Transitional Justice and Reconciliation through Identification

This section examines Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film La teta asustada in contrast with Paloma de papel (2003, Fabrizio Aguilar). While the latter promotes traditional, paternalistic, and objectifying images of rural indigenous culture, Llosa’s film, which focuses on indigenous immigrants in Lima, assumes a horizontal position with respect to indigenous communities. With over 40% of its dialogue in Quechua, La teta asustada, both through its circumstances of production and its treatment of its subject matter, is unique in that re-locates national culture and redefines the national subject, suggesting that the future of Peru lies greatly in an urban indigenous culture sustained by an inevitable heterogeneity of knowledges and practices. Furthermore, the film demands a new ethical stance on the part of the larger audience, obliging the public to take a position less of a far-away empathizer and more of solidarity.

Sustaining Dominant Narratives

Chapter One examines post-2003 novels by celebrated authors Alonso Cueto, Santiago Roncagliolo, and Ivan Thays. These texts present a lens through which to read the CVR’s Final Report, by teasing out and focusing on its central themes and revealing how a certain sector, namely upper-middle-class, limeño, male intellectuals, process the civil war and its consequences. The novels elucidate postconflict efforts to redefine concepts of sovereignty and citizenship, while reifying dominant understandings of class, race, and ethnicity within national discourse. Even as they construct stories set in the post-war period, with protagonists who must intimately struggle with the vestiges of violence, these novels further a sustained project of symbolic violence that began with the Conquest and that engendered and sustained the war itself.

Conclusion

The conclusion ties together the themes of transitional justice, nation building, and ethnicity by briefly examining three “memory museums”: the Lugar de la Memoria in Lima, and two museums in Ayacucho. The first is a controversial effort by the state to create a national museum to commemorate the conflict. The two museums in Ayacucho are local efforts, the Museo de la Memoria in Huamanga, established by Quechua-speaking mothers of dead and disappeared persons, the Yuyana Wasi museum in the municipality of Huanta. The conclusion asks why, within the context of Peruvian transitional justice efforts, the official, state-sponsored memory space has experienced so many difficulties, its opening delayed for years, while unofficial, even rebellious, grassroots efforts have comparatively succeeded in providing spaces where Peru can confront its difficult past.

Reconciling through other Knowledges

This chapter considers products of the Rescate por la memoria (Rescuing memory) contests in Ayacucho; these post-CVR interventions by Yuyarisun, a collective of Peruvian and international NGOs, invited entries in poetry, painting, illustrated stories, music, and narratives by local inhabitants. The works give an Andean perspective that is present in victims’ testimonies but largely absent in the CVR’s final analysis and recommendations. These ‘different memories’ frequently go against the grain of official discourses on the Shining Path era and the postconflict future of Peru. They are creative responses that defy easy interpretations of events and cookie-cutter resolutions based on ‘universal’ human rights values, while belying dominant visions of a ‘new Peru’ moving forward in a unified manner, having faced and overcome the recent past.

Collaborative Truth-Telling

This section critically examines the work of artist-anthropologist Edilberto Jiménez, his drawings and retablos that portray the horrors experienced in the Ayacucho district of Chungui. By centering analysis of the conflict in the Andes and within an Andean cultural framework, these works challenge the terms of the dominant transitional justice process and highlight the victim-survivors’ stakes in post-conflict labors. They rely on and transmit Andean forms of knowledge and knowledge-creation and contain symbols and references not readily understandable to the non-Andean public, while still attempting to communicate with that public. Challenging dominant concepts of citizenship and belonging, reconciliation and healing, center and periphery, Jiménez privileges an Andean world vision, while acknowledging and strategically deploying certain key Western concepts (democracy, justice, and human rights), with an Andean twist.

Towards a Narrative Pachacutic

This chapter studies Rosa Cuchillo (1997), by indigenous-mestizo writer, Oscar Colchado Lucio. Narrated by three indigenous characters, the novel portrays both the Shining Path’s and the state’s inability to understand indigenous Andean culture, while modeling an Andean-driven truth and reconciliation process. The novel relies almost exclusively on Andean characters who call upon autochthonous discourse, knowledge, and spirituality to create an Andean historical, political and affective archive that contrasts with that created and disseminated through other, official processes. In recounting the past and imagining the future, Rosa Cuchillo becomes a model of “intercultural communication” and “epistemological decolonization” (Quijano), and by channeling the therapeutic processing of the conflict through Andean modes of interpretation, it suggests one outcome could be a cultural, if not political, Pachacutec—an Andean revolution.

Dead Body Politics

This chapter examines the theatrical interventions by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Peru’s premier popular theater collective, at the CVR’s public hearings in Huanta and Huamanga. From an established repertoire on Peruvian cultural heterogeneity, ethnic and gendered violence, and the war, Yuyachkani presented two plays whose protagonists are dead (one indigenous male, one mythic female) and called upon more (indigenous) dead when creating new pieces to accompany the endeavor, suggesting that after years of sustained—real and symbolic—violence, only the dead can embody the national situation, serve as the nation’s memory, and bridge individual and collective trauma. Challenging the therapeutic efforts of the CVR, dead bodies of marginalized subjects, and their ghosts, serve to explore collective and individual trauma, and mediate between the people and the state.

Introduction

The introduction analyzes the activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (CVR), its public fact-gathering tribunals, 2003 final report, and sponsored photography exhibition (Yuyanapaq: Para recordar). Both the thorough final report and internationally acclaimed Yuyanapaq exhibit contain many images of indigenous and mestizo peasants and victims, but ambivalent references to ethnicity, indigeneity, the Quechua language, or Andean values and cultures. Furthermore, there was insufficient effort to involve Andean victims in the process of creating the CVR, determining its focus and procedures, processing the information gathered, or proposing future directions (none of the commissioners were indigenous, and only one spoke Quechua). In the end, the indigenous and mestizo victims are objects of examination rather than empowered actors in the reconciliation efforts. This introductory chapter suggests that creative cultural products may fill in the gaps created by official narratives, challenge the role of Andean cultures in dominant views of the nations, and suggest alternative directions for transitional justice efforts.