the right was white but the other side was still lacking—it’s black even now! But other people who don’t know God, their hearts were totally black. Those who know return with God.”
“So, people are chosen?”
“Yes, and He doesn’t make them go back.”
“So God will judge—He will look into each of us?”
“Yes, and some will be saved.”
“And what about the others—the ones with black hearts?”
“They’re sent back. They’ll be punished in the rain of fire.”
While some would argue that justice deferred is justice denied, I want to complicate that maxim. There were multiple justice systems interacting during the internal armed conflict and its aftermath: those of Shining Path, the armed forces, human rights organizations, the ronderos, communal authorities, and the divine. Each of these actors holds different conceptions of justice and reckoning, of what constitutes the individual and collective good, and which takes precedence when they come in tension. These different understandings of justice reverberate throughout these communities and challenge the supremacy of liberal models of justice and the dichotomy they construct between retributive and restorative forms of justice—while favoring the former.
In complex moral situations, judging may be fraught with challenges. In conditions of sustained political violence and militarized states of emergency, many people will have behaved less admirably than they might have wished. Some will finger a neighbor in hopes of extra food or an end to torture; some will name names to settle old accounts; others may kill under threat of losing their own lives; still others will kill for the sheer pleasure of doing so. Reconstructing a moral community in the context of many bloodied hands calls for exploring these multiple conceptions of justice. For some people and groups, legal justice—criminal justice and punishment—will be the highest priority. For others, this may be what they demand for the leaders they hold responsible for their suffering yet have very different ideas of what should be done with the local-level perpetrators with whom they live. Trials may be demanded, and legally mandated, for the Taylors, Fujimoris, and Miloševićs, and people may want the most brutal local leaders thrown in jail. However, many people are more disturbed by the neighbor down the street or the fellow that smirks at them each week at the market. Justice takes many forms—both in its demands and in its application—and asking, “Who are the victims and whom do they hold responsible for their suffering? Who are the guilty and what should be done with them?” may lead to answers we could not have anticipated.
I was told repeatedly that we cannot see into another human being’s heart, followed by the question, “So who are we to judge?” Some will find solace in leaving that task to God. This does not supplant demands for other forms of justice in this life, particularly redistributive justice, but it may provide a necessary complement to the always imperfect, always deferred ideal of earthly justice. I have been made achingly aware of the limits of secular forms of reckoning in the face of deep moral injuries—for addressing the heridas del alma that sent so many people searching in the Clinic of the Soul.
PART II
Common Sense, Gender, and War
Chapter 5
Speaking of Silences
Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions … concludes.
—Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge
IN ACCOMARCA THEY told us about Eulogia, a young woman who died long before our arrival but who continues to appear in the memories of various women we spoke with. Eulogia was mute and lived during the time when the military base sat on the hill overlooking Accomarca.
The soldiers came down from the base at night, entering the house Eulogia shared with her grandmother. They stood in line to rape her, taking advantage of her inability to verbally express her pain. Her female neighbors told us, with a mixture of compassion and shame, that “We couldn’t do anything. We were afraid they would visit us as well.” So they listened to her at night, along with her grandmother who sat across the room, unable to protect her granddaughter.
Eulogia’s muffled, guttural sounds still resonate in her neighbor’s ears. “We knew by the sounds. We knew what the soldiers were doing, but we couldn’t say a thing.” The soldiers succeeded in depriving everyone of their capacity for speech.
There are two versions of how Eulogia died. Some told us she had fallen, walking down the steep cliffs toward Lloqllepampa. Others insisted she threw herself from those cliffs, unable to bear her pain.
Elaine Scarry has argued that pain and torture seek to “unmake the world” and to rob human beings of their capacity to speak and to make sense—a sense that one can share with other human beings.1 Eulogia could not resort to language: she could not put words to her pain; she could not denounce injustice. She also appears in my memories: it is impossible to erase the image of a young woman screaming with all her might, unable to say a thing.
When people talk about rape, they talk a great deal about silences. What to do with these silences—how to listen to them, how to interpret them, how to determine when they are oppressive and when they may constitute a form of agency—is a subject of much concern and debate.2 Clearly if there is a theme capable of imposing silence, it is rape. Women have many reasons to hide that they have been raped and, with justice a distant horizon, few reasons to speak about a stigmatizing, shameful experience.
My goal is this chapter is not redundancy. We know rape can be a strategy of war, and recent developments in international jurisprudence have recognized this.3 I am averse to presenting graphic details that may resemble a pornography of violence and that may be yet another violation of the women with whom I have worked. Rather, I want to share some of the conversations that my research team and I have had, addressing a series of themes that left a deep impression upon us.
First, I explore the historicity of memory, discussing how certain victim categories become “narrative capital” within the context of a truth commission. Second, I turn to what women talked about and how their narratives are “thick description” in the best anthropological sense of the term. Drawing on their thick descriptions, I examine some assumptions about what constitutes a “gendered perspective” on armed conflict. In doing so, I discuss how women talked with us about rape and the emphasis they placed on how they had attempted to defend themselves and their family members. Third, I examine how women were coerced into “bartering” sex to save their lives and the lives of their loved ones. I then discuss how rape between men and women—and between men—was a form of establishing relations of power and “blood brothers.” I conclude this chapter by considering some of the legacies of the massive sexual violence that characterized Peru’s internal armed conflict, reflecting on the possibility of reparations in the aftermath of great harm.4 But let’s begin with some “common sense.”
Commissioning Truth: A “Gendered Perspective”
One goal of truth commissions is writing new national narratives that are more inclusive of groups that have been historically marginalized within the nation-state. In her discussion of postconflict issues, Martha Minow writes: “The most distinctive element of truth commissions, in comparison with prosecution, is the focus on victims, including forgotten victims in forgotten places.”5 There is hope that democratizing history may exert a positive influence on the future and that truth commissions may be a better format for writing that inclusive history. In contrast to legal proceedings and the aggressive questioning that characterizes them, truth commissions are considered “victim centered” because they include empathic listening rather than an adversarial hermeneutics of suspicion.6
One group frequently included in the forgotten victims category is women. Indeed, the word “victim” conjures up a gendered set of images when the topic is war. However, although allegedly victim friendly, parallel with the rise of truth commissions in