Narratives about Political Violence and Reconciliation in Peru

Abstract

The narratives of members of the armed forces, former members of the Shining Path, and victims of Peru’s armed conflict between 1980 and 2000 include very different views of the responsibility for the violence, the notion of terrorism, the concepts of truth, justice, reparation, and nonrepetition, and the meaning of reconciliation itself. Analysis of in-depth interviews reveals a society that, decades after the violence, in 2018, the Year of National Dialogue and Reconciliation, is still fractured and far from any type of recovery of its social fabric and symbolic resolution of its internal armed conflict.

Las narrativas de miembros de las Fuerzas Militares, exmiembros de Sendero Luminoso y diferentes víctima del conflicto armado interno acontecido en Perú entre 1980 y 2000 incluyen perspectivas muy diferentes sobre la responsabilidad de la violencia, la noción de terrorismo, los aspectos relativos a verdad, justicia, reparación y no repetición, o el significado mismo de la reconciliación. El análisis de entrevistas en profundidad muestra una sociedad que décadas después de la violencia, en el año 2018, denominado como “Año del Diálogo y la Reconciliación Nacional”, se mantiene fracturada y alejada de cualquier atisbo de recomposición de su tejido social y superación simbólica de su conflicto armado interno.

Keywords

Reconciliation Narratives Shining Path Peru Political violence

The year 2018 was named the Year of National Dialogue and Reconciliation in Peru. Between 1980 and 1999 the Andean country had been one of the most violent countries in the world as a result of an armed conflict between the state and the armed groups Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which according to official figures (CVR, 2003) left 69,000 dead and some thousands disappeared and displaced by the violence. Responsibility for these victims is attributed to the Shining Path (54 percent), the armed forces and police (37 percent), the peasant patrols and self-defense committees (7 percent), and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (2 percent), not counting the undocumented disappeared, estimated at more than 7,000.

In 2003 a report like that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission based on detailed fact-finding in communities, mostly Quechua-speakers in Ayacucho and Huancayo but also from areas such as Apurímac and Junin, also appeared. The report gathered 17,000 testimonies in more than 20 hearings, and more than 10,000 persons participated, resulting in an “official” account of more than 4,000 pages. This was an exemplary effort like that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but over time it has been obscured as an exercise in reconciliation.

Twenty-seven years have passed since the capture of the top leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, and 21 years since the Chavin de Huantar Operation, in which the Public Force (the national police and the armed forces) evicted the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement from the Japanese embassy in Lima and decimated it. Although the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission turned its sights on overcoming political violence and beginning the peace process, Peruvian society remains profoundly fractured by the consequences of that violence not only for the social fabric but also for the institutional establishment and the collective imaginary.

What is the current situation in Peru in the face of the end of political violence and reconciliation of the extremes it inflicted? How are the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its 2003 report viewed? What are the narratives of the actors involved in the repair of the social fabric? What are the perspectives on coexistence achieved in the relationship between the armed forces, the former members of the armed groups, and the civilian victims? I aim to answer these questions in terms of a general consideration: that Peruvian civil society remains profoundly polarized, its extremes incapable of reconciliation, and victims of the violence appear to be caught in the crossfire between the perceptions of the Public Force and those of the former members of the most important armed groups. This and the absence of political will, a scenario of winners and losers, a prevalence of vengefulness over reconciliation, the persistence of “them/us” logic, and the absence of action for reparations, justice, and nonrepetition blur any possible positive assessment of the scope and meaning of the dialogue and national reconciliation that characterized Peru in 2018.

This article incorporates narratives from the extreme positions that constitute a scenario of national reconciliation with regard to the violence. In-depth interviews were conducted with two members of the active military confronting the memory and the official discourse of the armed forces about the violence: the director, Colonel Enrique Gargurevich, and the deputy director, Major Alberto Castro, of the Permanent Commission on the History of Peru’s Armed Forces. Two leaders of the Shining Path who after more than 20 years in prison are currently free and continue to represent the position of post–Shining Path discourse in Peru’s current political and party scenario were interviewed, and at their request both testimonies are presented as anonymous. Finally, I carried out interesting fieldwork with members of the Pro–Human Rights Association (representing victims of political violence) and the Peruvian National Association of Journalists, which actively collaborated in obtaining testimonies of victims of the conflict for this article.Representing civil society were Carolina Oyague, whose sister, then a student at La Cantuta University, was killed by the paramilitary group Colina in 1992, and Doris Calixto, former representative of the Coordinating Committee of Organizations of Victims and Affected by Political Violence and the widow of Teófilo Rimac, a union leader and teacher disappeared by the military in Pasco on June 23, 1986. Testimonies were also obtained from Belsa Escobar, daughter of the activist, union member, and human rights defender Rodolfo Angel Escobar, who was disappeared in February 1990 by the army in Huancavelica and whose remains were found in two mass graves; and Marly Anzualdo, sister of Kenneth Anzualdo, disappeared by the army and the subject of a verdict against the state by the Inter-American Human Rights Court in September 2009. Finally, interviews were carried out with Cipriana Huamani and Jorge Tenorio, the widow and son of Rigoberto Tenorio, a member of the armed forces disappeared by the navy in July 1984 at a military barracks in Ayacucho, and Eudocia Reinoso, the widow of Felix Galivan, one of the eight journalists killed in the Ayacucho highlands in January 1983. These 11 interviews are documented in field research performed in Lima and Huancavelica in May 2018 with the express approval of all those interviewed.

The Theoretical Framework

An essential factor in every peace process is reconciliation (Nordquist, 2018). According to Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall (2005: 366), reconciliation can be understood as having four interrelated dimensions. The first is conformity with reality—reconciliation with destiny and approval of the end of violence in the strict sense. Although one might consider this negative, it is essential for the second dimension, the convergence of opposing narratives and discourses. The third, broader dimension is uniting opposite poles through symbolic bridges and recognitions that overcome the contradiction, and the fourth is the reconstitution of the social fabric between enemies-turned-adversaries.

The first dimension is evolutionary and changing in nature, with the groups to be reconciled showing a variety of understandings of the way to manage the transition from the end of violence to the reconstitution of the social fabric shattered by that violence. This transition will require calculating how and when contact between the actors, stories, and practices of the parties involved in the violence will take place, adjusting the tempo to the particular characteristics of each case. Hewstone and Brown (1986) emphasize the importance of contact—humanizing the faces in the contest—in creating opportunities for overcoming the consequences of violence. Kaufmann (1996), in contrast, argues that “good fences make good neighbors.” In any case, as Northrup (1989) points out, reconciliation ultimately requires that the notion of “us” prevail (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall, 2005). It demands at some point that the acts of violence be accepted and recognized by way of an “official story” that accounts for the past actions, integrates them from a point of convergence in the present, and projects the difficult task of reconstituting the future (Galtung, 2003). It involves one of the equations that always precedes a process of reconciliation and has to do with amnesia, justice, and revenge. While Rigby (2001) and others hold that forgetting is required for reconciliation, Mani (2002) has pointed to the exhaustive application of the judicial apparatus in pursuit of a collective occupation of the public past in which mechanisms of rectifying justice prevail. I argue that reconciliation demands restorative justice in a framework that rejects institutional mechanisms of vengeance.

An important element of reconciliation after armed conflict, as seen in experiences such as those of South Africa, El Salvador, Chile, and Guatemala, is the formation of a commission that honors truth and goes beyond the possible contradictions and criticisms present in all processes (Rotberg, 2003) to construct a “single scenario of understanding” (Graybill, 1998: 49). It should be accompanied by the admission of responsibility, the expression of regret, symbolic reparations for the victims (Nordquist, 2018; Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall, 2005), and the recovery of memory (Caruth, 1996). Reconciliation may require judicial processes beyond the truth commission, and transitional justice (Ferrajoli, 2004) may serve as a midpoint in the face of peace/justice tensions (Goldstone, 2006) and a foundation for reparations that, far from being understood in monetary terms, as Minow (2002) points out, include monuments, streets, public homage, and resignified parks or buildings and aim at contributing to long-term social transformation.

There is an extensive literature on the Peruvian case. The works of Degregori (1990; 2004; 2011), Portocarrero (2015; Portocarrero and Oliart, 1989), Mendoza (2011), La Serna (2012), Rios and Sanchez (2018), and Gorriti (1999) are attempts to understand political violence from an anthropological, historiographic, or sociological viewpoint mainly focused on Shining Path. There are also enriching contributions about state violence such as Burt (2016) proposes, especially the recent studies on memory of Milton (2014), Sánchez (2015), and Gavilán (2018). Studies of post–Shining Path violence’s survival in the form of cartelization also have academic value (Dreyfus, 1999; Kay, 1999; Kernaghan, 2009; Taylor, 2017), as do perspectives on the phenomenon such as gender (Caro, 2006; Kirk, 1993) and civil-military relations. Peace studies have remained marginal despite the intensity of the impact of the conflict on the civilian population, but there are contributions that deserve to be highlighted, such as those of Theidon (2009), Agüero (2015), Milton (2015), Ulfe and Ríos (2016), and De Vivanco (2018).

Narratives in Sociological Research

The analysis of discourse and especially of narratives brings to social research the possibility of deepening the understanding of the meaning of political practices. As a broad literature on this suggests (Van Dijk, 2004; 2005), narratives serve as a primary source for social research in that they allow us to understand social phenomena—in this case, political violence and reconciliation—and seek to construct meanings. In other words, they go beyond strict semiotic analysis to encompass aspects such as enunciation and actors’ strategies (Ríos and Cairo, 2018). This article draws on a literature review of works on discourse and history and on 11 semistructured in-depth interviews with persons who had a direct relation with political violence and, by extension, reconciliation.

Narratives represent only part of discourse, and their interest lies mainly in their offering different views, understandings, and arguments about phenomena from which they construct a particular interpretation of reality and on which they juxtapose various social and historical meanings (Lanza, 2017). Thus, focusing on narratives forces testimonies to look back in time and allows the researcher to approach the object of study from their interaction with the researcher’s conjectures and the factual evidence (Barzelay and Cortázar, 2004). As a result, as Ríos and Cairo (2018) suggest, narratives are ideologically charged, given the social and political dimension of the object of study and their character as “maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of a collective conscience” (Geertz, 1987: 178). In other words, narratives should be interpreted as charged with an ideology that defines or obscures social categories, stabilizes or perturbs expectations, maintains or undermines norms, strengthens or weakens consensus, and alleviates or exacerbates tensions (Ariño, 1997: Van Dijk, 2005, cited in Ríos and Cairo, 2018).

Finally, the conceptual framework of this study focuses on readings of what political violence and the concept of terrorism meant for each of the interested parties, the consequences for each of civil society’s extremes, and the meaning and scope of the concept of reconciliation and the perceptions and attributes required for it to materialize. It is in conflicts over meaning that politics and historical and social meaning truly matter (Edelman, 1991). The language of the narratives reveals, as Van Dijk (2004) suggests, the ways in which the meanings of “ally” and “enemy” are constituted, the limits of the conflict/cooperation relationship, and the different levels of legitimation of social relations in terms of political violence and reconciliation, reconstructive readings of the past, and projections of the future.

Political Violence and Reconciliation in Peru: Victims in the Crossfire

According to Antonio Zapata (2016), from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR, 2003) it seems that during the years of political violence and the struggle between armed groups and the Peruvian state, the civilian population was caught in the crossfire. This situation continued well into the second half of the 1980s, although in many cases political violence was caused by indiscriminate paramilitarism that shared an enemy with the Public Force. Victims, especially the nearly half who were not involved in the armed groups, argue that the effects of the political violence have never been rectified and reconciliation remains an outstanding debt of the state to the civilian population. Thus the “them/us” duality of the conflict persists in the form of “perpetrators/victims.” The majority of victims attribute the conflict indiscriminately to the armed groups and the state:

The terrorism was started by the Shining Path, but then it was perpetrated by the state, the police, the navy. . . . The forces of order caused terrible terror instead of rescuing the unarmed population. (Doris Calixto, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

State terror and Shining Path terrorism are the same to me. Both killed innocent people in the same way. Shining Path would come to a town and tell us, “You have to cook for me.” You had to give them something out of fear; if not, the military would come. “I will stay in your house and you have to cook for me.” The next day Shining Path would come, and they would get killed. Both used terrorism. (Eudocia Reinoso, interview, Lima, May 18, 2018)

As occurs in many cases of conflict such as this one, the civilian population ends up showing more deference for the armed groups than for the state, attributing to the latter responsibility for providing protection and security that does not materialize and eventually adopting rhetoric justifying the social transformation that the armed groups extol (Muller and Seligson, 1987). These situations are marked by a marginality that attracts institutional neglect and social and cultural exclusion:

Ayacucho and Huancavelica were forgotten areas, ignored by the state. A group of people who wanted to change this situation was at the root of that. Some terrorists killed authorities, but those authorities were crooks. (Belsa Escobar, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018).

It should be said that Shining Path arose because of cynical state corruption. They rose up as an expression of the lack of impact of street protests. But that does not work. It is equally terrorist. (Marly Anzualdo, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

Studies such as those of Gorriti (1999), Zapata (2016), Ríos and Sanchez (2018), and especially Degregori (2011; 2015) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (CVR, 2003) give good accounts of the beginning, especially during the Fernando Belaúnde presidency (1980–1985), of a kind of asymmetrical civil war between the Public Force (first the police and as of December 1982 the army and the navy) and Shining Path, particularly in the Ayacucho region, with the civilians under constant suspicion of collaborating with the enemy: “You could go out until six in the evening but not after because the bullets were flying. There was a curfew. They changed ways of living and dressing. You could not wear red shoes. You could not wear a backpack. You could not wear sneakers. Every day people were killed like dogs” (Cipriana Huamani, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018).At the same time, hundreds of thousands of cases have been documented in which a death or disappearance is attributed to the state. As in the recent cases of Manta and Vilca, lawsuits in the ordinary courts based on this documentation have led to sentencing for perpetrators of crimes of organized sexual violence as war crimes and/or crimes against humanity (Ríos and Brocate, 2017). This is because, despite the limited recognition by the state of its direct responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths and the official accounts collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in many cases backed by international institutions such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court, no sentences are being issued by the institutional establishment. This makes any attempt at reconciliation more difficult in that the existence of a state policy of extermination of innocent civilians is far from trivial, as the victims’ themselves point out:

The forced disappearances were state policy toward a general objective: to make politicians, peasant leaders, trade union leaders, and peasants who fought for the rights of their people disappear. (Doris Calixto, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

The military has killed thousands of innocent people, peasants who didn’t even speak Spanish. The government has gone to extremes, but what kind of extreme? Killing innocent people. (Eudocia Reinoso, interview, Lima, May 18, 2018).

Yes, there were violations, and they were systematic. This has been proven. This cannot be denied. Can you imagine a general barracks in Ayacucho where 180 bodies were found and others that were burned and there is no way for an anthropologist to put a body together? You cannot say that did not happen systematically. (Carolina Oyague, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

Thus the conviction prevails among victims that Peruvian democracy suffers from opacity, manipulation, corruption, and politicization of justice that call the restorative capacity of the judicial system into question. Cooperation in achieving justice continues to be essential to any attempt at reconciliation in Peru, and it is conspicuous by its absence. The narratives of the interviewees repeatedly mention the absence of political will, the inaction of the judicial system, and the limited collaboration of the military establishment:

Two months ago, a 20-year prison sentence was handed down for the perpetrator and 14 years for the person in charge of the jail. They are still looking for them. (Doris Calixto, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

Those from the General Headquarters who killed my brother should be known. They are against people’s knowing what happened, why it happened. The reality of the facts is continually distorted. (Marly Anzualdo, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

Nothing has happened after 35 years. We are in CIDH [the International Human Rights Commission], but nothing happens. We continue to get nothing. They ask for more evidence; what more evidence do they need? (Eudocia Reinoso, interview, Lima, May 18, 2018)

Where are your documents, armed forces? There were exact orders issued to act; if not, they did not act. We are talking about recent events, with reports, documents. . . . Where is all that? (Jorge Tenorio, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

Interviewees generally view reconciliation in the country negatively. The prevailing general perception is that for the state and specifically the military reconciliation is synonymous with amnesia, nothing more than “case closed.” Current analyses of reconciliation in Peru suggest various interrelated considerations among which victims highlight the lack of will and empathy with their condition stemming from the simple but startling fact of denial of what happened:

We need specific responses to victims’ demands from the state. The state remains on the margin of the demands resulting from the internal armed conflict. Without empathy with those truly affected, we cannot establish reconciliation. (Doris Calixto, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018).

Reconciliation lies in the state’s will and recognition that they killed peasants, making them seem like terrorists. The state has done a lot of damage to their relatives. We have to see ourselves recognized as having suffered in the conflict between the terrorists and the military. The state has always denied the damage it did. (Belsa Escobar, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

For me, to reconcile is to recognize, not to deny the facts, to recognize responsibilities. (Marly Anzualdo, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

To call today the year of reconciliation is a gross and brutal mockery. They want to have a clean slate and a new account. And it always comes from the armed forces, who don’t understand this comparison. (Carolina Oyague, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

An essential element for understanding the critical and skeptical position of civilians who are victims of the conflict is recognizing reconciliation as a process that is causal in a sense and related to truth. The victims of the conflict know that justice has not yet been served and their condition as victims has not changed:

The state ends up looking like the executioner you fought against. This social process has to come from the state’s recognizing—making it possible for truth and justice to be recognized. You cannot keep hiding truth and justice. (Carolina Oyague, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

For me, reconciliation does not exist. For there to be reconciliation there has to be justice. No justice, no reconciliation. They pay lip service to forgiveness, but we expect justice. Let them tell the truth. Then there will be reconciliation. As long as there is no justice, there is no forgiveness. (Eudocia Reinoso, interview, Lima, May 18, 2018)

We have not recovered; I can’t say anything regarding reparation and reconciliation. There has to be reconciliation with justice. You have to call out the perpetrators by their own names. Then we can talk about reconciliation. To begin reconciliation, we have to find the guilty and have them tried. (Jorge Tenorio, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

We have always complained that the perpetrators of my father’s disappearance should be tried. Only then can we reassess. The guilty have to pay, go to prison and change. The state hides everything in the name of saving the country. (Belsa Escobar, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

In addition to the state’s failure to accept responsibility for its participation in the violence, to respond to the demands for truth and justice, and to take action on reconciliation and reparations, victims point to its treating their claims as a thing of the past, something already dealt with by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the judicial system:

They call us terrorists. They stigmatize us. They hurt our families and the way our families are perceived. Instead of reconciling they make us feel bad and lie that they have made reparations. (Belsa Escobar, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

The peaceful ones, those who want the common good, are the terrorists. To protest is to be a terrorist. The primitive indigenous people, who want the common good, are terrorists. (Marly Anzualdo, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

They stigmatize those who have suffered political violence. (Doris Calixto, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

The victims consider this a long-term struggle in the face of strong institutional resistance that sooner or later will position memory, truth, and justice at the center of the dialogue and defeat violence (see Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall, 2015):

At some point, the whole country should agree, and not only the victims who were in the crossfire. (Doris Calixto, interview, interview, Lima, May 16, 2018)

I have hope that some authorities will come to recognize the facts of the internal conflict to heal the wounds and [let us] live in peace and tranquility. (Belsa Escobar, interview, Huancavelica, May 11, 2018)

We have hope, but we are old and tired, 73, 74. . . . Our children will follow us. They will not forget what happened to their parents. It is not easy, but I do have hope. (Cipriana Huamani, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018).

We will continue to take the lead from our parents. And if the state does not meet some of these measures, there is no doubt that we will take action. The state is very aware of the issue, and I don’t think they want that to happen. (Jorge Tenorio, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

The Views of the Shining Path and the Military

Several considerations can be extrapolated from what has been presented so far about victims’ perceptions, reconciliation in general, and the state’s responsibility. The first is that the state has an undifferentiated view of the armed groups with regard to terrorism, and the second is that it is blamed for complicity in obscurantism and inaction in the interests of a judicial system that, for the victims, trivializes the consequences of political violence and blurs any hint of justice. Thus, not only is reconciliation denied but the them/us logic presents the state and particularly the armed forces as “the other.” In the following I attempt to show how former members of Shining Path and members of the military interpret the conflict and especially the future scenario for reconciliation.

Former members of Sendero Luminoso distance themselves from any notion of terrorism, instead referring to a “people’s war” (see Inter Press Service, 2008; Zapata, 2016):

The change of name began at the end of the 1970s. The term comes from the United States. Imperialism, in its conception of low-intensity warfare, changed the terminology. With the rise of the revolutionary movements after 1980, the term was “terrorism,” but in Peru it was a people’s war. We are talking about a revolutionary war of oppressed nations with a majority peasant population. We are talking about a war from the countryside to the city. (Shining Path member 1, interview, Lima, May 15, 2018)

This comment is important because in a way it dehumanizes the victims by justifying the violence against them and treating them not as fellow citizens but as political objects that swell the ranks of the enemy:

It’s necessary to prioritize political objectives—national importance. This included various forms of struggle: guerrilla warfare, sabotage, selective assassination, and propaganda. Agitation was predominant. Selective assassinations were in the minority. What war has not had selective assassination? But they stress that to call us “terrorists.” (Shining Path member 2, interview, Lima, May 14, 2018)

The word “terrorist” is continually used in reference to Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement in official military and police narratives such as in In Honor of the Truth (Ejército del Perú, 2010). According to Major Alberto Castro (interview, Lima, May 17, 2018), “The issue is that we were a democratic state in which we had a monopoly on force and were expected to act when confronted by a terrorist group that applied radical violence in an ideological attempt to take power.” Here we see a logic that hinders progress in reconciliation in that the two main perpetrators of the armed violence not only understand the conflict in “friend/enemy” terms but have introduced the notion of terrorism. At the same time, for Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and, in a way, for the victims, the real terrorist ended up being the state:

The armed forces carried out a horrific genocide. The massacres of 1983 and 1984 were perpetrated by the military, who wanted it kept out of the media. If you compare the deaths of late 1982, which were scarcely 50, with those of 1983 and 1984, they shot up, and this demanded a response. (Shining Path member 1, interview, Lima, May 15, 2018)

There was no state in the middle of Peru—it was us, with our grassroots committees and support bases. Nothing is said about that. Everything was organized as an emerging new state; the only terrorist was the state. (Shining Path member 2, interview, May 14, 2018)

The armed forces’ reconciliation with victims is also obstructed by their denial of any comparison to Shining Path. This is evident in the military’s reduction of the violence to simple statistics, which place them on the same plane as Shining Path in the eyes of society and public opinion as responsible for more than a third of the 70,000 official recorded fatalities:

If you read the first page, you know what it’s about. The first page says that the process Peru experienced between such-and-such years caused so many deaths—a number, both from the armed forces and the terrorist organization. Without knowing anything, you read that and think, “Oh, the armed forces are responsible for genocide.” (Coronel Enrique Gargurevich, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

The problem with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report is that it had a number of statistical errors. The historical narrative is well detailed, but not the statistics, and there was little attempt to seek consensus in its elaboration. We do not participate; Degregori’s idea is imposed, and this is a serious mistake. (Major Alberto Castro, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

The argument here points to one that is essential for understanding the military’s negative attitude toward any attempt at reconciliation: that the state was doing what it had to do—that the monopoly of force, in the strictly Weberian sense, justifies the use of violence when the state’s stability is threatened and that ultimately state terrorism or the annihilation of peasant citizens was neither generalized nor systematic and took place in the context of a democratic state. Thus, one thing that was often said in explaining the armed forces’ abuses was how disconcerting it was to confront an enemy that, in contrast to the earlier Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario in Chile or Colombia’s Ejército de Liberación Nacional, did not set up camps or wear camouflage:

The army did not know which enemy it was confronting. . . . The subversive groups had the total advantage of surprise, of covert action, and this gave them the initiative. . . . It’s difficult to defend yourself if you don’t know where you’re going to be attacked. (Coronel Enrique Gargurevich, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

This is important because it justifies the state’s modus operandi in Ayacucho in terms of a learning process that, when it matured, achieved greater efficiency in the antisubversive struggle and, at least formally, caused fewer deaths of innocent people. In any case, it contributes to the broader, more complex and problematic argument that the state did what it had to do and therefore reconciliation is unnecessary:

It’s not that the military decided to kill peasants. Rather, there were various ways and strategies for combating this threat to the state, and we had to guarantee the legitimacy of the state. This has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by subsequent generations. The action of the state had to be repressive initially to avoid damage to its sovereignty. . . . The state had to use all its weapons to avoid that, and therefore the armed forces have no reason for reconciliation with anyone. (Coronel Enrique Gargurevich, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

If the monopoly on force grants us the authority to use force of arms to defend ourselves, does the concept of reconciliation apply here? I don’t think so. . . . The question is to what degree does the state have the capacity to defend itself? We were a democratic government and that makes a difference. To what extent can these doctrines that allow a democratic state to defend itself be applied? Our case was successful. (Major Alberto Castro, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

For Shining Path, the previous accounts embrace a framework of amnesia and impunity leading to a narrative of winners and losers, punished and unpunished, that explains the impossibility of reconciliation when those who share the responsibility for the deaths and disappearances protect, justify, and deny the systemacity of that responsibility. This is an argument that is similar in important respects to the victims’ accounts (albeit with different intentions):

When the armed forces are asked about the disappeared, they say that the issue is resolved. That is false. They contradict the information. The legal solution is not a solution. What relatives of the victims want is to have the remains back and to feel calm. It’s the symbolic solution. It’s about closing a painful chapter of torture. (Shining Path member 1, interview, Lima, May 15, 2018)

If the war resulted in that many deaths, it was the state’s fault. The state was terrorist and genocidal. It didn’t kill anyone and Shining Path is blamed for all the deaths? National reconciliation is for both sides. This acknowledgment comes from the [Shining Path], but Guzmán has them isolated. Here we have only purged a few. (Shining Path member 1, interview, Lima, May 14, 2018)

Contrary to what one would expect, however, what is proposed is collective amnesia for both the military and Shining Path, the opposite of punitive justice:

For the military to provide information, there should not be a trial in which they would be viewed as involved. Given how much time has passed, exhumation is inviable, and the same goes for filing lawsuits. This takes a lot of time. The option is a general amnesty. (Shining Path member 1, interview, Lima, May 15, 2018)

Reconciliation is impossible because there is no military or judicial solution. The only solution is political. If we’re talking about impunity, Shining Path did not have impunity. We have to leave upright. There are still 100 comrades in prison; the rest were released without benefits. We have to close this chapter. This means a general amnesty for all: civilians, political leaders, peasant patrols, Shining Path, and MRTA. This should lead to a culture of national reconciliation. (Shining Path member 2, interview, Lima, May 14, 2018)

Here is another element of conflict both with the victims and especially with the military, who perceive themselves as having risked everything in the fight against Shining Path:

There is nothing to reconcile. The mission of the armed forces was to defend the state, and the armed forces will always come out when the state is attacked. The state has the authority. We have nothing to reconcile. (Coronel Enrique Gargurevich, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

Yes, there has to be reconciliation; for me it is utopian to think that it will happen in this decade. When it comes to reports, reconciliation, interviews, the military family is the least considered. We are the most forgotten and unprotected by the state. (Major Alberto Castro, interview, Lima, May 17, 2018)

What is common in the accounts of Shining Path and the military is the unviability of reconciliation. This is because “to reconcile” means to find commonality in opposing evaluations, a product of the particular way in which the facts are interpreted and justified. While for Shining Path the political violence was part of a people’s war promoted and provoked by the state and a degree of justice and reconciliation will require amnesty, for the military terrorism was limited to the armed groups, the isolated and unsystematic excesses were part of a learning process, and having a monopoly of force relieved them of responsibility for a struggle that, in any case, ended up victorious with the dissolution of armed groups.

Conclusions

It is evident that 2018 is far from being properly understood in Peru as the Year of Dialogue and National Reconciliation. For the former members of Shining Path and the armed forces, the armed conflict continues to be part of a “friend/enemy” logic and a quantitative interpretation that ultimately leave victims caught in a sort of crossfire. While amnesia, amnesty, or a tabula rasa with regard to responsibility for the abuses committed between 1980 and 2000 are discussed by the armed actors, the victims continue to claim rights of truth, justice, reparation, and nonrepetition that are still unresolved in their understanding of what happened, which is far from any reconciliatory action. For them corruption, the politicization of justice, the lack of political will, the perceived necessity to “turn the page,” and the criminalization of protest present a negative scenario for reconciliation. For the military, there is nothing to reconcile, while Shining Path does not see itself as inciting terror, much less as the only perpetrator of the violence against the civilian population.

Despite the good work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in fact there has been no convergence of narratives about what happened in Peru, and not only Shining Path but also the armed forces have adopted a biased reality and the responsibilities it attributes. More than 15 years after the report was published, actions toward reconciliation in Peru are absent and victims continue to claim rights that are far from being achieved. They continue to demand justice, symbolic reparation, and nonrepetition, revealing a fractured and strongly polarized social fabric. The irreconcilability of “them/us” and “bad/good” has not been overcome, and because of this attempts to dignify the memory of what happened such as the screening of the film La Casa Rosada and the inauguration of the Memory Place in the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima continue to motivate, if not violence, extreme social conflict and censorship.

Footnotes

Jerónimo Ríos is Research Fellow in Political Geography and Geopolitics at the Complutense University of Madrid as a recipient of a 2018 grant cofinanced by the Comunidad de Madrid. This research is part of the 2018-T2/SOC-10508 project. He is the coauthor (with Marté Sánchez) of Breve historia de Sendero Luminoso (2018). Margot Olavarria is a translator living in New York City.

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