Incommensurable worlds,irreparable wounds: Transitional justice politics and personal violent pasts in postconflict Peru

Lucanamarca and Huanca Sancos

At the beginning of the 1980s, the Shining Path, a Peruvian communist guerrilla movement that would later turn into a terrorist group, was looking for allies and recruits in the Ayacucho region. Since many of the first Shining Path recruiters were rural teachers – indeed, some of them became rural teachers specifically to spread the word – they reached out to Lucanamarca and Huanca Sancos’ youngest generations. Most of them were students at the Los Andes high school in Huanca Sancos, while the older recruits were studying in Huamanga, the capital of Ayacucho, where they were exposed to the teachings of Abimael Guzmán, Shining Path’s founder and ideologue. Young teachers arrived in Los Andes and other visitors immersed themselves in community life, announcing the arrival of a ‘new power’, a world with no rustlers and adulterers. Known in popular speech as senderistas, these Shining Path members opened a series of ‘popular schools’ in the region to spread its ideology, a mix of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and Abimael Guzmán’s ideas about revolution.

Huanca Sancos is known for its pastures and animals. Elite families owned large portions of land populated with livestock. By late 1982, senderistas took political control of the local communities and districts by killing the well-known members of the elite who occupied positions of power and replacing them with Shining Path sympathizers. The local population seemed confused, as these actions went against the Shining Path’s initial discourse on equality and social justice. Many could not believe what was taking place in front of their eyes, even when the killings spread; but after seeing that senderistas’ discourses and actions did not coincide, people took arms against the Shining Path in their localities. Sadly, these rebellions led to more deaths as the Shining Path reacted by crushing any sign of opposition in a very violent way.

Angélica’s worst nightmares are tied to the bloody events in Lucanamarca. Both her parents were killed between late 1982 and early 1983. It was her father’s death, a senderista leader executed by the community in an effort to eliminate the Shining Path’s influence in the district, that started a cycle of violence that would last for years. In retribution for their leader’s death, senderistas killed 69 comuneros in a massacre on 3 April 1983 (Ulfe, 2013; Ulfe and Málaga Sabogal, 2021a). In the following months, people accused of either supporting or rejecting the Shining Path were killed, and Angélica’s family, seen as entirely senderista by the local community, was decimated.

There is something powerful in the symbolic and emotional dimension that words contain. We talked several times to Angélica about what happened during those years and what her family had to go through. She told us that she was 6 years old during the terrible events of 1983. Her words not only refer to the acts of violence that she witnessed – how her mother died, how her grandparents were killed, how she did not know about her father’s death – but through her words she also tries to make sense of these facts. Angélica’s words did not necessarily give order or establish a linear sequence to a chronological story of her people, they flowed between ‘bare’ description and emotional meaning of the re-constructed events. It is in this subjective universe of Angélica’s memories that the tensions within the communities are narrated, tensions that are mirrored in Angélica’s fraught relationship with her extended family members.

The Lucanamarca, Sacsamarca, and Huanca Sancos rebellions against the Shining Path were severely punished. Although many people died at the hands of senderistas, several others were executed without a trial for their supposed links with the Shining Path. Nobody could remember the exact date when the military base was installed in Huanca Sancos or when a little office and barracks in the plaza of Lucanamarca were transformed into a police station. It must have happened between 1983 and 1984. At first, people may have been hopeful, but the presence of the police and the army did not bring peace, only repression and more violence. A helicopter in ruins on one of the hills that overlooks Huanca Sancos may be the most visual reminder of the military base, but the multiple testimonies of disappearances, sexual assaults, kidnappings, and violence mark the more permanent traces of the Peruvian state’s presence in the region.

In September 1992, a group of intelligence police (Grupo Especial de Inteligencia del Perú or GEIN in Spanish) captured Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path’s main leader. Months before, on 5 April 1992, the country’s president Alberto Fujimori ³ closed the Peruvian Congress and called for a new constitution. In the following months and years, Fujimori fashioned himself as the saviour of the Peruvian nation against the Shining Path, while his government became increasingly authoritarian and corrupt. This discourse came hand in hand with an accelerated neoliberalization and privatization of Peru’s economy and social life. As in Chile, neoliberalism spread during a dictatorial regime. However, the postwar context was quite different. In Peru, instead of designing politics for the recuperation of democracy, a populist and authoritarian regime was prioritized (Ulfe, 2016). These were not the best conditions to carry out a postwar process that could prioritize the reorganization of juridical institutions and democracy (Degregori, 2015). Instead, Fujimori’s administration was geared towards development programmes and infrastructure projects (Burt, 2011; Murakami, 2012; Rousseau, 2012). His government did nothing to try to restore social bonds, reinforce the democratization of the judicial system, or tackle any other important human rights issues. Instead, as we have shown in the case of Huanca Sancos, the State arrived in rural communities in the form of military presence and social programmes to fight poverty (Ulfe and Málaga Sabogal, 2017a, 2017b). The reparations programme ended up as just another element in this social policy puzzle.

Victims under the lens of reparations

Reparation programmes have a long history, one that can be traced back to World War II when Germany and Japan had to pay compensation to other countries for damage caused (García Godos, 2008; Mani, 2005; Torpey, 2005). These programmes evolved to include antiracial rallies for African Americans and indigenous groups in the United States and in Canada, respectively (Torpey, 2005). Since the 1990s, when many countries came out of a series of civil wars, reparations became a vehicle for the restitution of dignity, the bestowal of rights to citizens, and a promise not to repeat past crimes. This is precisely how they are framed under international human rights laws, especially by the United Nations (De Grieff, 2006). Reparations became an important tool and agenda for transitional justice programmes. But, as De Grieff (2006: 457) points out, there is an intrinsic impossibility grounded in any reparations programme – there is no exact compensation for a damage done to someone.

Since the early moments of the armed conflict in Peru, there were discussions about who could carry the tag of victim. After the widely publicized case of Edmundo Cox Beuzeville who was captured in 1981 and tortured in prison, an implicit agreement was accepted among human rights organizations: the victim had to be pure, clean, and innocent. It was still 1981 when Cox’s case was publicized and championed by a sector of the Catholic church (he was a bishop’s nephew) and the left, denouncing the abuses of the state. The government’s response was categorical: ‘If the Church wants to canonize one of these terrorists, so be it’ said Peruvian president, Fernando Belaúnde (Youngers, 2003: 88). Shortly after, it became evident that Cox was indeed a high-ranking member of the Shining Path and since then human rights organizations have been more careful in giving their support to particular cases. It became a standard procedure to run background checks on the supposed victims of state repression to avoid another Cox situation. The notion of a clean and pure victim remained in the public imagination and set the ground for the discussions regarding the rights to reparations. In the particular context of the armed conflict, being free of any links to the Shining Path became mandatory in order to be recognized as a ‘legitimate’ victim. This applied in both urban and in rural areas, perpetuating the long living myth of the apolitical peasant or apolitical peasant community. ⁴ This context provided a fertile ground for transitional justice policies that tend to establish clear-cut oppositions between victims and perpetrators (among others, see Castillejo, 2015; Hayner, 2010).

Fujimori’s decade in power ended in 2000 when a transitional government called for elections and approved the creation of a truth commission with the mandate to uncover what happened between the years 1980 and 2000. The Truth Commission was created in 2001 under Alejandro Toledo’s government and was later renamed as Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Truth and Reconciliation Commission). As a plan that groups different programmes, Programa Integral de Reparaciones (PIR, Comprehensive Plan of Reparations) is first mentioned in the conclusions and recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003). There, the plan is proposed as a way to resolve the great historical gap between the Peruvian state and its society. PIR includes a programme for economic compensation that targets both individual persons and collective groups, like associations of victims or peasant and indigenous communities (Ulfe, 2013). It also includes a programme for educational reparations (Jave and Ayala, 2017), housing (Ramírez and Scott, 2019), mental health and symbolic reparations (Guillerot, 2019).

PIR was born in 2006 with two programmes or offices as its pillars. The first one is the Consejo Multisectorial de Alto Nivel (High Level Multisectorial Council or CMAN in Spanish) that gives compensations, and the Consejo de Reparaciones (Council for Reparations) that decides who receives or becomes a beneficiary of the compensation programme. The Council works with Registro Único de Víctimas (RUV, Registrar of Victims). To be registered in this database and become a potential beneficiary of PIR, people must prove that they were victims of torture, sexual violence or the killing of a direct relative (‘types’ of damage suffered). Registering in this database entails that the person is recognized as a victim of violence. Thus, being a victim becomes a new category of citizenship. This category forever links the victim with Peru’s recent period of violence.

Despite its seemingly universal character, this condition of victimhood is reserved only to some. PIR’s article 4 (Congreso de la República del Perú, 2005) indicates that there are some people who cannot be considered as potential victims of the 1980–2000 armed conflict period: those with links to subversive groups and those who already received any kind of reparation from the state. These people cannot receive economic reparations or become beneficiaries of the reparations programme. However, as the right to reparation is inalienable, they still have the right to resort to judicial means. For instance, Gladys Carols Espinoza Gonzáles, member of the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA), ⁵ was detained in 1993, tortured and sexually abused. She demanded justice, reparations and compensation from the Peruvian State. She presented her case to the Inter-American Human Rights Court, receiving a favourable judgement (Espinoza Gonzáles vs Peru, 2004).

PIR’s article 4 builds upon the idea of a ‘legitimate victim’ (Robin Azevedo, 2021: 99) who is not considered guilty of having been involved with any of the subversive groups. Manrique (2014) states that in Peru the only way to demand the restitution of human rights is from a position of innocence. This is, however, a very controversial issue regarding human rights and the way the politics of reparation work in the Peruvian case. Human rights are supposed to be inalienable, part of the basic human condition. Furthermore, the false dichotomy of innocent/guilty obscures the nuances of what happened in Peru. This idea makes it hard to understand how this same society produces victims and perpetrators, and how the same person can be a victim and perpetrator under different circumstances. Angélica, who was a child at the time of her relatives’ killings, cannot possibly be called a perpetrator but she is still not ‘clean’ enough to be considered a victim by the state. PIR works as a legal framework that defines who is an innocent victim, which plays a role in the political battles fought in the realm of political subjectivities.

One realm in which these experiences were openly narrated was the public hearings that took place during the work of the TRC. According to Rodríguez Maeso (2012), testimonies provided in public hearings constitute a version of ‘historical truth’ (p. 25). The author analysed testimonies provided to the Peruvian TRC and to the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) in Guatemala as political struggles that represent relationships of power and negotiations between the so-called victims and the State. In both the Peruvian TRC and the Guatemalan CEH, Maeso observes ethnic discrimination at play and an emphasis on depoliticizing the indigenous victim (Rodríguez Maeso, 2012: 36).

Moreover, Theidon (2007) notes how Truth Commissions require a gendered perspective, as women’s voices are still seldom heard by the rest of Peruvian society, and especially Peruvian institutions. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission incorporated a gendered perspective, but this viewpoint only appeared in the final stages of its work, and not when it was first conceived (Theidon, 2007; Ulfe and Romio, 2021). Also, this gendered perspective included the voices of women, but not girls. The recent work of the Dirección General de Búsqueda de Personas Desaparecidas (DGBPD in Spanish) in Peru challenged the victim profile depicted in the TRC Final Report, concluding that a large number of female children remain disappeared (Ulfe and Romio, 2021: 399–400). In the end, the victim is a public political subject whose subjectivity is limited by transitional justice technologies, and by his or her performance as testimony-giver of a traumatic event.

In this sense, the Peruvian Law of Reparations seems especially restrictive when compared to other Latin American regulations on the matter. In Colombia, for instance, immersed in an armed conflict for more than 50 years, the Victims’ Law includes the restitution of land and land property. This applies to all victims of the conflict without taking perpetrator status into account. The victims are given priority access to state services and their entire families can claim comprehensive reparations (Ministerio del Interior y de Justicia de Colombia, 2011: 7).

Reparation programmes are also forms for restitution of citizenship rights prior to the act of violence. As Povinelli (2002) writes regarding the Australian case and the quest of aboriginal populations to be considered historical citizens, reparation programmes become key to the emergence of new forms of citizenship. In the Australian case, it would be the construction of a multicultural nation. In the Peruvian case, as well as in other post-conflict societies, this means the appearance of the victim as a citizen in the nation-state. However, article 4 of PIR indicates otherwise that not all who were involved in the armed conflict can claim the right of victimhood, and thus, that of citizenship.

Angélica’s memories

It was 2013 and we had been going to Huanca Sancos for a few months collecting stories about reparations when we first heard of her. The people who first told us about her were not sure if she would be willing to talk. We were given a phone number and, after a quick call, we scheduled a meeting under the midday sun in Huanca Sancos’ main square. ⁶ Angélica started her story by telling us that both her parents were killed, but since they had ties to the Shining Path, she could not register in the RUV. What followed was a story of loss and pain that went back to the portrait of a memory, a frozen memory like the ones described by Hirsch (1997). This was not a secondhand memory, frozen because of the way in which it was told by others over and over again. As opposed to the next generation that learnt of the conflict through whispers and half stories of their parents and relatives, Angélica was there, and she saw it happen. Angélica’s was not a post-memory, but a child-memory: half absurd, half inexplicable, entirely traumatic. She was 6 years old when most of her family was killed, some even in front of her.

She told us about her mother’s death. That she was forced to receive ‘those people’ [Shining Path militia] in her home. That her dad did not want to ‘involve’ her mom. That ‘people from other places kept coming to their house, looking for him, for Olegario’. That he pushed Angélica’s uncles, Nicanor and Wilber ‘Curacha’, into ‘joining’ as well. That her parents did not live together. That ‘them, those people that came from afar, were carrying weapons. They were not from here, they were white, blue-eyed, curly-haired. They forced my mom to attend [those meetings]’. What Angélica was describing to us were the escuelas populares or people’s schools, the centres of formation for Shining Path’s recruits. Her mom had to prepare food for these sessions. Since they lived close to Angélica’s grandparents, she spent a lot of time being taken care of by them while her mother was busy. Although she did not pursue economic compensation for other relatives killed who were undoubtedly members of the Shining Path, Angélica believed that her mom was innocent and that she had a right to reparations for her death.

Angélica’s mother was killed in March of 1983, but her death was not registered in any of the official records. After her death, Angélica spent a few days at the house of her grandma’s sister, Marciana Quichua. Her grandma came looking for her and told her that Angélica’s mom had been killed by the police, who had come into their home and ‘killed her right off’ (‘la han asesinado a ella primerito’). Angélica, who was 6 years old at the time, moved in with her other grandparents, Zenón Curitumay and María de la O, because her maternal grandma was too old and too poor to care for her.

In Angélica’s story, the dates are all mixed up even though the order of the consecutive killings of her family members is clear. Like many other victims’ testimonies, hers is sometimes messy and she may not remember who was killed when, but she definitely knows who was killed first, and who followed. One night, her grandparents Zenón and María did not come back home. She found her way to Lucanamarca’s main square. It was nighttime and she saw them tied up [amarraditos] on one of the benches. ‘The town [el pueblo] said we are going to kill. Most of them, almost all, had sticks’. She did not see it, but she heard her grandparents’ screams. She ran back to her grandparents’ place, but the door was closed so she spent the night hiding away, crying and feeling terribly cold. She then went to her other grandma (actually, her grandaunt and Zenón’s sister), Leonora Curitumay, with whom she lived for a year. The problem was that Leonora was also scared to have her around, and the kid seemed to have a target on her back. Angélica moved again, this time to live with her uncle, Baldomero.

Why were adults scared of having Angélica around? She did not really talk about the reasons, but it was obvious back in the day that having her at home was like having bits and pieces of her father’s history. In all of the death that surrounded her, she barely mentioned her father, Olegario Curitumay, Lucanamarca’s Shining Path leader. His was the first in a long line of deaths that Angélica had witnessed in one way or another. Although she did not know about his death at first, it soon came back to haunt her and the rest of her family.

Angélica’s father, Olegario, was not the only member of his family to fall during the armed conflict. His brother Nicanor was killed in 1983, and his half-brother Wilber ‘Curacha’ disappeared sometime between 1983 and 1984. Since Baldomero, the youngest of Olegario’s brothers, did not have children of his own, he took Angélica to live with him and his wife. But Angélica always wanted to leave. She never felt protected, she actually remembers the beatings and the enormous amounts of work that she was objected to. ‘It’s not like having your own parents’, she said.

Jessaca Leinaweaver (2012) calls this ‘child circulation’, a kinship practice that consists in resettling children without parents, a practice that is found in different cultures around the world. Leinaweaver studies this process of displacement and resettlement of girls and boys in Ayacucho through different archives of adoption and also through the study of specific cases. At the end of her research, she found that the violence that brought on a higher degree of poverty in Ayacucho also affected mostly girls, who were constantly resettled with new families, many times as working hands. These girls ended up in homes of relatives, both in cities and in major towns. In Angélica’s case, her way of escaping this cycle was to get married at a very young age without a chance to finish school. A victim of circumstance, historical turns and gender expectations, Angélica scrambled to make her own family and take her fate into her own hands.

Being in limbo

The condition of ‘being’ a victim does not transform subjects into citizens. There is a subjacent tension between being a victim and a citizen. The Peruvian state seems to work against the possibility of constructing citizenship. Reparations, in its original intention, were meant to be a form of retribution, restoration of rights, reconstruction of a broken social body and non-repetition. Nonetheless, the reparations programme in Peru in its current form often implies the reduction of a person to its condition of victimhood, rather than a subject who not only has rights but also a voice to claim them. The partial result is a citizen who carries the weight of a past that becomes a filter through which their present will be built, as Sanford (2003) suggests. Still, the condition of victimhood allows for certain forms of agency and new (or different) relationships with the state to emerge (see Ulfe and Málaga Sabogal, 2021a).

What makes one more or less of a victim? Are there different degrees of victimhood? Elvira, a member of the local landowning elite of Huanca Sancos, did not perceive herself as a victim although her family was directly on the receiving end of Shining Path violence. She believed that economic compensation was meant for the poor and that the monetary value (according to her, ridiculously low) would not even cover the hours spent in bureaucratic efforts to achieve the outcome. ‘Why humiliate oneself for such an underwhelming amount of money?’ Elvira could afford not to pursue economic compensation. ⁷ However, that was not a choice for Angélica.

For Elvira, whose family was never invisible and whose last name was known even in the capital of the region, reparations were ‘just’ money. In our reading, her economist approach to reparations is a sign of her class belonging. For our other interlocutors, reparations were not ‘just’ about the money. They were a recognition of wrongdoing, and for many, they were at least a fragmentary restoration of dignity. People who were constantly persecuted by the State for their supposed ties to the Shining Path saw reparations as a way to reclaim their innocence. In a reparation system that sees victims as ‘clean’ and apolitical, being officially recognized as a victim bears a mark of purity.

The neoliberal playing field implemented in the 1990s has permeated the relationships at the centre of the social programme of reparations. Efficiency, depoliticization of the market and the value ascribed to individual action and decision-making processes above collective ones are all key in understanding the politics behind reparations. In a context that presents the state as a mere observer in an increasingly privatized ‘public’ sphere, a large gap keeps growing between the social programme’s design and politics, and people’s everyday struggle to be counted as part of this social programme.

Being a Quechua-speaking woman, Angélica embodies the idea of a subject subjected to these social programmes. Elvira, for example, provides a class-insight to reparations and how it seems to be perceived as yet another social programme for poverty alleviation. Angélica has never given her testimony in public or to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru (2001–2003). However, this is not the situation of other children of Shining Path members. José Carlos Agüero, a well-known Peruvian historian and poet, published an acclaimed best seller book Los rendidos (The surrendered) (2015), in which he tells the story of his parents. Both his father and his mother were members of the Shining Path and were killed horrendously. In his book, he tries to think about his parents and the (im)possibility of considering them as full citizens. He speaks about pardon in social terms, a pardon that never arrives for his parents who are dehumanized in public discourse, as were many other men and women accused of being involved with the Shining Path. But Agüero has the possibility to speak out in his writings, whereas Angélica does not. In this article, we have shown how gender struggles, ethnic discrimination and class play an important role in these mnemonic wars. The victim should not only be clean and pure, but the indigenous victim should also perform his or her victimhood within the frames imposed by transitional justice procedures and by the state (see Tejero, 2014). Sometimes these issues are not evident at first, but they quickly become apparent for the people who try to establish themselves as potential beneficiaries of PIR: they need not only to register as victims (and officially be recognized as such), but their testimony should also operate in a specific institutional context. Before being recognized as valid, Angélica’s testimony had to be cleaned of her father’s past and faults. Mnemonic wars imply different levels of confrontation, and invisibilization of subjects and citizenships. Again, not everyone is recognized as a valid victim, and without that recognition one cannot claim the right to reparations.

Conclusions

The next time we saw Angélica, she was crossing the main square with her little blue cart and her embroidered floral tablecloth. She was ready to start selling her traditional ‘trucha frita’, fried trout in the market. She brought some already fried from home and others fresh and ready to be prepared on the spot. She would serve them with potatoes and onions. Since the beginning of our conversation, she told us that she had finally managed to register in the Reparations programme for her mother’s case. She was also proud to tell us that her eldest son had been admitted into an important university to study civil engineering. Laughing, she said that she did not even finish primary school but that her son would be a professional. Her remaining three children were still in school, about to follow their brother’s steps.

At the time, we were working on a photographic exhibition of Huanca Sancos’ recent past, and so we asked her if she had any photographs from her childhood or her early adolescence. She said that from her ‘época de huérfana’, orphan stage, she did not have any photographs. That she always lived half-hidden in Sancos at her uncle Baldomero’s house. ‘I only have memories in my head’, she would say. This time she told us about her other sisters who lived in Lima and who changed their names so that they would not be associated with their father. Still, she also told us that in Lucanamarca it was not a problem anymore to carry the last name Curitumay. What did remain were legal issues associated with fights over land and such problems that were made even stronger by the violence, the lack of trust, and the lack of clarity in the hereditary succession of a generation that has been affected by so much death. In her own words: ‘We didn’t find any of the legal books of those years, it was all burned by the Shining Path’. Angélica, who for years could not prove herself to be ‘victim enough’, could not claim her right to her properties either.

In this article, Angélica’s story brings to the forefront the ways in which normative and institutional frameworks come to life through people’s experiences, people who are not always interested in fitting into the role that the state assigns them. In a social space of competing memories and contradictory accounts of the dealings of both the subversive groups and the state, refusing to renounce one’s history and right to reparations becomes a political statement. Mnemonic wars, although apparently fought mostly on an institutional and state level, always involve people on the ground, be it as protagonists, forsaken and uncomfortable pieces, or the ones who bear the consequences of their battles.

In the current state of affairs in Peru’s reparation legislation, ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ are mutually exclusive terms, terms that do not allow us to understand the complexities of living in a permanent conflict zone. The way the Reparation Programme works to make tangible and concrete people’s sufferings makes little sense in a context in which equivalences are impossible to attain.