero and indigenous

communities, people like Vargas Llosa and García create fear and make further violence

more likely. The conclusions of the CVR seem useless if the Peruvian state does not use

them to prevent violence occurring like it did at Bagua.

However, the truth about events at Bagua and Uchuraccay is threatened by the secrecy of

Peru’s military courts and the threat of Amnesty Laws.158 Amnesty International still hold

deep fears that many families will never learn the truth about the fate of their loved ones if

there is a military amnesty, such as the one President García tried to pass through Congress

in 2008.159 Military tribunals are also a concern for human rights campaigners, as claims

that tribunals did not have the “competence, impartiality, nor independence” to provide

154 Bebbington, ‘The New Extraction’, p.12. 155 Human Rights Watch , ‘Peru: Radio Closure Could Undermine Press Freedom’, 24 June 2009

<http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/24/peru-radio-closure-could-undermine-press-freedom> [Accessed 14 August 2013]. 156 ‘No hallan culpables de ‘Baguazo’, El Chino, 6th June 2013. 157 ‘La Sociedad de Minería y el perro del hortelano’, La República, 4th February 2008. 158 Amnesty International, ‘Army Officer charged with murder of student, Amnesty International fears he will be tried at military

tribunal’, 1st January 1994. 159Amnesty International, ‘Peru: Amnesty bill setback to human rights’, 7th November 2008.

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justice after the La Cantuta massacre in 1992 have been reiterated as recently as last

year.160

From this perspective it is clear to see that the apparatuses of law are applied to different

groups or violent actors in different ways, and that the governmental use of those

apparatuses has been consistent from 1990 to the present. Not only do amnesty laws and

judicial impunity effectively condone objective violence against citizens of the state, they

also form a violent system of denial which decriminalises state violence; as Stern asserts,

they create a “violence of forgetting”.161 Fujimori may be in prison and the CVR may have

been successful in holding many more people to account, but questions remain over the

roles of García and Humala during the conflict and judicial impunity remains a very real

threat to justice for many indigenous communities and families. This brings to mind

Scott’s distinction between the colonial “rule of force” and “rule of law”; just because the

transition from a corrupt, authoritarian government to a democratic government has taken

place, indigenous communities are in many ways no less excluded from political

institutions than they were before.162 Because of this, the Andean interior is still colonised

by Peru’s urban coast, and the continued search for truth for many families shows that the

reconciliation period has not yet undone the great difficulties indigenous communities have

with making claims through the Peruvian state.163

Memories of violence have also been used to exclude Movadef, Sendero’s political arm.

Movadef’s demands for a general amnesty have been treated with nothing short of outrage

and derision by the conservative press since they first tried to achieve legality in 2010.

Mariátegui argues that “estos caviares y rojos no dejan de escupir sobre el resto de los

160 Amnesty International, ‘Peru: La Cantuta case to be heard by military tribunal’, 11th February 1994; Human Rights Watch, ‘Peru:

Open Letter to President Humala’, 20th September 2012 < http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/09/20/peru-letter-presidente-ollanta-humala> [Accessed 19 August 2013]. 161 Stern, Battling for Hearts and Mind, p.382. 162 David Palmer Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’, Social Text, 43 (1995), pp.191-220 (p.192). 163 ‘Destino Uchuraccay, 30 años después’, La República, 29th January 2013.

47

peruanos” whilst another columnist warns “los caviares controlaron el país y convencieron

al Perú que el camino era ser políticamente correcto”.164 El País has also ominously stated

that “el fantasma del terrorismo no termina de irse”.165 As before, Leftist politicians and

senderistas are portrayed as internal enemies of the same cloth. As a result, Movadef has

struggled to find support even among students, and a 2012 poll found that 89% of

respondents thought the party posed a security threat to Peru.166 Interestingly, as with Alan

García before, Movadef could be accused of trying to silence the past through requests for

an amnesty to all convicted. President Humala’s government have strongly rejected this

proposal and have even legislated against it, producing a bill designed to “punish those

who deny the existence of terrorist violence in recent Peruvian history”.167 Similarly,

journalist César Hildebrandt says that Movadef cannot understand politics because its

young members “no tienen memoria vívida de las matanzas de los años ochenta”.168 The

significance in these statements lies in the way that memory, previously a tool of the

dissident to be used against the Peruvian state, is now being used to delegitimize

opposition to the state.

If we consider a statement from El Comercio in 1992, “Sendero Luminoso es una

movimiento inmoral y ahistorico”, we can see that Sendero violence is deemed illegitimate

on moral and ideological grounds (for believing Peru was ripe for a communist

revolution).169 Looking at Humala and Hildebrandt’s statements, Movadef are deemed an

illegitimate political force because they do not buy-in to the official state history of the

conflict in which Sendero were primarily responsible for violence. This corroborates

164 “These caviar socialists and reds will not stop spitting on the rest of Peruvians”, Aldo Mariátegui, ‘Qué horror esto de Movadef...’,

Diario Correo, 11th January 2012; “The caviar Left controls the country and convinces Peru that political correctness is the right path”,

Maria Cecillia Villegas, ‘La caviarada en su laberinto’, Diario Correo, 7 July 2012. 165 “The spectre of terrorism does not stop”, Francisco Peregil, ‘Sendero Luminoso busca participar en la política de Perú sin condenar la

violencia’, El País, 5 December 2012. 166 ‘Gana Perú pide a etudiantes rebelarse frente a grupos terroristas’, El Comercio, 20 November 2012. 167 ‘Peru to punish “negationism”’, MercoPress, 21st August 2012. 168 “Have no memory of the killings in the 1980s” quoted in Peregil, ‘Sendero Luminoso busca participar en la política de Perú sin

condenar la violencia’, El País, 5 December 2012. 169 ‘Destacada labor de la DINCOTE’, El Comercio, 16 September 1992 quoted in Peralta, Sendero Luminoso y la prensa, p.233.

48

Theidon’s conclusion that memory is now “a way of doing politics” in Peru; because ideas

of consensus and healing are so important in the reconciliation period, to challenge the

state’s interpretation of violence is still subversive.170 Han has identified a similar process

in Chile where the Retting Report has promoted “forgiveness” but produced a

reconciliation which is “dissociated from the historic struggles for economic justice”.171 It

has been concluded by the CVR that violence was carried out along uneven ethno-social

boundaries, but because the structural violence of Peruvian society has not been identified

as the primary cause, memories of Sendero will continue to be used to justify further

inequality and political exclusion. In this sense it is necessary to consider Max Weber’s

statement that the state has the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”, as the

state must also control the way violence is represented and talked about to retain its own

legitimacy.172 Although the CVR has made sure there is no monopoly on memory in Peru,

there are clear continues from the 1990 to the present in the way that talking about violence

has been used to justify political projects.

170 Theidon, Traumatic States, p.25 171 Clara Han, ‘Depths of the Present: State Violence and the Neoliberal State’, E-misférica, 7:2 (2008)

<http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-72/han> [Accessed 31 July 2013]. 172 Max Weber, ‘What is Politics?’ in Charles Lemert (ed.), Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (London, 1993), pp.110-41 (p.115).

49

Conclusion

The aim of this thesis has been to demonstrate the ways in which representations of

political violence in Peru have contributed to the legitimacy of neoliberal governance.

O’Donnell has argued that neoliberal rule in Chile and Argentina in the 1990s had its roots

in the previous decades of authoritarianism when a rhetoric of anti-communism and

modernisation were the idée force which legitimised economic restructuring and political

exclusion.173 As part of a broader thesis on Latin America’s New Right, it can be seen that

Peru’s Fujishock and subsequent neoliberal governments have drawn their legitimacy from

a sustained rhetoric of salvation from Peru’s violent Left and indigenous interior. Part of

their ideological programme, as Žižek states, is “to chastise violence outright…a

mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social

violence”.174

The chastisement of Leftist revolutionary violence, student protests and indigenous

movements, in particular, is central to the neoliberal project, particularly in Latin America

where long-standing fears of the racial Other mean that violence is not just represented as a

threat to class hierarchies, but to ethno-social hierarchies as well. The market driven

reforms and authoritarian rule of the Fujimori government are typical elements of

neoliberal governance, but they absolutely depended on the foundational myth which

presented Fujimori as Peru’s saviour. Because Fujimori’s policies would reproduce and

worsen the inequalities which precipitated Sendero violence, it was necessary, as Žižek

puts it, to “falsify clues” about the reasons for and nature of violence. For this, he relied

heavily on the press to present Sendero as barbaric, drug-trafficking ideologues.175

173 Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Tensions in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State’ in David Collier (ed.), The New Authoritarianism in Latin

America (Guildford, 1979), pp.285-318 (p.300). 174 Žižek, Violence, p.174. 175 Žižek, Violence, p.179.

50

These myths and misrepresentations of violence, however, were not limited to the corrupt

and sensationalist tabloid press in the Fujimori era. Cinematic and literary representations

of Sendero built a whole language of signs, a coded aesthetic with which it was possible to

challenge official history but which also made stereotypes of indigenous communities and

Leftist groups more pervasive. These sources show that narratives constructed about

violence are not just lies told by authoritarian regimes to cling to power, but essential tools

used by all groups of society and all forms of government to make sense of their past.

Whilst the sources I examined involved diverse and conflicting representations of violence,

the most consistent narrative is one which explains violence as a re-emergence of

something violent buried in Peru’s past which only cultural or economic modernisation

will expiate.

Finally, in the post-Fujimori era it has shown that these symbols and narratives have fed

into different projects for remembering the conflict, and have shaped legitimate and

illegitimate ways of remembering the conflict. In state rhetoric and in the prensa

sensacionalista the traditional narratives of violence remain strong and, whilst the CVR

has allowed silenced voices to express memories about violence in the Fujimori era, it

remains highly controversial to use memories of the conflict as a way of promoting

political and economic change. When Alan García spoke of el perro del hortelano, or

when Ollanta Humala legislated against non-official accounts of violence, they both

evoked fears of Sendero violence and denied its socioeconomic causes. Without

representing violence as savage, anti-modern and illegitimate, it would be impossible to

legitimise the continuing economic projects which are likely to precipitate further conflict.

In this case, it is vital to recognise the relationship between structural violence, antithetical

revolutionary violence and the representations of violence which delegitimize the latter and

promote the reproduction of the former.

51

There are of course limitations to this thesis. This essay has focused on the way violence

has been recreated through media which are linguistically and technologically suitable for

an urban audience; indigenous experience is, to an extent, automatically silenced. Further

research could focus further on the narratives constructed in Andean song and performative

dance, whilst there is also room to explore whether Latin American states have always

utilised racial and political fear in this way, or if it is a very recent phenomenon. It is

perhaps also a little presumptuous, if not insulting, to talk about memories of violence

when there has been consistent, if minor, Sendero activity in the Apurímac Valley until the

capture of Comrade Artemio in 2012.176 Yet, as the narrative in Abril rojo suggests, this

may be the kind of violence which indigenous communities live with permanently in the

interior. As long as those on the urban coast can talk about pacification and reconciliation,

the true meaning of violence in Peru, and cultural and socioeconomic boundaries which

grow wider each year, may remain invisible to them.

***

176 ‘Peru Shining Path leader Comrade Artemio captured’, BBC.

52

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