are fought. They are also told, and the telling is always steeped in relations of power. As countries emerge from periods of violent conflict and authoritarian rule, reckoning with the past is a volatile endeavor. Memories and countermemories become both a means and an end of political struggle, and our historical époque is characterized by much faith in memory—not its infallibility but rather the work it is alleged to do in deterring future atrocities.7 Part of contemporary memory politics involves transitional justice, a field of postwar inquiry and intervention focused on addressing the legacies of past human rights violations in the hope that doing so will build a more peaceful future.8 Transitional justice may include tribunals, war crimes prosecutions, memorials, reparations, and truth commissions.9
The primary function of a truth or truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) is to collect testimonies from as many individuals as possible—including but not limited to victims, perpetrators, witnesses, political and religious leaders, institutional representatives—to clarify “the truth” of what happened during a specific episode of a country’s history. These temporary bodies focus on the past, investigating patterns of abuses that resulted in the derogation of basic human rights, including acts of violence such as torture, rape, unjust imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances.10
Based on these testimonies, a truth commission publishes an official public record of the past while also offering recommendations to the transitional or successor government. The recommendations may include a wide range of reforms, including moral, symbolic, and economic reparations for victims, institutional reforms, and the transfer of selected cases to the appropriate authorities for further criminal investigation.11
The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) was a two-year process that involved focus groups, in-depth interviews, fourteen Public Audiences, ethnographic research, the review of archives including those compiled by the U.S. State Department, and the collection of almost seventeen thousand testimonies from people throughout the country, many given to the commission’s mobile teams that worked in rural areas.
The PTRC aimed to provide a structural analysis of the conditions that gave rise to the internal armed conflict and to the governmental response, as well as identify responsibility both institutionally and individually for what had occurred. Unlike other truth commissions, Peru’s investigations included the identification of criminal responsibility because the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had annulled Fujimori’s 1995 amnesty laws.12 As a result, the PTRC was able to present state prosecutors with forty-two criminal cases, many of which related to human rights violations that had occurred during the Fujimori administration.
When the commission concluded its work in August 2003, it presented then president Alejandro Toledo with a nine-volume final report. Among the most striking conclusions in the report is the number of fatalities—69,280 deaths, double the number routinely cited by human rights organizations and the government prior to the PTRC.13 During the presentation, Dr. Salomón Lerner, head of the commission, posed a rhetorical question to the crowd gathered in the Government Palace: “We Peruvians used to say, in our worst estimates, that the violence had left thirty-five thousand dead. What does it say about our political community now that we know another thirty-five thousand of our brothers and sisters were missing and we never even noticed they were gone?” I say “rhetorical” because the answer lies in the demographics of those who died. Of the total number of victims reported to the PTRC, 79 percent lived in rural areas and three of every four people killed during the internal armed conflict spoke Quechua or another native language as their mother tongue. The dead were people who—in the national imaginary—had counted for little during their lives and went largely unaccounted for in their deaths.
Equally striking are the statistics regarding accountability for these deaths. In the section of the Final Report regarding responsibility for the conflict, the commissioners state that the Shining Path guerrillas were responsible for 54 percent of the fatalities reported to the PTRC.14 These statistics in no way diminish the atrocities committed by the armed forces; they do, however, point to a high level of civilian participation in the violence.
I collaborated with the commission in the Ayacucho office, directing research on community mental health, reconciliation, and reparations. This book is in part an exploration of the PTRC and how people interacted with this national initiative in the region of the country where the violence left its most damaging and enduring legacies. I worked with an amazing group of young researchers: Edith Del Pino Huamán, Leonor Rivera Sullqa, José Carlos Palomino Peña, Juan José Yupanqui, Dulia Lozano Noa, and Norma Salinas Mendoza. They appear throughout this book, along with two research assistants who accompanied me during my first year in Ayacucho: Efraín Loayza and Madeleine Pariona. Working with them figures among my fondest memories of Peru.
Memory Projects
It is not only a truth commission or the anthropologist who has a memory project. So do people who have lived through violent times and fiercely guard stories, secrets, and silences. Although there was technically one war, we could write many histories of the sasachakuy tiempo. Where to begin? Where to tease out the multiple registers of truth that may coexist yet rarely collide? The “Eight Martyrs of Uchuraccay” came to mind.
It was early in the course of Peru’s internal war when eight journalists from Lima’s leading newspapers headed out for the highland village of Huaychao, located in the department of Ayacucho. The men had arrived from Lima to investigate rumors that the peasants had been killing the Senderistas, who were ostensibly waging a revolution on behalf of the rural poor. Immediately following the killings of the Senderistas in Huaychao, President Belaúnde congratulated the peasants for taking action against the “terrorists” in defense of the Peruvian state. However, uncertainty about the reports—and concerns from groups on the left that the military was involved in a misinformation campaign—prompted the journalists to travel to the site to investigate. In 1983 the war in the interior still had an enigmatic quality for many residents of Lima due to the profound cleavages that characterize Peru. Indeed, in part because the war was still a mystery to many urban Peruvians, the journalists fashioned their trip as an expedition in search of the truth.
They spent the night in the city of Huamanga before heading out at dawn the next day for the lengthy trip to Huaychao. Their route took them through Uchuraccay, where the journalists arrived in the village unannounced, accompanied by a Quechua-speaking guide. Although the sequence of events remains debatable, the photos taken by one of the journalists as he and his friends were dying established one thing: The villagers surrounded the journalists and began killing them with rocks and machetes. Their bodies were then buried facedown in shallow graves in the ravine that runs the length of the village.
At the national level, the events at Uchuraccay marked the initiation of the war in the highlands and thus the journalists’ deaths became an intensely debated national theme. Although Sendero Luminoso had initiated their armed struggle three years earlier and the armed forces had been sent to Ayacucho a month prior to the killings to begin the counterinsurgency campaign, until Uchuraccay the violence had not captured significant national attention. However, the photos that were subsequently developed from the camera that had been buried with journalist Willy Retto would be placed on the cover of every major Peruvian publication, constructing a “mediatic spectacle of political violence” that would become one of the emblematic national memories of the war.15 The “Eight Martyrs of Uchuraccay” would be commemorated annually in the press for the sacrifices they had made in their search for truth.
In the aftermath of the killings, President Belaúnde established an investigatory commission to determine what had happened and why. Headed by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the commission was composed of three anthropologists, a psychoanalyst, a jurist, and two linguists who were sent to study Peru’s “ethnic other” and the circumstances of the journalists’ deaths.16 The three anthropologists were well-known and respected members of the academic community and were included on the basis that anthropologists specialized in the study of “indigenous communities.” And so the members of the Vargas Llosa commission accepted their charge and headed via helicopter to Uchuraccay, where they spent one morning investigating the killings as