Memories between Eras: ANFASEP’s Leaders before and after Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict

Abstract

During Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000), many women formed associations of relatives of victims to demand truth, justice, and reparations. The Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos y Desaparecidos del Perú (National Association of Relatives of the Kidnapped, Detained, and Disappeared of Peru—ANFASEP) was the first of these organizations. Accounts by its leaders of their early lives challenge the stereotypes of them employed in previous studies and point to changes in their senses of identity in the postconflict period. Their memories are part of the development of a self-narrative in which new rationales emerge and they are led to question the validity of the characterization of them as poor, illiterate, dependent women unaware of having rights.

Durante el conflicto armado interno (1980–2000) muchas mujeres formaron asociaciones de familiares de víctimas para demandar verdad, justicia y reparación. En el Perú, ANFASEP fue la primera organización de este tipo. Este artículo presenta narraciones que las presidentas de esta asociación hacen sobre su infancia, matrimonio y maternidad. Por un lado, esto permite cuestionar las caracterizaciones y estereotipos que estudios previos han hecho sobre ellas. Y, por otro lado, aporta elementos teóricos sobre el cambio de sentidos de identidad en el post- conflicto. Desde una perspectiva cualitativa planteo que las memorias que las presidentas de ANFASEP elaboran sobre sus primeros ciclos de vida, recreadas o no, se inscriben en una narración y construcción de un auto-relato entre épocas. En este nuevo contexto, se producen nuevas lógicas de posicionamiento donde sus primeros ciclos de vida se tornan definitorios y desde donde se cuestionan los estereotipos que se han elaborado sobre ellas.

Keywords

Gender ANFASEP Stereotypes Memory Postconflict situations

In May 1980, members of the Partido Comunista del Perú–Sendero Luminoso (Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path—PCP-SL) burned the ballot boxes that were to be used in the first general elections in the Chuschi (Ayacucho) district after 12 years of military dictatorship. The PCP-SL proclaimed this act the start of a “people’s war.”¹ The Peruvian state dealt with it first through police operations and later with the armed forces. As the conflict unfolded, new armed actors emerged, among them the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement), the campesino patrols, and the paramilitary groups. It was widely held that the civilian population and those most affected by the conflict were “caught in the crossfire.”² In 2001, after 20 years of armed conflict, the transitional government created the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to investigate human rights violations and other crimes committed in the context of the violence. The commission’s final report (CVR, 2003) indicates that the political will and military capability of the PCP-SL, taking advantage of the state’s institutional weaknesses and the discontent of various sectors of society, were central to the origin of the armed conflict. Throughout those 20 years, the opposing armed groups committed serious human rights violations: murders, kidnappings, arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, forced displacements, sexual violence, and torture. According to the commission, the perpetrator of most of these was the PCP-SL, followed by the armed forces. The conflict was the longest and most intense and had the highest economic and human costs in Peru’s history as a republic. In addition, it took place under democratically elected governments³ and mainly affected the country’s poorest rural and indigenous villages. Inequality, ethnicity, class, and gender were the most important aspects of the profile of victims. The majority of those murdered, kidnapped, and/or disappeared were men, while women were more affected by sexual violence. It was in this context of extreme violence that the Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos y Desaparecidos del Perú (National Association of Relatives of the Kidnapped, Detained, and Disappeared of Peru—ANFASEP) emerged. It was the first organization of relatives of the victims of the internal armed conflict created in Peru and was primarily made up of Quechua-speaking women.

Whereas studies of ANFASEP have analyzed it as a collective actor, particularly because of its importance during and after the internal armed conflict, this article adopts a different perspective, delving into the early lives of its leaders. What was life like for them before the internal armed conflict? What is the relationship between their preconflict experiences and their achievements during and after the conflict? There is a notion in academia and in activism that the women of ANFASEP were empowered by the armed conflict. Concentrating on their experiences prior to the conflict allows us to challenge this notion.

I chose a qualitative methodological approach focused on life stories (see Pollak, 2006) along with written sources.⁴ In the interviews we talked about the women’s life experiences prior to the internal armed conflict: childhood, marriage, and the beginning of motherhood. Many of these narratives were permeated with their memories of the conflict and its aftermath.⁵ Sommer (2005), in her analysis of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonies, suggests that working with narratives of the memories of the women who directly experienced armed conflict entails a process that is both conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, in the narrators, who must reorganize, prioritize, and silence episodes and designate their relationships to others. Listeners, in turn, become not only witnesses to but also participants in “conversations” that can never be separated from their own narratives. Thus, memory topics involve giving new meaning to the memories of both the interviewee and the interviewer, and I approached my interviews not with a battery of prepared questions to answer but as conversations in which experiences and viewpoints were exchanged. Since the leaders of ANFASEP speak Quechua and Spanish, I carried out the interviews in both languages.

With regard to theory, I approached reflections on memory as a process of selection employing certain conscious or unconscious criteria to determine the use we would make of the past (Todorov, 2010). Memory plays a highly significant role as a cultural mechanism for strengthening the sense of belonging and thus building confidence in oneself (Jelín, 2012). There are clear differences in the ways in which men and women remember that have to do with early gender socialization. Women tell different stories from men’s and thus introduce a plurality of points of view (Ely and McCabe, 2009; Jelín, 2012; Leydesdorff, Passerini, and Thompson, 2009). The ANFASEP leaders tended to remember everyday life—what happened in their families and communities—because women’s subjective time is organized and tied to reproductive events. For reflections on the idea of stereotypes I dialogue with Bhabha (2011) and Mohanty (2008), who assert that essentialization and stereotyping are important features of colonial discourse that shape the construction of the ideology of the “other.” Bhabha argues that the stereotype is ambiguous: on the one hand, its objective is to define, and on the other it is the endless repetition of what has been defined, and this is precisely what I identify in the development of stereotypes in relation to the women leaders of ANFASEP.

To answer the questions I have posed, I have divided this essay into five parts. I first briefly discuss ANFASEP and then critically review the earlier studies of it, contrasting what ANFASEP says about itself with what academics and others say about it. Then I present the memories of the leaders about the stages of their lives prior to the armed conflict. In the fourth section I analyze the referents of the early identities and their impacts on their struggles to support their families during the armed conflict. In the concluding section I reflect on their recasting of their memories, which evolve into new senses of identity and new rationales of their positions in the postconflict period.

ANFASEP: History and Legacy

Jelín (2012), Molyneux (2001), and Craske (1999) explain that women in Latin America who experienced armed conflict and dictatorship engaged in two types of action. In the public realm they created human rights organizations to search for their disappeared relatives, and in the private realm they engaged in a struggle to support their families. The goal of ANFASEP, formed during the early years of the conflict (1983) and in the area most affected by it (Ayacucho in 1983) was to locate the disappeared and to demand truth, justice, and reparations. ANFASEP is an emblematic organization in Peru not only because it was the first organization of its kind but because it has become a referent and a sociopolitical actor in defense of democracy and human rights. It created a soup kitchen to feed the children orphaned by the armed conflict, gave testimonies and support through the identification of mass graves for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established Peru’s first memory museum, and is now demanding that the former Los Cabitos army barracks be converted into a memorial site.⁶

To its members ANFASEP is like a family in which they feel welcome, supported, and safe and in some cases in which they argue and disagree—in Pollak’s (2006) terms, a warm community that operates primarily as a mutual support network.⁷

ANFASEP’s consolidation has been complex. It has faced internal and external crises. Its members have received death threats and been persecuted and accused of being Senderistas, and one of its first leaders, Guadalupe Ccallocunto, was disappeared by the army. In this adverse environment, it has had the economic and institutional support of public figures and national and international institutions with which it has undertaken legal action, mental health care, small productive projects, the preservation of memory, and political advocacy. Carrying crosses and photographs of their disappeared relatives and wearing homemade bandoliers, members of ANFASEP have marched through the streets and held protests in front of the institutions charged with protecting human rights, but the administrations of Fernando Belaúnde (1980–1985), Alan García (1985–1990), and Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) failed to deal with their demands and their pleas for justice. On the contrary, the more marches and demonstrations they held, the more intense the threats and intimidation of them became.

Members of ANFASEP describe themselves as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of innocent victims of the armed conflict with no political party affiliation. Their relatives were assassinated or disappeared on their way to school or work or were unjustly and arbitrarily detained as Senderistas. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has indicated that during the armed conflict it was sufficient to be young, a student, or born in Ayacucho to be suspected of being a Senderista and disappeared. ANFASEP has about 200 members. Its member assembly elects a steering committee, which is led by a president. By 2014 it had had four presidents; rotations in the presidency had begun only in 2005 and included reelections. This article focuses on the leaders who have represented the organization and served as political intermediaries transmitting members’ feelings and demands.⁸

Review of the Literature: Identifying the Fabrication of Stereotypes

“Following the installation of the Politico-Military Command in early 1983, victims of the violence multiplied. Their relatives, mostly women, sometimes accompanied by their minor children, went through the streets of Ayacucho crying in search of their loved ones” (ANFASEP, 2007: 26) In ¿Hasta cuándo tu silencio? ANFASEP gives an account of its experiences during and after the armed conflict and its work as “peacemakers” and “actors.” It presents testimonies “of courage and bravery” in which members describe their experiences of violence and how they survived them. It discusses the creation of the soup kitchen as a place for help and caring, the acquisition of its institutional site, its support for the establishment of the National Coordinating Body for Human Rights, and its contribution to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. It also points to its having created the first memory museum in Peru.⁹ It does not include any analysis of disagreements in its interactions with the state and nongovernmental organizations.

Institutional profiles of ANFASEP have been drafted by human rights organizations. The Ombudsman’s Office (DDP, 2002), the Human Rights Commission (CDH, 2001), and the Projects Council (CP, 2004) describe it as a source of research, collective claims, mutual aid, and moral and economic support for members and stress members’ identification of detention centers and mass graves. The Ombudsman’s Office highlights ANFASEP’s advocacy work in the first investigation of the situation of disappeared persons in Peru.

Academic studies of ANFASEP¹⁰ have focused on analyzing its formation, consolidation, achievements, and local, national, and international allies. Muñoz (1999) and Tamayo (2003) suggest that the human rights organizations encouraged the associations of relatives of victims in Peru to use the methodology and procedures developed by the Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared. Muñoz points out that ANFASEP members went to Lima to learn how to protest using photos of disappeared relatives, resist violent police tactics, and talk to reporters. Tamayo indicates that the formal establishment of ANFASEP occurred with its establishment as a private nonprofit association in 1990 and the acquisition of its own office in 1991. In her estimation, the period from 1992 to 2000 saw a weakening of the association as family members stopped participating because of the intimidation, persecution, and accusations of terrorism endured by their leaders. Cóndor (2007), analyzing ANFASEP’s internal dynamic, concludes that there is a difference between mothers, who consider themselves victims, and their children, who do not, and that this may have caused intergenerational conflict within the organization. Cóndor and Muñoz agree that the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have paternalistic and vertical relationships with ANFASEP. Tamayo points out that the association is matriarchal and caudillista in that it has had the same steering committee for many years.

In developing descriptions of its members, these studies have highlighted their dual role as victims and heroines and their capacity for resistance, resilience, agency, and empowerment in forming ANFASEP, raising their children, and working on human rights in an extremely violent and repressive context (Reynaga, 2008). Cóndor (2007), Muñoz (1999), and Tamayo (2003) describe members as elderly, poor, rural, illiterate Quechua-speaking women, lacking independence and a knowledge of Spanish. They note that these women made up the human rights NGOs’ social base and had learned that they had rights in a war setting.¹¹ They conclude that ANFASEP members have been stigmatized and discriminated against and have the self-image of victims of institutional neglect and denial of citizenship. They portray them as not knowing how to file claims about the disappearance of their relatives and present this as a sign of their fledgling notion of citizenry and lack of awareness of being persons with rights. In what follows I will challenge these characterizations.

The ANFASEP Leaders: Memories of Childhood and Marriage

The experiences of five ANFASEP leaders—Angélica, Felicitas, Lidia, Elena, and Adelina— before the internal armed conflict come from rural Ayacucho in the early years of the twentieth century.

Angélica’s Story

Around 1920, Ayacucho was a prominently rural region with a mainly agricultural population. As part of a program of the Augusto Leguía administration (1919–1930), campesinos began to build highways. They shared the landscape with haciendas whose owners subordinated them and were often the elected authorities and representatives of the state. With the exception of this weak and arbitrary representation, besides the schools there was little state presence in these areas. Angélica Mendoza, a founder and first president of ANFASEP, was born in this milieu in October 1928 in Huambalpa (Vilcashuamán). Having lost her father when she was seven, she was placed in charge of caring for her maternal grandparents when her mother remarried. She recalls that “the landowners treated community people as if they were their slaves, working day and night for the patrón.”¹² Her family had property and livestock, and her maternal grandfather was regularly elected to public office. Angélica has drafted and/or recreated a memory in which her family was well-off and enjoyed the respect of the large landowners and the campesinos. This memory regarding her family’s position created a special type of relationship for her: “People respected me from the time I was little. I used to ask them why they mistreated poor campesinos, why there had to be fighting. People respected me because my grandparents were local authorities.”

In the community where Angélica was born, the first school was built when she was 16. She recalls that she attended it only for a week: “My grandfather and grandmother could not work. Despite being rich, they did not send me to school: ‘You have to take care of the animals and make sure the workers pasture them. There’s no time for you to go to school. You have to look after things.’ ” Lack of access to education, which, according to Jelín (2012), defines the course of one’s life as well as the actions and views of one’s existence and social interaction, branded Angélica. She remembers that after having to give up her studies, she was also forced to marry her teacher, Estanislao Ascarza. She explains:

But I did not know love; my mother gave me away to this man. I cried so hard; I suffered so much because they handed me over to this man I didn’t know. I couldn’t adapt. Before, that was the custom. . . . I was angry with my mother because she didn’t let me go to school and delivered me to this stranger. In the end, I spent my life with him.

Earls and Silverblatt (1977) have documented that in some rural areas parents agreed to have their children marry without the partners’ knowing one another. An arranged marriage afforded some benefits. In Angélica’s case, marriage to her teacher (at the time a symbol of knowledge and prestige) allowed her to maintain her family’s status by being tied to an individual with a certain authority.

After marrying, Angélica had eight children. Because of her husband’s job, they lived in various rural areas and ultimately settled in Ayacucho. Her husband’s salary was enough to raise and educate their children without her having to work. While they were living in Huamanga (Ayacucho’s capital) her son Arquímedes, who was 19, was kidnapped by the army. During her search for him, she founded ANFASEP. She died in 2017 without having obtained justice or located the remains of her disappeared son.

Felicitas’s Story

Felicitas Delgadillo was born in April 1949 in Carmen Alto (Huamanga). Her parents worked on a hacienda. Her mother had had 16 children, of whom only she and her three brothers survived. In Ayacucho around 1940 the changes taking place in the rural areas were very significant, particularly because of migration from the countryside to the city. There was a sizable increase in the number of schools, but at the political and economic level the hacienda system was still in place (Zapata, Pereyra, and Rojas, 2008). Felicitas recalls that “the landowner was very abusive of my mother. . . . He was a bad, bad man. He exploited poor people and never even gave them a plot of land. When they refused to accept the mistreatment, they were punished. They couldn’t take it anymore, and one night they escaped.” Colonial relations prevailed in many communities through the forced labor of campesinos. Felicitas recounts that her parents fled the hacienda and went back to Carmen Alto, where they worked as muleteers (described by Velapatiño [2003: 7]), “people who transported goods over short and long distances on schedules or any month of the year, using llamas, mules, horses and donkeys; their economic standing was defined by the number of animals they possessed”). Her parents wanted her to study, and she started doing so when she turned 10, but when she was in the fifth grade she quit school because of her family’s economic problems and almost at the same time was raped and became pregnant.

Several years later, she married Teófilo Ramos, who worked as the registrar in the Municipality of San Juan Bautista, through the ritual of “asking for her hand.” While Felicitas lived with her husband and five children, her time was spent taking care of the family and sewing. She very much appreciated having learned to sew: “I was able to get ahead. I really bettered myself when they taught me how [to sew]. I bought my own machine, sewed at home, and sold what I sewed in the market. I sewed day and night. . . . That’s how I saved my life.” Motherhood and her work as a seamstress became decisive elements for coping with the armed conflict, which touched her when the army arrested her husband in 1986. While Felicitas was searching for him in the ditches and ravines, she came across ANFASEP and has been a member of the steering committee for many years.¹³

Lidia’s and Elena’s Stories

Toward the end of the 1950s, movements about land tenure emerged to challenge the oppression and subordination of campesinos on the haciendas. At the same time, schools became a vital space for transforming the people of rural areas (Degregori, 2010), but regional economies were still based on small-scale livestock production and agriculture for home consumption. Lidia and Elena were born in this setting.

Lidia was born in March 1952 in Carmen Alto. Her parents, also born in the district, raised seven children and were muleteers. Lidia recalls that during vacations she traveled with her parents: “From here we carried blankets to sell in the Puna. We arranged for them to be woven and sold them by the meter.” She completed fourth grade in a girls’ school in Carmen Alto and remembers her teacher and her books from that time. She recalls participating in skits and dances and wearing a special uniform on anniversaries and national holidays: “Our special blouse was mustard-colored, and we had military caps, with special insignia.” Lidia left school at 14 because of her mother’s illness and had to take on new responsibilities to contribute to the family income. While she liked school, leaving it did not bother her because she was going to be involved in commerce. Another reason for her leaving was that she had become pregnant and was going to raise the child alone.

Lidia married Felipe Huamán when she was 25. He also came from a family of muleteers, and they worked together until they had two of their five children. After the birth of a third child, Lidia stopped working in transportation. When in 1984 her husband was detained and later killed by a policeman, she found herself responsible for her children, including an infant, and returned to work to provide for and educate them. She joined ANFASEP in late 1984 and since 2000 has actively participated in the association, serving two terms as president. She continues to seek justice and punishment for the policeman who murdered her husband.

Elena was born in August 1958 in Vilcanchos (Víctor Fajardo) and lived there with her parents, five siblings, and two half-sisters. Her parents were farmhands: “My father and mother were from poor families that could not support themselves, so they worked . . . for people who had cattle to graze.” Her father traveled to the coast to work on the haciendas, and sometimes she also worked there, taking care of children. At 11, after returning from work on the coast, she began elementary school, but she was unable to finish. When she was 16 she married Claudio Choque, who was a merchant, and they had four children. She recalls that “we started working in 1978 or 1979, and by 1983 we had a small, very busy store.” Her husband was murdered when she was 25, and at the same time her parents were disappeared and she herself was detained by the police in Paras (Cangallo, Ayacucho Province). Out of fear, she and her children and siblings moved to the capital of Ayacucho, where she worked as a street vendor and squatted on land for a place to live. She joined ANFASEP in 1998 and was president of the association in 2011 and 2012.

Adelina’s Story

During the 1960s migration to the city from the countryside increased, the struggle for land heightened, and the crisis on haciendas intensified (Zapata, Pereyra, and Rojas, 2008). Juan Velasco Alvarado’s (1968–1975) agrarian reform put an end to exploitation of the campesinos by the landowners. Adelina was born in January 1965 in Accomarca (Vilcashuamán). Her father had left her mother and brother before she was born: “My mother was alone, and she managed to raise us by herself.” She remembers the celebrations in her community with great joy: “It was beautiful in my community in December. . . . They danced to harps and violins at Christmas. That was our celebration.” She attended primary school in an Accomarca community and at 13 moved to Huamanga for secondary education. She explained: “When we went from the country to the city it was kind of hard; I couldn’t get used to it and wanted to go home.” Her mother insisted that she finish high school, however. Adelina was living in Ayacucho when she met Zósimo Tenorio, whom she married at 19. They had a daughter. Of her married life she remembers that her husband taught her how to cook “city food” and that they rode around on a motorcycle for enjoyment and ate out on weekends. In 1983, less than two years after their marriage, her husband was detained and disappeared. From that day on she searched for him in police stations and on military bases and met Angélica, who invited her to join ANFASEP. Since then she has been active in the association, taking on the presidency for two terms.

Early Referents of Identity

The above accounts of the early lives of ANFASEP leaders reveal the generalizations about the members of the association as poor, rural, illiterate, lacking ties to the state, dependent, and incapable of agency as simply victimizing stereotypes. Similarly, the Uchuraccay report presented the campesino and Andean populations as belonging to a world completely separate from the rest of the country, frozen in time, “backward,” and “violent.” It suggested that residents of the high-country communities had no clear awareness of the state and questioned their status as citizens and persons with rights. The massacre of journalists in Uchuraccay in 1983 was presented as the result of a misunderstanding generated by cultural differences between Quechua campesinos and the urban nation (CVR, 2003).¹⁴ I identify crosscutting themes in these women’s stories: the work ethic, the desire for education, migration, and changes in gender roles.

Felicitas and Lidia worked as muleteers, not only earning income but developing social, political, and economic skills such as negotiation, persuasion, and interchange. Moreover, experiencing different settings and climates allowed them to display special personal qualities. The women’s active participation in the economy was reflected on by Ruiz-Bravo (2004) in terms of a work ethic. Writing about women in the southern mountains (Puno) and on the North Coast (Piura), she identified a “dialectical relation between socioeconomic systems, cultural models, gender systems, and feminine identities” (315). González (1999), studying Ayacucho’s street vendors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, found that the merchant economy of the landowners was replaced by a new economic power made up of shopkeepers and small producers. The most powerful guilds (cattle traders, bakers, and weavers) were mestizos living in various neighborhoods around the city where women predominated. Felicitas, Lidia, Elena, and Adelina had ties to work and the market well before the armed conflict. The responses, agency, and skills they displayed in contending with the conflict (presiding over ANFASEP, mobilizing in defense of human rights, and confronting the authorities) were influenced by their previous experiences and socialization, in which their identity models were their grandparents, fathers, and mothers and the contexts included the profound social and political changes they grew up with and not just the actions of human rights organizations during the armed conflict.

Despite their differing circumstances, all of the women began their primary education between 8 and 13 years of age except for Angélica, who did so at 16. Her situation was different because her family had economic resources, but in the sociopolitical context in which she grew up the idea of women’s right to education had not yet taken hold. Elena’s, Adelina’s, and Felicitas’s parents’ desire to have their daughters go to school was part of a change in perceptions and beliefs about education for women. Their stories are located between 1960 and 1970 and speak to us of new norms for gender relations in rural areas.¹⁵ Changes also took place regarding marriage. While Angélica married around 1940 under an agreement, the other women, decades later, could choose whom they wished to marry.

Migration was a process that all of the women experienced. Elena was the only one who migrated to the coast to work during her childhood and who was forcibly displaced by the armed conflict. The other four women migrated to the capital of Ayacucho to study. Their varying motivations and migration circumstances were a form of transcending the circle of belonging and rooting; agency lies not in their migration itself but in the decision to broaden their horizons and opportunities for action. From their experiences and early socialization it is apparent that the ANFASEP leaders possessed a certain type of empowerment before the armed conflict: they were already displaying their skills and agency according to their contexts and circumstances. Lidia had pursued a bank loan to build her house. Adelina had filed for a municipal permit to expand her business, and Elena had the most important store in her community. No one had expected or was prepared for a war; it was only logical that they needed humanitarian assistance to survive because the war had destroyed their lives and plans.

Studies document that the women who lived in the city of Ayacucho and its surroundings in the nineteenth century had experience in the use of the judicial system and that campesinos had filed suits against the large landowners (Ataurima, 2001; Urrutia, 1982). Lidia recounted that in the 1970s she was involved in a suit and had an understanding of claims and courts. In early 1980 Peru was coming out of 12 years of military government, universal voting had just been established, the state was weak and had a limited presence in many areas of the country, and the social and political structure excluded anything that was indigenous and rural. Consequently, we cannot assess ANFASEP members in terms of urban standards; there would clearly have been differences in their ties to the state and their exercise of their rights as citizens. It is inadequate to conclude that their citizenship was only incipient: their histories prior to the armed conflict call upon us to look at the sociopolitical context that had created this situation. Likewise, we must question the idea that in their narratives of early life experiences the ANFASEP leaders idealized life in the communities (highlighting celebrations, sharing, and unity), overlooking the domestic violence, sexual violence, and sociopolitical change occurring in Ayacucho before the conflict. Their accounts should be understood from the perspective of studies suggesting that memory is always selective: people construct narratives, choosing what to tell and not tell, and their accounts are not static but dynamic and fluid and vary depending on when they are told. They must also be understood from the point of view of the women’s gender roles.

In Conclusion: Uses of Memory in the Postconflict Period

Why is it that the academy and the human rights movement in Peru and elsewhere choose to identify the women of ANFASEP in terms of the dichotomy of victims and/or heroines? And why do these women themselves not voice their agencies and previous identities? What is the image of themselves that they would like to advance? The answers fall into three categories: the emergency, memory, and the postconflict moment. These time/spaces have been shaped by stereotypes.

The emergency created by the armed conflict led academics and activists to develop identity strategies that would allow us to deal with the vulnerability of people directly affected by the conflict, and we did so by identifying victims, perpetrators, mechanisms, and patterns of effects from the perspective of transitional justice. In light of the systematic violation of human rights, we chose the category of “victim” for confronting the armed conflict from different angles.¹⁶ However, this contributed to the creation of urban-rural, literate-illiterate, Spanish-speaking/Quechua-speaking dichotomies that turned into stereotypes about rural women as victims. Although there are always power and subaltern relations in human interactions, they were intensified by the conflict not only in activism but in knowledge production. I am not arguing that there was a conscious assessment of the ANFASEP women as inferior. In the context of the war and in light of the emergency, we focused on their testimony of violence and the violation of their human rights and highlighted their roles as survivors, heroines and fighters, neglecting the nuances of their identities.

Bhabha (2011) points out that a stereotype is a simplification not because it is false but because it locks in the image and denies difference. Mohanty (2008) questions the representation of Third World women as monolithic and consistent, with identical interests and desires, overlooking gender, social-class, ethnic, and geographic differences. The accounts I have presented of the early life experiences of the ANFASEP leaders contrast with academic characterizations of them. The simplification and generalization of their situation have established stereotypes that obscure personal and social processes that predate the armed conflict.

The postconflict context allows us to look at other dimensions of the actors in the conflict and allows the ANFASEP women to focus on earlier moments.¹⁷ Levi (2011) has explained that our memories are not set in stone; not only do they tend to fade over time but they often change or even grow to include new facets of our life experiences. This is crucial in transition processes. In the Argentine context, Quintana (2015) and Cepeda (2013) suggest that analyzing the subjectivity of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and of HIJOS reveals realized acts that subvert practices and rhetoric. According to these writers, what is recounted in postdictatorship moments in Argentina may often be a strategy for facing this new moment in personal, family, and social history. In the Chilean case, Lazzara (2014) refers to this as a type of construction of a “between-eras” narrative in which a new identity as “leftist activist” is invented. The ANFASEP leaders are telling of their experiences prior to the conflict in a new, postconflict time. They have different ways of turning to the memory, but there are crosscutting lines in their stories—common denominators in different sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Millones (2013) concludes that in a postconflict period the women affected by the conflict consciously or unconsciously try to construct a different past for themselves and therefore a different way of locating themselves in the present.

In the cases I analyze here, accounts of the women’s links to work, their idealization of life in the communities, their initial educational achievements, and their migration with varying hopes speak of a different way of depicting themselves in the postconflict period—a reordering of events and experiences to establish a new narrative about themselves that does not invalidate or erase their previous self-portrayals but broadens and enriches them. During the transition, identities are reconstructed and placed in dialogue with the new sociopolitical moment. Not only agendas and actors but memories and narratives and consequently one’s sense of identity change. This may be a strategy for contending with a new moment in their personal and social histories, or it may be a retrieval of the memory of their early lives that has political uses, in the broadest sense of the word, or a conscious reshaping of their stories.

During the armed conflict, the leaders of ANFASEP began to question the repressive practices of the state and make demands linked to respect for their human rights. Now, in the postconflict setting, their mission is remembering so that there can be justice—pursuing “memory politics” so that their experiences will never be repeated. The collective function of remembering situates the ANFASEP leaders as representatives of an organization, part of a broader emotive community, enables them to create a place for themselves in history and in society, and provides them recognition and a sense of belonging. Knowing about their experiences prior to the armed conflict allows us to humanize them, transcending the stereotypes and the victim/hero dichotomy, and situate their responses to the conflict in a broader family, social, and political context. It also brings us elements to question the notion “caught in the crossfire.” Reformulating or reconstructing their memories of their early lives enables them to build new meanings for their identities, decide how to portray themselves in the postconflict period, and question the stereotypes that obscure, deny, and silence. It will be interesting to see whether this reconfiguration of memories will find an echo among the other women of ANFASEP as well as within other Peruvian victims’ organizations.

Supplemental Material

DS_10.1177_0094582X19856901 – Supplemental material for Memories between Eras: ANFASEP’s Leaders before and after Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict

Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0094582X19856901 for Memories between Eras: ANFASEP’s Leaders before and after Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict by Mercedes Crisóstomo Meza in Latin American Perspectives

Footnotes

Notes

Mercedes Crisóstomo Meza is a Ph.D. student at University College London. An anthropologist with a Master’s in political science and gender studies, she teaches at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She is the author of Violencia contra las mujeres rurales: Una etnografía del Estado peruano (2016) and the editor of Género y conflicto armado interno en el Perú: Testimonio y memoria (2018). She thanks the editors of Latin American Perspectives for their suggestions for improving this article. Victoria J. Furio is a translator and conference interpreter located in Yonkers, NY.

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