At The Edge of The Peruvian Truth Commission: Alternative Paths To Recounting The Past

At the Edge of the Peruvian
Truth Commission: Alternative Paths

to Recounting the Past
Cynthia E. Milton
In the winter of 2003, the Peruvian Commission for Truth and Reconciliation
(hereafter CVR) displayed a series of over two hundred photographs documenting
violence from 1980 to 2000 as part of its efforts to remind Peruvians of events in
the recent past: just as Peru was returning to elections after extended military rule
(1968 – 80), the Maoist insurgency Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) launched a
“people’s war” in May 1980 by burning ballot boxes in a small town in Peru’s center-
south highlands. This act was followed by years of violence by this group against
the people it claimed to represent, the peasantry. The state also committed human
rights violations in the name of suppressing subversion. Caught in the crossfire,
highland communities suffered a devastating loss of life and outward migration to
regional capitals. The 2003 exhibition’s title, Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar (To Remem-
ber), solicited Peruvians to remember this “time of fear” (manchay tiempo) in the
country’s two official languages, Quechua and Spanish. It may seem surprising that
a country with a population of some 28 million would need to be reminded of what
took place: 69,280 people dead or disappeared, over 43,000 orphans, and some
600,000 internal refugees in the preceding twenty years. An underlying premise
of this photography exhibition is that “truth” comes in many forms, not just written
records or recorded testimonies. For Peruvians to recount and reconcile with the
past, they must also see it.
Radical History Review

Issue 98 (Spring 2007) doi 10.1215/01636545-2006-025
© 2007 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

This article shares the premise that the past is expressed through many
media outside of formal venues of truth telling and truth seeking such as truth com-
missions and trials. Truth commissions are both the product of historical processes
and the sites of production of historical sources about the past. As such, truth com-
missions present a fascinating opportunity for historians to look into the past and see
how that past is constructed through truth commission narratives.1 Yet such official
venues of truth seeking are not the only paths to the past. In the case of Peru and
elsewhere, the social opening that gave rise to the CVR also opened spaces for pub-
lic discussion and “speaking truth to power” that were previously unavailable, thus
allowing for a flood of alternative forms of historical representation that fell outside
the scope of the CVR: for instance, visual and performance art, memory sites, cin-
ema, stories, humor, rumor, and song.2 This essay considers the formation of some
of these unofficial modes of truth telling as well as the historical narratives that they
relate, focusing on the weeks surrounding the submission of the final Peruvian truth
commission report.
The consideration of various manifestations of truth seeking and truth telling
in Peru is an investigation into what constitutes “historical evidence,” how it comes
into being through unofficial venues, as well as an analysis of the past recounted
and remembered. This article calls for an expansion of the archive to include other
repositories of memory and history beyond state-produced and written records.3
Such an approach is all the more pressing for social groups for whom the written
record excludes their experience and where the presence of the state is weak — such
as the Peruvian highland communities most heavily affected by the violence.
Leading Up to a Truth Commission

Recent attempts in Peru to recount and reconcile with a violent past locate this
violence within the context of long-standing ethnic and regional divisions present
since the colonial dual republics and continuing into the period of independence.
Since the nineteenth century, the highland population, principally of indigenous
descent, has been elided from accounts of Peruvian patriotism and nation forma-
tion, both creole and mestizo projects.4 Following through the twentieth century,
political inclusion necessitated a conversion to “modernity,” making “common sense”
discrimination against those who remained culturally and physically distant from lo
moderno.5 Despite the rare effort to engage indigenous peasants in national-level
politics such as through the Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tawantinsuyu in the
1920s, popular organizations and the Peruvian Left of later generations continued
to “de-Indianize” political identities, effacing ethnicity with the class-based category
of campesino or “peasant.”6
The question of land seemed to lie at the heart of Peruvian political struggles
in the 1960s.7 By 1965, 0.1 percent of the population held over 60 percent of culti-
vated lands. Land seizures and union organizations led by Hugo Blanco in the La
Milton | At the Edge of the Peruvian Truth Commission
Convención and Lares valleys in the department of Cuzco encouraged others such
as the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaira (MIR) and the Ejército Nacional de
Liberación (ELN) to attempt to foment similar transformations and to ignite revo-
lutions in the vein of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.8 The reformist military regime of Gen-
eral Juan Velasco Alvarado responded in part to these demands through agrarian
reform and a wave of nationalization of natural resources. Preempted by Velasco’s
reforms, impaired by rivalries within the Peruvian Left, as well as influenced by
the Sino-Soviet split and the Cuban Revolution, different peasant mobilizations,
political parties, and guerrilla movements were unable to unite in a common cause.9
Furthermore, the period of agrarian reform ushered in new forms of political orga-
nization, new political spaces, and new brokers who mediated between rural and
urban settings; yet the weak and fractured state could not respond adequately to
their demands.10 One result was a growing disillusionment with state politics. As
Florencia Mallon notes of Andahuaylas’s agrarian struggles in 1974, a region with
a long history of land disputes, the seeds of the Shining Path were planted in this
period. Perhaps the most alarming of these “shining omens” was the belief that the
total destruction of the state through popular war was the sole means to change.11
It was on the bedrock of centralism and racism, in the aftermath of the fail-
ure of Velasco’s “revolution from above” and in the presence of an inchoate Peru-
vian Left, that the radical Shining Path emerged in the department of Ayacucho
and quickly spread through the highlands.12 Various human rights groups that had
formed to press land and labor demands in the 1960s and 1970s expanded in the
1980s in response to violence in the departments declared by the state as emer-
gency zones. 13 Highland communities, leaders, activists, and human rights workers
were caught between two interpretations as either pro-Senderista or promilitary,
as a result becoming casualties of Shining Path, military, and paramilitary forces.14
Human rights groups spoke out against abuses committed by the Shining Path and
the armed forces and advocated a nonviolent solution to Sendero. They received
testimonies, documented human rights abuses, and provided assistance, legal and
otherwise, to those accused of terrorism, to the families of the disappeared, and
to the growing number of internal refugees. Yet some government discourse and
media denounced these nongovernmental organizations as Sendero sympathizers,
thus imbuing the term human rights with negative connotations.15 Sendero Lumi-
noso, for its part, targeted activists and humanitarian members who sought a leftist
alternative to Sendero’s violent trajectory; for instance, Shining Path members killed
the activist and vice mayor María Elena Moyano in Villa El Salvador.16 Highland
communities who sought a third path, neither Sendero nor military, faced reper-
cussions from both sides.17 Furthermore, armed conflict between Sendero and the
military exacerbated intra- and intercommunity violence.18 It was not until the rise
of community self-defense patrols (rondas) and the capture of the Sendero leader
Abimael Guzmán in 1992 that the “time of fear” subsided, though authoritarian
rule under Alberto Fujimori continued until his self-exile in 2000.19 In sum, during
three democratically elected governments (Belaúnde Terry, García Pérez, and the
early Fujimori governments) the worst violence and human rights violations suffered
in Peruvian republican history came to pass: according to the CVR, their “statistics
exceed the number of human loss suffered by Peru in all the external and civil wars
that have happened in its 182 years of independence.”20
In the euphoric aftermath of the massive civil society protest, the pinnacle
of which were the March of the Four Quarters (la Marcha de Quatro Suyos) and
the fall of Fujimori, a truth commission stood out as one of the possible options for
Peru’s move away from authoritarianism and toward democracy. In July 2001, the
interim government of Valentín Paniagua launched a formal inquiry into the pre-
ceding twenty years, the Comisión de Verdad, an established mechanism used by
other countries in transition (e.g., Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and South Africa).
Human rights groups and the government’s Defensoría del Pueblo (an autonomous
organization that defends the constitutional rights of individuals and communities)
provided much of the guidelines for the truth commission.21 As president, Alejandro
Toledo kept the truth commission but added the term reconciliation to the commis-
sion’s title — and implicitly to its objectives — and changed the composition from
seven to twelve commissioners and one observer.22 These additions might be seen as
an ambivalent effort to broaden his support base by courting both the armed forces
through the appointment of a retired lieutenant general and human rights groups
through the appointment of the executive secretary of the Coodinadora Nacional de
Derechos Humanos (National Coordinator of Human Rights).23 In total, the CVR
had a staff of over eight hundred people who collected testimonies in Peru’s twenty-
four departments, with a focus on the areas most affected by the violence. The truth
commission’s mandate was to “shed light on the process, the facts, and the respon-
sibilities of terrorist violence and the violation of human rights produced since May
1980 until November 2000, attributed as much to terrorist organizations as to state
agents, and in this way propose initiatives toward affirming peace and agreement
between Peruvians.”24
The CVR submitted the Informe final (Final Report), based on almost seven
teen thousand testimonies, to President Alejandro Toledo on August 28, 2003, in
Lima and the following day to the community of Ayacucho. Seventy-five percent of
the dead and disappeared during this twenty-year period were non-Spanish (mainly
Quechua) speakers from rural regions. The regions hardest hit were isolated small
towns in the Peruvian highlands (in the departments of Ayacucho, Huancavelica,
Apurímac, Junín, and San Martín), representing 85 percent of the victims. Many
of these towns were literally pueblos perdidos, small forgotten villages and hamlets
with difficult access to urban centers.
While the CVR emerged at an important historical opening in Peru, at the
international level, the CVR appeared at a time when truth commissions in vari-
ous shapes burgeoned.25 Coached by international consultants such as the Inter-

national Center for Transitional Justice and encouraged by national human rights
groups, the Peruvian CVR was able to build on and to go beyond other truth and
reconciliation commissions (TRCs). Despite having the benefit of other countries’
experiences with truth commissions, the CVR faced similar constraints: the CVR
had a confined period to conduct investigations into the previous twenty years (the
commission had an original mandate of eighteen months, with the possible exten-
sion of five months), limited resources, and difficulties translating from Quechua
or other indigenous languages into Spanish.26 Both South Africa’s TRC and Peru’s
CVR worked in a media-driven and performative context. In South Africa, televised
highlights of the truth commission were shown on Sunday evenings, and there were
live radio broadcasts during the day. In the case of Peru, public hearings (audien-
cias públicas) were planned as performative acts in which the commissioners could
“fulfill [the Peruvian] obligation to hear and make heard the victims.” From these
public hearings, the CVR gathered over four hundred testimonies that testified to
over three hundred cases of gross human rights violations.27 These public hearings
were unique for truth commissions in Latin America.28
Compared to other TRCs, the CVR had a broad mandate. For instance, the
CVR scope was considerably wider than that of Chile’s truth commission (known
as the Rettig Commission, 1990 – 91), which at the time could investigate only the
cases that led to death and disappearance. In Peru, the CVR investigated assassina-
tions and kidnappings, disappearances, torture, and other serious wounds, violations
of collective rights of Andean and native communities, as well as other grave viola-
tions against people’s rights.29 Even the much-acclaimed TRC in South Africa had
a narrower focus since it considered only “gross human rights violations” that were
politically motivated, excluding daily violence committed as a result of apartheid.
Rather, the Peruvian commission firmly placed the internal conflict (1980 – 2000)
as a period in a longer national history of racism and isolationism that was both the
cause and a consequence of the violence. That is, in addition to determining the
responsibility for abuses and violations, identifying and reporting on the experi-
ences of victims, and developing proposals for reparations and reforms, the CVR’s
mandate also analyzed the political, social, cultural, and historical context that con-
tributed to the violence.30
That the Peruvian truth commission was able to structure a wider mandate
than many other TRCs has much to do with the historic moment of when it came
into existence. As Carlos Iván Degregori notes, other commissions emerged from
“pacted transitions.” In the case of Peru, it came more from a political vacuum left
by the “collapse of the authoritarian regime”: in the wake of Fujimori’s self-exile to
Japan, Peru abruptly transitioned away from authoritarian rule.31 In part, the rapid
pace of change permitted the formation of a truth commission and one with judi-
ciary capabilities, the only commission to do so.32
Another innovation of the CVR was the active incorporation of visual rep-
resentation in recounting a national narrative. The CVR drew on established grass-
roots organizations and groups previously engaged in visual and artistic expression
to document the past. For instance, the photo exhibition Yuyanapaq tried to involve
civil society through a public exhibit: many of these images would have already been
familiar to the public who had seen them in national newspapers; some images came
from the Social Photography Workshops (TAFOS), a grassroots photography group
in the mid-1980s to 1997 that gave cameras to individuals with little or no experi-
ence in photography as a means to document their surroundings.33 According to the
CVR president, Salomón Lerner, photojournalism provided an invaluable means
to reconstructing the past “that we should not forget or abandon to indolence.”34
The CVR also recruited the theater troupe Yuyachkani, which had been actively
engaged in politics since the late 1970s, to assist in informing highland communi-
ties of the CVR’s work and to encourage people to attend the public hearings. 35
The CVR understood implicitly that the social opening accorded to the truth com-
mission also extended to the public sphere more broadly, among nongovernmental
and grassroots organizations, artistic groups and individuals who had long expressed
truth narratives in various forms. These initiatives for recounting the past came
from outside of the commission. Indeed, the political shift that had allowed for a
truth commission also created a new public opening for giving voice to experience.
It is to these other modes of expression that this article now turns.
Informal Truth Telling and Alternative Paths to the Past

Public truth telling flourished at the edge of the CVR, offering personal and social
truths beyond official accounts. At various times these truths were either in consort
with the CVR or challenged official narratives of the past. However, the juxtaposition
is not necessarily between “popular truths” and “official truths”: “truths” are mal-
leable and contradictory; they are sites of conflict and fissures both within affected
communities and between civil society and the state. Yet despite the elusiveness of
truth or of determining specific truth narratives, the pursuit for unofficial means of
recounting the past is necessary for the writing of historical accounts of the past for
the future. These informal modes of truth telling form part of the historical struggle
over memory and play a part in the making of historical narratives.36
In the days and months surrounding the publication of the nine-volume
Informe final in August 2003, unofficial versions of events emerged through various
modes of truth telling outside of the CVR. The inclusion of alternative or unofficial
means of recounting the past favors the formation of public history as constructed
from below, that is, by nonstate actors. While the CVR findings contested the offi-
cial heroic narrative of the Fujimori government, still other narratives in the form
of individual and collective memories and artifacts abound. The importance given
here to alternative sources builds on the idea of “hidden transcripts” that emerge
at a historical juncture, in this case the erection of the CVR, and thus allow for
previously muted truths and silenced memories to come to the foreground through
various media.37
People’s desire to contribute to a public history and to record their experi-
ences can be found outside the CVR in films by the Ayacuchano filmmaker Palito
Ortega Matute and others, in regional artistic traditions such as the hand-painted
wooden boxes and boards (retablos and tablas) by Ayacuchano and Sarhua artists
depicting violence, the lyrics of folk songs (such as huaynos and pumpin) that give
testimony to the abandonment of natal lands and the disappearance of loved ones,
local memory sites that mark common graves and massacres, and abandoned villages
recently reinhabited, for instance Uchuraccay.38 In this article, I have chosen to look
specifically at three modes of truth telling during the months around the submission
of the TRC report: humor, performance, and art. For examples of humor, I have
drawn from editorial cartoons that appeared in leading Peruvian newspapers in the
weeks before and after the Final Report. The performative events described here
took place on the eve of the public presentation of the Final Report in the city of
Huamanga, the capital of Ayacucho.39 Examples of artistic expression come from an
art contest held by an NGO in Ayacucho and from retablos by Edilberto Jiménez on
display during the Final Report.40
In the weeks around the Informe final, editorial cartoons addressed the find-
ings of and the political reactions to the CVR. For the most part, these cartoons
used humor to highlight the limits of what the CVR could do in the face of a political
environment in which the will to acknowledge the crimes committed was noticeably
absent. Humor thus shed light on the continued legacies of the period of violence,
while also trying to push open the frontiers of discussion about the past. As Leigh
A. Payne observes, humor “makes trouble” not only for old regimes but also for tran-
sitional governments for failing to confront and challenge authoritarian versions of
the past, and thus their inability to bring about truth, justice, and reconciliation.41
This humor does not necessarily come from below to poke fun at dominant powers,
but can come from the same social class as the political elites, as was the case with
editorial cartoonists in Peru.
Cartoons raised several themes current in the discussions surrounding the
CVR. Cartoonists pointedly made fun of the fact that political parties in power
rejected the findings of the CVR (even before the publication of the Informe final).42
While the CVR names the armed group Sendero (54 percent) as the main perpe-
trator of violence and to a much lesser extent an urban-based, more traditional
leftist guerilla group the Revolutionary Movement of Tupác Amaru or MRTA (1.5
percent), the CVR also places responsibility in the hands of successive governments
and the military.43 Indeed, during the twenty years of armed conflict, three differ-
ent elected governments exacerbated the violence. The CVR clearly lays responsi-
bility with the governing political parties from 1980 to 2000 for having abdicated
10 Radical History Review
Figure 1. The Peruvian cartoonist Eduardo Rodríguez Díaz, known as “Heduardo,”

portrays a man commenting on the CVR: “They say that Abimael Guzmán and the other
terrorist leaders are also preparing their criticisms against the truth commission. This is
reconciliation! The [political parties] Unidad Nacional, APRA, Fujimori, Acción Popular,
the armed forces, and Shining Path all fighting very closely against the truth.”
Source: Perú 21, September 4, 2003
responsibility for assuring order to the armed forces at the expense of the constitu-
tion and human rights.44 Covering such a large swath of Peru’s political elite and
armed groups, one cartoonist from the centrist newspaper Perú 21, “Heduardo,”
thus finds an encouraging irony. Though far from forming a united front, Heduardo
claims that these oppositional forces held a common aim that reconciled their
differences: to criticize the truth commission. In this cartoon, Unidad Nacional,
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), Acción Popular, Fujimori, the
military, and Shining Path all oppose the final report. Some political parties hoped
to minimize the impact of the CVR denunciation; for instance, APRA worried that
the CVR report might cost Alan García the 2006 election. Heduardo’s cartoon,
however, does not include the center and center-left political parties, human rights
groups, and popular organizations, some of whom also criticized the report, but for
different reasons (fig. 1).
Cartoons also made humorous the very tense accord between the armed
forces and the Peruvian TRC. While CVR interviews with military personnel were
cordial and informative, no specific thematic or public assembly was held with them;
the military also did not officially acknowledge or respond to the CVR findings.45
According to the CVR report, nearly 29 percent of the cases ending in death or
disappearance were attributed to the armed forces, and another 6.6 percent to the
Milton | At the Edge of the Peruvian Truth Commission 11
Figure 2. The President of the

CVR, Solomón Lerner, throws
a bin full of garbage at the
armed forces saying that he is
not against the armed forces
as an institution, but only
against some “bad elements”
who committed crimes.
Source: Expreso,
August 31, 2003
police.46 The CVR report laid blame on the armed forces not simply for committing
excesses but for “generalized and/or systematic practices of human rights violations.”
However, in the same breath, the CVR wished to “pay homage to the more than a
thousand of courageous military agents who lost their lives or were left disabled in
complying with their duty.”47 The part played by the military during the preceding
twenty years thus posed a problem for the CVR: how to criticize the armed forces
and encourage reform without calling into question their national service? Such
an aspiration seemed perhaps unrealistic to political commentators such as Miguel
Ángel in his cartoon in figure 2, from the pro-Fujimori Expreso, who questioned if
one could really name some bad elements in the military without staining the mili-
tary as a whole.
One often-mentioned criticism of the CVR is that it opens old wounds.
Present in many countries making transitions away from periods of violence, this
concern is expressed by social groups who think that forgetting, or an implicit
accord to silence, leads to a form of reconciliation; the opposite — the discussion
of past harms — not only recreates the pain but may revive old antagonisms and
conflict.48 Another perspective might argue the contrary: that not cleansing these
wounds — the attempt to ignore them — will lead to social eruptions.49 Still others
might add that these wounds were never closed in the first place and that people
indeed want to speak and be heard.50
Advocates of the first perspective asking that we let the past lie undisturbed
may worry about further harm caused to the victims by unearthing truths and open-
ing old wounds. The cartoon in figure 3 from the weekly magazine edition of the
center-left La República portrays an Andean woman, similar to a pietà, carrying her
son (or another loved one) whose remains are disintegrating, condemned to peace.
As the title states, “There is no peace in the tomb of the assassinated.”
Attempts by much
of Peru’s political elite to ig-
nore the CVR ﬁndings did
not escape the attention of
cartoonists. In the cartoon
from the magazine insert for
the traditionally conserva-
tive newspaper El Comercio
(fig. 4), three figures repre-
sent the church, the financial
sector, and the military who
discuss the various mean-
ings of the phrase nunca
más, or “never again,” the
title originally given to the
Argentine report but used
broadly to refer to truth re-
ports in general. The mili-
tary man in a wheelchair
Figure 3. Source: Domingo: La Révista de la República,
is meant to remind us of August 31, 2003
Chile’s Pinochet, the proto-
type of a military cadre who abuses human rights but who stands for the military
as a whole. The tall, thin character might remind Peruvians of the cardinal who
worked against human rights claims and organizations while bishop of Ayacucho.51
The cardinal says to
the others, “We can do
like the Argentines did
with the book Nunca
Más.” “In order that it
never again happens?”
asks the banker. “No,”
responds the military
man, “so that we never
again speak of the
subject.”52
A more extreme
response to that of just
“not talking about it”
is an outright denial
of what took place. A
public opinion poll Figure 4. Source: Somos 16 (2003)
Figure 5. Source:
El Comercio,
August 28, 2003
taken by the human rights magazine Ideele right after the publication of the CVR’s
Final Report showed that most Limeños of various socioeconomic backgrounds
agreed with the CVR’s work. 53 Yet the political parties in power at the time, as
well as the former presidents, denied the CVR’s narrative of the systematic and
widespread violence by the armed forces.54 In figure 5, Death, wearing sunglasses
to protect him from the bright light of the CVR, states “nothing happened here,” in
reference to the violence between 1980 and 2000.
Some who disagreed with the CVR accused the Peruvian truth commission
of fabricating lies. For instance, on the morning of the handing in of the commis-
sion’s Informe final in Huamanga, APRA supporters, though seemingly few in num-
ber, attempted to drown out Salomón Lerner’s address to the public with shouts of
“Commission of Lies.” One protestor’s sign read “CVR + waste of money + lies (fig.
6).” The central criticism against the CVR lay in the commission’s projected number
of 69,280 dead and disappeared, almost three times the actual number of victims
registered by the CVR.55 This number continues to cause debate, but at the time,
this projection was taken up by two camps, those that supported the CVR and those
that wanted to undermine it. As Carlos Iván Degregori puts succinctly, those who
did not recognize the number of dead and disappeared simply wished to ignore
this as part of Peru’s “long period of forgetting, or, better said, custom of repressing
subaltern memories.”56 It is important to note that the criticism leveled against the
CVR came not from political elites alone, but from highland community members
as well. People who suffered violence

complained of the money spent to erect
a truth commission, feeling that this
money would have been better spent
on individual reparations or on pub-
lic works in the affected communities.
Others might have been frustrated that
their claims were not investigated or
that they were not called on to give their
testimony. The dissent could be quite
public; for instance, some ronderos,
members of peasant defense groups,
march in support of a former bishop of
Ayacucho and against the CVR on the
day of the report in Huamanga.
In an odd twist, some critics of
the CVR might even claim that the
truth is itself a form of terrorism. In
the cartoon in figure 7, Jesus advises Figure 6. An APRA supporter holds a sign accusing
the armed forces (in a marine uni- the CVR of wasting money and of telling lies.
form), the oligarchy (either a politician
or banker), and the church that “the
truth will set you free.” To which they
respond with the designation “Ter-
rorist.” This sentiment, conflating the
CVR with terrorism, is one forwarded
by those who felt that the CVR placed
too much emphasis on the responsibil-
ity of the armed forces for the violence
rather than on the Shining Path, a simi-
lar criticism long leveled against human
rights groups in general.57 For instance,
on the morning of the CVR ceremony
in Huamanga, Ayacuchanos awoke to
graffiti in their streets. The photo in
figure 8 shows a painted-over message:
“CVR=SL,” equating the truth com-
mission with the Sendero Luminoso.
Figure 7. In this cartoon, Jesus is accused of being
These silenced, denied, and dis-
a terrorist for telling representatives of the armed
torted truths stand in stark contrast to forces, the oligarchy, and the church that the truth
the lived memories of violence. On Au- will set them free. Source: Somos 16 (2003)
Figure 8. Graffiti in the streets of Huamanga (Ayacucho) equates the truth commission
with the Shining Path.
gust 28, 2003, the eve of the presentation of the Final Report in Huamanga, the
suffering of many and the loss of loved ones seemed far from having been silenced
or forgotten.58 In the main plaza, to one corner, a huge stage in the shape of a reta-
blo had been set up for the next day’s arrival of the commissioners. But outside of
this enormous stage, which conjured thoughts of E. P. Thompson’s remarks on the
performative state, other events around the plaza seemed spontaneous or assisted
through several NGOs.59 On the plaza, a poster board with several newspaper clip-
pings about the preceding twenty years offered a place for people to write down
their views. Some comments repeated messages of the CVR: “We have to remember
in order not to repeat”; “We have to know the truth,” and so on. Others were more
hostile: “Why such expense for a stage for a commission when people need repara-
tions?” Others still called the CVR a “Lie Commission.” Around the plaza, lining
the street, school children laid out flowers and chalk to design carpets, alfombras,
describing and depicting different aspects of the armed conflict. Among the many
carpets was the picture of a woman weeping with a crying child on her back and the
plea “don’t forget.” Another carpet was of Mamá Angélica, an Ayacuchana woman
who founded an association for the family members of the disappeared. In one al-
fombra children acted out death as portrayed by the grim reaper in one corner,
peace as an angel-dove in the opposite corner, and an Ayacuchano, as a shoe-shine
boy, in the center (fig. 9).
As the sun began to set, the word paz (peace) burned bright in the hillside
overlooking Huamanga. The Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados,
Detenidos y Desaparecidos del Perú (ANFASEP, National Association of Kid-
Figure 9. An alfombra (chalk carpet) with three school children depicting Death (the Grim
Reaper), a shoe-shine boy (an Ayacuchano), and Peace (an angel-dove). The angel-dove is
not present in this photograph.
napped, Disappeared and Detained Relatives of Peru), the Asociación de Jóvenes

Huérfanos Víctimas de la Violencia Sociopolítica (Association of Young Orphan Vic-
tims of Socio-Political Violence), APRA representatives, and other groups marched
around the main plaza, some carrying demands for justice and posing questions to
political authorities such as “Dónde están” (Where are they?; fig. 10).
Angélica Mendoza, known as Mamá Angélica, the president of ANFASEP,
led this candlelight vigil around the main plaza to remember the victims of violence
Figure 10. Family members march around the central plaza of Huamanga (Ayacucho)
asking where the disappeared are.
(fig. 11). In her arms, she carried a ribbon-adorned

cross with the painted words verdad and justicia
(“truth” and “justice”). In 1983, the army took
her son from her home. He remains disappeared
today. Before the audiencia pública in Ayacucho,
Mendoza gave the following testimony:
I asked them, “Why are you taking my son away”
and they said that he had to be a witness and that
they would give him back to me at the door to the
barracks. . . . “Piss off, you stupid old woman,” they
told me, “leave your son.” . . . When I caught up
with them at the door, they pushed me and beat
me. They wanted to put a bullet in me, they took my
son from me and put him in the army truck and I
started shouting like a mad woman. Since that day
I have been going all over the place day and night
trying to get them to return my son.60
After completing the walk around the

square, and a brief rain shower, the procession
gathered at one corner, near the big stage. A mod-
erator started to call out the names of towns and Figure 11. Angélica Mendoza leads a candlelight vigil
communities hard hit by the violence. After each around the main plaza on the night before the official
CVR ceremony in Huamanga (Ayacucho).
name, people replied “presente” (present). There
were chants of “Never Again,” “Death, Never
Again,” “Torture, Never Again,” “Disappearance, Never Again,” “Rape, Never Again,”
“Mass Graves, Never Again,” “Impunity, No,” “Justice, Yes,” “Peace, Yes,” “Life, Yes,”
“Truth, Yes!” After speeches from different local representatives, including Mamá An-
gélica, an APRA member also came to the microphone. His words remind us that per-
formative sites are not without contestation or competing truth and narrative claims.
He presented a more favorable interpretation of APRA’s role in the violence during
the government of Alan García than the one the CVR findings made public that same
evening in Lima. He tried to remind the public that APRA members had “put our
lives on the front line for this pueblo”; that they “had given [their] lives in exchange for
nothing”; and that “people don’t remember when Apristas are victims.”
Close by, mothers and wives held a symbolic pacha vela for their disappeared
and dead loved ones (fig. 12). The pacha vela is an Andean ceremony performed
after the death of a family member. The clothes of the deceased are laid out and
different family members take turns keeping the deceased company. On this eve-
ning, women laid out the clothes of their dead or disappeared relatives, with candles
and photos, and sat by them. In front, they placed a large banner with the word
“assassinated.”
Figure 12. Women gather in a circle in a symbolic pacha vela ceremony for their dead
and disappeared loved ones.
These public demonstrations against forgetting or repressing memories are a

kind of performative act, not necessarily tightly scripted, but nonetheless requiring
both performers and an audience (perhaps, at times, one and the same). As Laurie
Beth Clark argues, performance takes many forms, and in the context of post
authoritarian societies they often include performances “to tell the story of one’s
own wound.”61 While the CVR provided one forum for telling one’s story, indeed
giving “center stage to the formerly marginalized,” street theater and demonstra-
tions allow for the telling of individual and collective narratives through a different
script.62 As Clark notes, not only do these performances tell history but they also
make history by being an event in the contestation. One could further add that they
are active in the creation of narratives of the past.63
Art, like performance, gives individuals and collectivities the means to expose
truths about past violence, to contribute to the construction of social memories, to
assert an identity, and, perhaps, even to advance a kind of justice. As one prominent
South African artist working under apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s wrote of
his calling, “What the arts can do . . . is to construct images by whatever means pos-
sible to expose the nature of tyranny, to support the struggle for freedom, and give
dignity and respect to the lives living and the lives lost.”64
Artistic and performative acts stand in stark contrast to the forgetting or
ignoring advocated by much of the political elite who preferred to disregard or to
challenge the findings of the CVR. They also stand in contrast to another, perhaps
more well meaning, understanding of how individuals and communities “remem-

ber” what took place in the preceding twenty years in Peru. Some speak of memory
“recovery” — such as a group of NGOs that held an art contest for youth and adults to
record their experience entitled “Rescate por la memoria” (“Recovery of Memory”).
The above-described performances suggest, however, that these memories were not
consigned to the past, but permeate the present and are actively lived. Rather than
being rediscovered memories (that is, memories once forgotten or buried deep in
the individual or collective unconscious), these unexpressed memories have been
experientially meaningful throughout the previous political regimes, waiting for an
opportune forum and social opening for expression.
During the CVR’s investigations, a consortium of NGOs called Colectivo
Yuyarisun (We are Remembering) organized an art contest as part of their efforts
toward the diffusion of human rights and the establishment of a collective mem-
ory project in the department of Ayacucho. The contest entries were on display
in the SER (Asociación Servicios Educativos Rurales [Association of Rural Educa-
tional Services]) office of Huamanga at the time of the Final Report.65 Members
of Yuyarisun had traveled to community fairs in the eight provinces of Ayacucho,
where they advertised the contest “Rescate por la memoria” and invited youth and
adults who originated from these communities to express artistically their thoughts
about truth, justice, reparation, reconciliation, and the violence that they had lived
through in the years 1980 – 92. In total, 177 people participated in the contest, sub-
mitting 175 different works in the categories of poetry, stories (both comics and
short stories), song, and paintings.66
Human rights groups have long used art to depict communities and their
experiences. Drawing and painting contests held from 1984 – 96 encouraged youth
to paint daily life. These artistic entries, now held at the Centro Cultural de San
Marcos, have reached the status of folk art, pintura campesina, among limeño cir-
cles. Agronomists in the 1990s would ask peasants to “map” their communities and
agricultural practices (for instance, organizers from governmental antipoverty pro-
grams aimed at rural communities such as PRONAMACH). A decade later, similar
practices were employed to encourage participation in electoral campaigns and so
that community members could indicate potential problems such as the distance
between their homes and voting stations (e.g., the Institute for the Investigation and
Promotion of Development and Peace in Ayacucho [IPAZ]). Early maps might be
“drawn” by placing beans, while later techniques involved actual drawing. Groups
also used improvised plays for peasants to indicate community relations and needs.
More recently, in an attempt to ready communities to testify before the CVR, mem-
bers of the SER organized workshops with community members and leaders in
which they “mapped” scenes of violence. While a few of the original maps remain, a
second workshop was held after the CVR as a means to record this information.67
The various art forms included in the 2001 contest “Rescate por la memo-
ria” acted as testimonial accounts by individuals who at the time were children or
young adults and witnessed the violence committed by the armed forces and by Sen
dero Luminoso in their communities: torture, rape, disappearance, executions, and
clandestine graves. In the painting in figure 13, Alberto Contreras Oscco testifies
to the execution and mass burial of community members from Chungui, La Mar.
The presence of clandestine graves is a good example of memories silenced but not
forgotten. As the former CVR commissioner Degregori reflects, people spoke out
against the violation of human rights, which three years before the CVR would have
been unthinkable; the arrival of the CVR broke the fear that kept people silent. For
instance, at the beginning of their investigation, the CVR knew of some fifty mass
burial sites based on information from human rights groups. By the end of the CVR,
the number of clandestine graves exceeded four thousand, and forensic teams were
able to gather preliminary data for more than two thousand of them.68
But the fear of testifying before the CVR was not easily overcome and had
not completely gone. One comic strip entry for the contest, entitled Enchay (Cry/
Lament), tells the story of the arrival of the military in the town of Toto in Cangallo
in eight panels. Soldiers take prisoners to the military base, where the latter are
tortured, killed, and left to be eaten by dogs. Years later, migrants who had fled to
Figure 13. “Execution of inhabitants by the military in a clandestine mass grave in Chungi.”
By Alberto Contreras Oscco. Photo by Cynthia E. Milton, taken at the SER office in Ayacucho,
July 2003
Figure 14. In the last panel of

the comic strip Enchay by Aldo
Tudelano Guerra, a witness tells
a member of the CVR team who
is collecting testimonies about
disappearances that “I can’t
inform you. I am scared,” to
which the CVR member replies,
“All of your information will be
secret. Don’t be afraid.” Source:
Colectivo Yuyarisun, Rescate por
la memoria, 88
the coast return to their town after many years; some families are reunited while
others are left widowed and orphaned. In the final panel (fig. 14), the Comisión de
la Verdad arrives to gather testimonies, but one witness does not want to give his
testimony due to fear. Even though people had not forgotten what took place, their
fear cautioned them against speaking since they were still leery of the state in any
form, CVR or other.
Art documents well the reasons for the distrust of the state and the armed
forces. The upside-down world in which the armed forces harm rather than protect
Andean communities is a theme in Edilberto Jiménez’s one-floor retablo on display
along with several of his pieces at the Institute for Peruvian Studies during and after
the truth commission. In this retablo (fig. 15), the Ayacuchano singer and composer
Ranulfo Fuentes returns home from carnival, his face streaked with powder and
rain. But even though the celebrations of carnival are over, all in the world is not
set right: a cock crows in the light of the moon instead of in the morning, cats fight
on a rooftop, dogs bark. The armed forces, here the dark-hooded sinchis, brutally
attack the community rather than defending them. The sinchis take away men, and
when one woman tries to stop them, she is beaten. The men are thrown into a crev-
ice. Women, perhaps a mother and daughter, hide and weep in their home. In the
midst of this horrifying drama, Fuentes sings a song full of melancholy and mourn-
ing rather than the festive lyrics of carnival. In “Huamanguino,” Fuentes sings of
a resident of Huamanga who has disappeared from his home in the middle of the
night: “They have gotten him; they have taken him away.” Yet Fuentes’s song ends
with hope: “He will still come back; he will still arrive; like the rain for cultivation to
let the seeds sprout; like the sun at dawn; that the flowers bloom; and fruit opens.”69
The ﬂowers on the retablo doors bloom representing the suffering, the death, and
the hope for liberty of the Ayacuchano people.70 Thus, like the rains that accompany
carnival in the Andes, Fuentes and Jiménez express a hope for the future.
Figure 15. “Huamanguino” (“The Man from Huamanga”) by Edilberto Jiménez.

Photo taken at IEP, July 2003
One of the truths of the terror on which the CVR and art converge is the
gendered experience of the violence (see fig. 16). Men and women were affected dif-
ferently by the violence: over 75 percent of the victims were men over fifteen years
of age (most between the ages of twenty and forty-nine) because Sendero Luminoso
targeted local leaders or because the military disappeared them; most women who
died were the victims of indiscriminate violence and massacres leveled against the
communities. Because of their gender, women were subjected to rape and forced
domestic duties (such as cooking and tending to injured members of the armed
opposition and the military). Sexual violence went underreported to the Comisión
de la Verdad, a taboo truth made explicit in a few of the entries to the “Rescate por
la memoria” contest. But women were not passive victims alone: they participated
in Shining Path membership and also in the organization of communities against
violence. They searched for their disappeared relatives and cared for their families
in the absence of male family members.71
Interestingly, while women only made up a quarter of the participants in
the “Rescate por la memoria” contest, they accounted for nearly half of the entries
in the song category, and many also submitted pieces of poetry, perhaps reflecting
the strong oral and lyrical tradition of the region.72 Some entries offer a kind of op-
timism about peace and reconcilia-

tion. Such hopes are not necessarily
forwarded in a naive way, but are
complicated by the continued dif-
ficulties of Andean communities
who feel the large breach between
their experience and that of the rest
of the Peruvians. For instance, in a
poem entitled “Enjambre de Abe-
jas” (“Swarm of Bees”) by Rayda
Huayhua Huaraca from Chakiq-
pampa, Vinchos, the poet describes
a massacre in her village on San
Juan’s Day and the quest to identify
the remains of loved ones for burial.
She wants other Peruvians to know
of her and her community’s suffer-
ing. She argues against a forgetting
that would erase her identity and
that of others. The continued plight
of her community is evident in the
poverty of the children today. She
seeks both understanding and for-
giveness. Figure 16. “Tras la sombra del dolor” (“Behind the
Shadow of Pain”) by Luis Cuba Arango from the district
Hanging like abandoned nests of Pampamarca, Vinchos. Source: Colectivo Yuyarisun,
by carpenter birds Rescate por la memoria, 17
swarms of black bees, a hive without
honey
skulls of innocent campesinos.
II
As in the party of San Juan on June 24th
they left many scattered heads!
It is my soul that walks
it is my heart that cries out for justice
from the snouts of vagabond dogs.
III
Entire nights of candles
looking for my family’s body
pulling out carnivore’s claws
fighting in order to find a face
in order to give it an eternal burial and a goodbye.
IV
Sitting on the river banks
I cried tirelessly
in order that the river overflow
and all the world know
that the suffering of my pueblo is immense
and never will I be able to forget that unjustified slaughter.
V
Who will say who I was?
Who will say who he was or they were? I don’t know!
But I know very well that you cry in silence
upon seeing abandoned children, shoeless, malnourished
because of hunger and pain; God forgive them.73
This poem also expresses the notion that suffering is not limited to the past
but continues in the present and future. While this poet sees children’s poverty as
a legacy of the internal conflict, other artists more specifically place the violence
within the context of a long historical struggle. Art proposes an extension of the
historical narrative from 1980 to 2000 to a much earlier beginning date, locating
violence in the colonial and early republican period. This art is a reminder to his-
torians not to consider the period covered by the CVR as an isolated event, but
as a chapter in a long-standing story of injustice. Though the CVR unequivocally
stated that Peru’s deeply embedded history of racism and centralism permitted
both the violence and the elite and coastal indifference to the suffering of mainly
indigenous highland peoples, its historical narrative focuses on the twenty years of
violence from the first act of Sendero in 1980 until the fall of Fujimori in 2000. Yet
many artistic forms of expression, for example highland songs, some paintings in the
“Rescate por la memoria” contest, and the Yuyachkani theater troupe’s recent piece
Sin título: Técnica mixta (Untitled: Mixed Technique), place present-day Peru in an
ongoing struggle for human rights.
The historical roots of highland violence are the theme of Jímenez’s retablo,
titled “Hombre” (“Man”), after another of Fuentes’s songs composed in 1970 (fig.
17). In this huayno, Fuentes sings of money and wealth that cause the world’s ills.
He sings of wanting to be a condor that flies over continents to destroy the evils of
the world, defeat oppression, and give a helping hand to others. What he does not
want is the bloodstained world, ripping out the hearts of those who seek justice and
freedom.74 Created some time in the early 1980s and on display at the Institute
for Peruvian Studies during the CVR, this retablo breaks the tradition of many
floors but instead tells the story of highland repression and suffering in five compart-
ments. The rupture of retablo format might mirror changing themes by retablo art-
ists in response to the violence of the 1980s and the need to act as witness to them.
Figure 17. “Hombre” (“Man”) by Edilberto Jiménez. Photo taken at IEP, July 2003
In “Hombre,” Jiménez depicts the drama and central protagonists in Ayacucho’s

oppression since the nineteenth century. Clockwise from the center top, we see a
peasant begging for mercy from a landowner, a gold- and silver-pillaging, highland
boss (gamonal), a soldier and an exploiter fleeing from protest, and the tyranny of
a foreigner. In the next compartment, the wind blows against rocks and destroys
demons who represent all the harm done to peasants. At the center of the retablo is
a man, recalling Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, chained to Latin
America, with his blood spilling onto Peru and Ayacucho in particular. His bloodied
body sprouts two heads. According to the artist, the armed conflict of the 1980s
is part of a long history of violence, where despite protests, power is always on the
side of the “other” (the powerful, such as the gamonales, the landowners, the miner
owners, and the state), forming a permanent culture of exploitation and violence.75
What Jiménez reminds us of is that Ayacucho’s narrative is that of Peru and of Latin
America, placing this region’s experience in a larger geographic context and expand-
ing the violence of the 1980s to a much larger historical continuum of struggle, not
simply one launched by the Shining Path but by the exploitation of the colonial and
republican periods before.
Conclusion
Jiménez’s retablo and the different artistic, performative, and humorous accounts of
the internal conflict in Peru propose alternative truth narratives to that of the CVR.
These alternative narratives may include unacknowledged truths that emerged dur-
ing the CVR, ones either abandoned or silenced after the commission, for instance
the decision by some church members to reject human rights claims. Alternative
truth narratives might speak of taboo truths that remain unspoken or underreported,
such as sexual or intercommunity violence. Alternative truths might address the
propagation of lies and distorted truths as a means to confound, for instance, the
ongoing debate over the statistical methods used to count the number of dead and
disappeared, or claims that the CVR was unfairly hostile to security forces. Once
silenced truths were voiced as outed truths, such as the many clandestine burial
sites, truths continued to surface even after the end of the CVR’s mandate.76 And,
importantly, much of this art offers a different historical narrative, one much larger
than that of the years 1980 to 2000 studied by the CVR: one of political struggle
and violence throughout Peruvian history.
This article implicitly argues that while the CVR attempts to construct a
national narrative that dismantles the hegemonic, heroic, Lima-based narrative of
the Fujimori era (and before), historians should also be careful to include truths
and modes of truth telling that fall outside of official processes of truth seeking. It
is not a question simply of replacing an official memory with a popular memory (or
popular culture) that is more inclusive of marginalized groups, but rather one of
attempting to juggle (or layer or interweave) many narratives at the same time, even
when the truths therein contained are contradictory, complex, and even, perhaps,
of questionable truth value. Allowing for many truths is part of a larger memory
struggle to establish a narrative (or narratives) of what happened.
By expanding our repertoire of historians’ tools to include alternative forms
of historical evidence in circulation and their subsequent truth narratives, we draw
attention away from the privileged position given to truth commission reports as
primary conveyors of truth. We broaden the scope of possible alternative historical
sources, sites, and artifacts of memory, as well as consequent narratives that form
the individual and collective consciousness of the internal conflict. Such an approach
to truth telling potentially sheds light on truths omitted from official narratives and
permits the representation of diverse experiences beyond those recorded in written
and state-led accounts. Perhaps most important, these sources also testify to the
resilience of people and their ability to express and to represent for themselves their
diverse experiences in the aftermath of traumatic violence.
Notes
I thank many people in Peru for their assistance in gathering alternative sources and for helping
me understand this complex period, among them Gisela Canépa, Ricardo Caro, Fredy Cisneros,
Carlos Iván Degregori, Raúl Hernández, Edilberto Jiménez, Kairos Marquardt, Mayu Mohanna,
Ponciano del Pino, Javier Torres, and María Eugenia Ulfe. I also thank the two anonymous RHR
reviewers for their comments. Research for this essay was made possible by grants from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds Québécois de la
Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC). Many of the observations presented here come
from my field notes during the submission of the Final Report. All photographs are mine, as are
all translations, unless otherwise noted.
1. Both historians and truth commissions establish narratives of political violence providing
an explanation and interpretation of events. See Greg Grandin, “The Instruction of Great
Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina,
Chile, and Guatemala,” American Historical Review 110 (2005): 1, 46 – 67; and Charles
S. Maier, “Doing History, Doing Justice: The Narrative of the Historian and of the Truth
Commission” in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg
and Dennis Thompson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 261 – 78.
2. These eight modes of unofficial truth telling are discussed for various countries (for
example, South Africa, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand,
and the former Yugoslavia) in Ksenija Bilbija et al., eds., The Art of Truth-Telling about
Authoritarian Rule (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
3. For recent considerations of alternative sources and an expansion of historians’ archives,
see Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Steve J. Stern, Remembering
Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London, 1998 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998); and Fernando Coronil, “Seeing History,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 84 (2004): 1 – 4. Oral history is a well-established means of accessing
subaltern histories. For an exciting recent approach that combines oral accounts of violence
in highlands Peru with ethnographic drawings done in consort with those interviewed, see
Edilberto Jiménez, Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria (Chungui: Violence and Traces
of Memory) (Lima: Comisdeh, 2005).
4. Florenica Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One
Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nation Making in Andean Peru (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997).
5. As Marisol de la Cadena notes, the CVR served to break the unquestioned hegemony
of this supposedly commonsense response to Peru’s history of modernity. Marisol de
la Cadena, “Discriminatión étnica,” Cuestión del estado 32 (2003): 8 – 9; Marisol de la
Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919 – 1991
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
6. Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos.
7. Andean protest reaches back to the eighteenth century in the rebellions of Juan Santos
Atahuallpa and José Gabriel Túpac Amaru. A renewed wave of highland struggles took place
in the 1960s and 1970s. See Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness
in the Andean Peasant World, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987).
8. On the emergence of guerrilla groups in Peru during the 1960s, see Leon G. Campbell,
“The Historiography of the Peruvian Guerrilla Movement, 1960 – 65,” Latin American
Research Review 8 (1973): 45 – 70.
9. Ibid. See also Iván Hinojosa, “On Poor Relations and the Nouveau Riche: Shining Path and
the Radical Left,” in Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980 – 1995, ed.
Steve J. Stern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 60 – 83.
10. Through ethnography and archival accounts in Huanoquite in the department of Cuzco,
Linda Seligmann has traced the Shining Path back to the 1969 reform. See Linda
Seligmann, Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes,
1969 – 1991 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
11. Florencia Mallon, “Chronicle of a Path Foretold? Velasco’s Revolution, Vanguardia
Revolucionaria, and ‘Shining Omens’ in the Indigenous Communities of Andahuaylas,” in
Stern, Shining and Other Paths, 84 – 117.
12. Stern, Shining and Other Paths; Nelson Manrique, El tiempo del miedo: La violencia
política en el Perú, 1980 – 1996 (Time of Fear: Political Violence in Peru, 1980-1996) (Lima:
Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2002).
13. Coletta Youngers situates the beginning of Peru’s human rights movements in the repressive
aftermath of a general strike in Lima on July 19, 1977. Inspired by liberation theology,
progressive sectors of the Catholic Church such as the Episcopal Commission for Social
Action (CEAS) strongly supported these early human rights initiatives, as did, in a more
cautious way, some of the political parties of the Peruvian Left. Coletta Youngers, Violencia
política y sociedad en el Perú: Historia de la Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos
(Political Violence and Society in Peru: History of the National Coordinator of Human
Rights) (Lima: IEP, 2003), 29 – 57.
14. Ibid., 163 – 74.
15. Ibid., 147. Paramilitary groups intimidated and killed human rights activists such as Angel
Escobar (169 – 70). Jo-Marie Burt has argued that the government successfully weakened
civil society by equating protest with terrorism. “ ‘Quien habla es terrorista’: The Political
Use of Fear in Fujimori’s Peru,” Latin American Research Review 41 (2006): 3 – 62.
16. Excerpts of an interview with María Elena Moyano that include her call for a more unified
response from the Left are found in Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Robin Kirk,
eds., The Peru Reader: History, Culture, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1995), 371 – 76.
17. A film that depicts communities as caught in the crossfire is La vida es una sola (You Only
Live Once) (1992) by Marianne Eyde. See also Amnesty International, Caught between Two
Fires (New York: Amnesty International, 1989).
18. Kimberly Theidon, Entre prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la
reconciliación en el Perú (Among Close Ones: The Internal Armed Conflict and the Politics
of Reconciliation in Peru) (Lima: IEP, 2004).
19. Carlos Iván Degregori et al., Las rondas campesinas y la derrota de Sendero Luminoso
(The Rondas Campesinas and the Defeat of Shining Path) (Lima: IEP, 1996). Orin Starn,
Nightwatch: Politics of Protest in the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
20. CVR, Informe final, “Conclusiones generales,” www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php
(accessed December 11, 2005).
21. Youngers, Violencia política, 172, 437 – 38. Some prominent members of Peru’s human
rights movement saw the limits of what this commission could do given the restraint of
eighteen months to investigate the preceding twenty years. Then executive secretary of the
Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos, Sofía Macher, later nominated by Toledo

as a commissioner to the CVR, worried that the CVR could only create “a big inventory” of
facts. See “Piden apoyo politico para la commission de la Verdad” (“They Ask Support for
the Truth Commission”), El Comercio, July 8, 2001.
22. I thank the RHR anonymous reader for reiterating the importance of this shift for the
CVR. Though it is difficult to state the specific meaning of these changes, a concern
expressed at the time was that Toledo’s changes had compromised the CVR’s objectives
and possibilities for reaching truths. However, in regard to the addition of reconciliación
to the title, this theme was already on the lips of some commissioners. Gastón Garatea,
for instance, spoke of seeking reconciliation and healing wounds. See “Gastón Garatea:
Buscaremos reconciliación de los peruanos” (“Gastón Garatea: We Will See Reconciliation
of Peruvians”), El Peruano, July 7, 2001.
23. The original commissioners included academics (including the former rector of the
Universidad de San Cristóbal de Huamanga), human rights organizers, a fujimorista
congresswoman, and a Catholic priest who headed the Mesa de Concertación para la
Lucha contra la Pobreza (Forum on the Fight against Poverty): Solomón Lerner, Carlos
Tapia, Carlos Iván Degregori, Alberto Morote, Enrique Bernales, Beatriz Alva, and Gastón
Garatea. See Resolución suprema n. 330-2001-PCM, June 6, 2001 www.justiciaviva.org.pe/
comision/normas/norma2.doc (accessed December 11, 2005). After Toledo’s additions, the
commission included two more church representatives (including a Protestant evangelical), a
retired lieutenant general of the armed forces, another academic, and the former executive
secretary of the Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos: José Antúnez, Humberto
Lay Sun, Luis Arias, Rolando Ames, and Sofía Macher; Monseñor Luis Bambarén,
the Bishop of Chimbote, was named observer. On tensions around the nomination of
commissioners and the president-elect Toledo’s intended changes, see “Alva Hart pone a
disposición su cargo en Comisión de la Verdad” (“Alva Hart Makes Herself Available for the
Truth Commission”), El Comercio, July 10, 2001; “Toledo reestructuraría Comisión de la
Verdad” (“Toledo Would Restructure the Truth Commission”), El Comercio, July 13, 2001;
“Toledo evaluará cambios en la Comisión de la Verdad” (“Toledo Will Evaluate Changes in
the Truth Commission”), El Comercio, July 14, 2001.
24. See www.cverdad.org.pe/lacomisioin/cnormas/convenio25.php (accessed December 11,
2005).
25. On truth commissions, see Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror
and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001).
26. While Quechua has been one of Peru’s official languages since 1993, there is no program
of studies in translation, and there are therefore no trained professionals. As Carlos Iván
Degregori has pointed out, long-standing socioeconomic, linguistic, and gender divides
were recreated in the composition of the commission itself: among the CVR commissioners,
only one spoke and understood Quechua, while another partially understood, thus
maintaining a strong linguistic gap between the mainly middle-class, male (except for two
women) commissioners and the victims, 75 percent of whom spoke Quechua and other
native languages. Carlos Iván Degregori, “Heridas abiertas, derechos esquivos: Reflexiones
sobre la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación” (“Open Wounds, Aloof Rights: Reflections
on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”), in Memorias en conflicto: Aspectos de la
violencia política contemporánea (Memories of Conflict: Aspects of Contemporary Political
Violence), ed. Raynald Belay et al., (Lima: Embajada de Francia en el Perú, IEP, IFEA,
Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú, 2004), 82n22. Other Peruvians
were also well aware of the problem posed by the choice of commissioners. As Víctor Vich
has noted, “by speaking for the ‘other,’ in reality we are silencing the ‘other’ who could have
spoken for himself. On this point, the CVR starts with a central problem in that we do not
find in its composition a direct representative of the victims.” R. Víctor Vich, “La literatura,
la Comisión de Verdad, y el Museo de la Memoria,” Quehacer 132 (2001): 70.
27. The CVR held eight public hearings with victims or family members, seven public
assemblies, and five theme-based hearings (on subjects of antiterrorist legislation, displaced
persons, universities, women, and teaching). See www.cverdad.org.pe/lacomision/balance/
index.php (accessed December 11, 2005).
28. Amnesty International, Peru: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission; A First Step
towards a Country without Injustice (New York: Amnesty International, 2004), 3.
29. Article 3 of Decreto supremo n. 065-2001-PCM www.cverdad.org.pe/lacomision/nlabor/
decsup01.php (accessed December 11, 2005).
30. The objectives of the CVR can be found at www.cverdad.org.pe/lacomision/nlabor/objetivos
.php (accessed December 11, 2005).
31. Carlos Iván Degregori, “La Palabra y la escucha: Reflexiones sobre la Comisión de Verdad y
Reconciliación,” Sociolismo y participación 92 (2002): 95.
32. At the time of writing this article, these judicial trials are underway, though the scale
is limited. Of the 42 cases of gross human rights violations presented to the judiciary,
prosecutors have filed only 22 criminal charges; 389 members of the armed forces are under
judicial investigation, but so far none have been charged with human rights violations. César
Romero, “Ningún militar está condenado,” (“Not a Single Military Man is Charged”), La
República, November 27, 2006.
33. I thank the anonymous RHR reader for drawing my attention to TAFOS.
34. The photograph archive of the CVR can be visited at www.cverdad.org.pe/apublicas/
p-fotografico/index.php (accessed December 11, 2005). The CVR published the
photography exhibit as a book and created a photography database available on their Web
site: Yuyanapaq: Para recordar: Relato visual del conflicto armado interno en el Perú,
1980 – 2000 (Yuyanapaq: To Remember: Visual Account of the Internal Armed Conflict in
Peru, 1980 – 2000) (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la PUCP, 2003).
35. On the role of Yuyachkani in contesting violence during the war years and in the
reconstruction during the postconflict period, see Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire,
190 – 211; and Francine A’ness, “Resisting Amnesia: Yuyachkani, Performance, and the
Postwar Reconstruction of Peru,” Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 395 – 414. On the earlier years
of Yuyachkani, see Miguel Rubio Zapata, Notas sobre teatro (Notes on Theatre), ed. Luis A.
Ramos-García (Lima: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
2001).
36. Truths are held as a kind of memory and thus form part of the struggle over individual,
collective, official, and countermemories. As Stern argues, historians have to be careful
not to fall into the dichotomy of memory-versus-forgetting narrative structures. See his
Remembering Pinochet’s Chile, xxvii – xxviii.
37. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1990); on ruptures, delayed memories, and historical openings, see Stern,
Remembering Pinochet’s Chile; and LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 8 – 9.
38. Two of Ortega Matute’s films that depict violence in the highlands were in theaters during
the truth commission: Sangre inocente (Innocent Blood) (2000) and Incesto en los Andes:
La maldición de los jarjachas (Incest in the Andes: The Curse of the Jarjachas) (2003). On
retablos, see María Eugenia Ulfe, “Representations of Memory in Peruvian Retablos” (PhD
diss., George Washington University, 2005); on tablas, see Moíses Lemlij and Luis Millones,
The Tablas of Sarhua: Art, Violence, and History in Peru (Lima: SIDEA, 2004); on pumpin,
see Jonathan Ritter, “Historia de una música testimonial,” Cuestión del estado 32 (2003):
80 – 82. On Uchuraccay and alternative narratives, see Ponciano del Pino “Uchuraccay:
Memoria y representación de la violencia política en los Andes,” in Jamás tan cerca
arremetió lo lejos: Memoria y violencia política en el Perú (Never So Close it Attacked
from a Distance: Memory and Political Violence in Peru), ed. Carlos Iván Degregori (Lima:
Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2003), 49 – 93.
39. The names Ayacucho and Huamanga are both used to refer to the capital city of the
department of Ayacucho.
40. It should be noted that the distinction between state and nonstate sources is at times
difficult to differentiate because of the very weakness of the Peruvian state and the
strong presence of nongovernmental organizations. An interesting forum for or producer
of alternative sources, though methodologically problematic if one seeks “pure” sources
from “below,” comes in the form of the NGOs who solicit cathartic truth telling such as
art contests for the youth to recount their experiences and establish memory sites and
commemorative dates. These NGOs, through their different diagnostic techniques, may
point truth telling in certain directions and toward certain forms of expression.
41. Leigh A. Payne, “Humor That Makes Trouble,” in Bilbija et al., The Art of Truth-Telling,
70.
42. Political parties and the media played an active role in distorting and silencing truths by
speaking out against the findings of the CVR two months before the Final Report was
made public. This continued after the publication of the Informe final. Degregori, “Heridas
abiertas,” 84.
43. Informe Final, “Conclusiones generales,” www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php (accessed
December 11, 2005).
44. Informe Final, “Conclusiones generales,” www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php (accessed
December 11, 2005).
45. According to an Amnesty International report, Fujimori, Vladimiro Montesinos, and the
death squad Grupo Colina did not agree to meet with the CVR. See Amnesty International,
Peru, 4. The media, political parties, and conservative sectors of the church (especially
Opus Dei) posed the greatest opposition to the CVR, giving more resistance than Sendero.
Guzmán agreed to talk to the CVR, mainly to insult it. Carlos Iván Degregori, presentation
to the Instituto Hemisférico, Lima, July 20, 2005.
46. Informe final, “Los actores del conflicto” (“Actors of the Conflict”), www.cverdad.org.pe/
ifinal/index.php (accessed December 11, 2005).
47. Informe final, “Conclusiones generales,” www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/conclusiones.php
(accessed December 11, 2005).
48. On silence and memories, see Elizabeth Jelín and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of
Memories: Twenty Years after in Argentina,” in The Politics of War Memory and
Commemoration, ed. T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (New York:
Routeledge, 2000), 89 – 110; Elizabeth Jelín, Los trabajos de la memoria (Madrid: Siglo
XXI, 2002).
49. Alex Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,”
Journal of Latin American Studies 31 (1999): 473 – 500. Stern speaks of silence and
indifference as a “closed memory box” in Remembering Pinochet’s Chile, 90 – 93, 111 – 14.
50. Degregori, “Heridas abiertas,” 81.
51. While the CVR found the Catholic and evangelical churches to have contributed to the
defense of human rights in general and to have “strengthen[ed] the social fabric,” they also
criticized the archbishopric of Ayacucho for failing to acknowledge the existence of human
rights abuses and for impeding the work of organizations assisting Ayacuchanos. Informe
final, “Conclusiones generales,” section C, 141 – 44. On the struggle between progressive
elements in the Catholic Church who played a pivotal role in the Peruvian human rights
movement and provided important support for the CVR, and the conservative hierarchy
that acted in opposition to these efforts, see Youngers, Violencia política, esp. 178 – 89.
52. The reference to Argentina is indicative of a larger tendency to conflate aspects of Peru’s
period of violence with that of Argentina. Those individuals and NGOs working on Peruvian
memory projects borrow heavily from the boom of literature on memory and violence
in Argentina for framing of Peru’s own “dirty war.” This tendency, somewhat repeated
in the examples used in the essay, tends to place the focus of scholarly analysis on the
roles of the military and the state. It should be repeated, however, that the CVR found
Sendero Luminoso to be the instigator and main perpetrator of human rights violations.
Cartoons and artistic representations may focus more heavily on the military role in
committing violence because this is an easier narrative to construct, it poses a clearer
argument for reparations, and it avoids the greater difficulty for affected communities to
reconcile themselves with memories of fellow campesinos as Shining Path members. More
directly, Sergio Langer, an Argentine cartoonist, created this cartoon (fig. 4). I thank Raúl
Hernández Asensio for this observation about the “Argentinization” of Peruvian memories
of violence.
53. The number of people interviewed is not stated. Of those interviewed, 48.3 percent
“agreed” with the work of the CVR, 34.8 percent “disagreed,” and 16.9 percent did not
respond. It is interesting to note that in the Cono Norte of Lima, only 8.2 percent agreed,
while 50.9 percent disagreed. This region of Lima grew dramatically in the 1980s and
1990s as the result of rural highland migration to Lima. “La opinion de la gente,” Ideele 157
(2003): 44 – 47.
54. Amnesty International, Peru, 26 – 27.
55. For an explanation of how the CVR came to this number of victims, see Susana Villarán and
Hildegard Willer, “La cifra estimada: 69.280 muertos,” Ideele 157 (2003): 58 – 59.
57. Amnesty International, Peru, 27.
58. The CVR showed that these wounds were not closed and that they were much more serious
and painful that anyone outside of the affected communities realized. Unlike in Southern
Cone countries, where the violence targeted mainly urban groups, in Peru the most affected
was “el pobre-rural-indígena-joven” (“the poor-rural-female indigenous-young person”).
Degregori, “Heridas abiertas,” 81; Degregori, presentation at the Instituto Hemisférico,
Lima, July 20, 2005.
59. E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History, 7 (1974):
382 – 405.
60. Quoted in Amnesty International, Peru, 10.
61. Laurie Beth Clark, “Performing Truth,” in Bilbija et al., The Art of Truth-Telling, 84.
62. Similar examples of street performance include the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Thursday
processions, the banging of pots and pans (cacerolazos), and public rallies held by the sons
and daughters of the disappeared at the homes of perpetrators (escraches) in Argentina.
63. Clark, “Performing Truth,” 84.

64. Paul Stopforth, quoted in Sue Williamson, Resistance Art in South Africa (Cape Town:
David Philip, 1989), 114. Also quoted in Jo Ellen Fair, “Artworlds,” in Bilbija et al., The Art
of Truth-Telling, 224.
65. Colectivo Yuyarisun was formed in 2002, composed of several associations, including
IPAZ and SER. Colectivo Yuyarisun, Rescate por la memoria (Recovery of Memory)
(Ayacucho, Peru: Colectivo Yuyarisun, Ministerio Británico para el Desarrollo International,
Organización Holandesa para la Cooperación International al Desarrollo, 2004), 5. SER
held another contest the following year. Rescate por la memoria (Ayacucho, Peru: SER,
2005).
66. Some entries may have been excluded from the final contest because they did not meet the
format of short stories or comics. Colectivo Yuyarisun, Rescate por la memoria, 8.
67. Ricardo Caro and Javier Torres, interview by the author, November 3, 2005, Lima, Peru.
69. The lyrics for “Huamanguino” in English and Quechua are in Starn, Degregori and Kirk,
The Peru Reader, 368 – 70; and Ulfe “Representations of Memory,” 214 – 15. These two
translations differ: the first makes the main protagonist a woman and the latter, a man. I
have used Ulfe’s translation. For a more detailed description of this retablo and “Hombre”
discussed below, see Ulfe’s thoughtful dissertation “Representations of Memory,” esp.
212 – 15; and Toledo Brückman, Retablos de Ayacucho: Testimonio de violencia (Retablos
from Ayacucho: Testimony of Violence) (Lima: Editorial San Marcos, 2003), 61 – 65.
70. Brückmann, Retablos de Ayacucho, 64.
71. Amnesty International, Peru, 17 – 20; and Informe final, “Violencia y desigualdad de
género” (“Violence and Gender Inequality”), www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php (accessed
December 11, 2005).
72. Colectivo Yuyarisun, Rescate por la memoria, 7.
73. Ibid., 138.
74. For Spanish and English translations of the lyrics, see Ulfe “Representations of Memory,”
210. For Spanish and Quechua, see Brückmann, Retablos de Ayacucho, 61n16.
75. Both Ulfe and Brückmann describe this retablo based on interviews with Jiménez.
Ulfe, “Representations of Memory,” 211 – 12; Bückmann, Retablos de Ayacucho, 61 – 63.
On retablos as protest art see Billie Jean Isabell “Violence in Peru: Performances and
Dialogues,” American Anthropologist 100 (1988): 282 – 92.
76. Several of these truth categories were discussed in the context of South Africa at the
workshop “Alternative Truth-Telling,” Robben Island Museum, South Africa, May 22 – 26,
2000.

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At the Edge of the Peruvian

Truth Commission: Alternative Paths

Radical History Review

Leading Up to a Truth Commission

ous shapes burgeoned.25 Coached by international consultants such as the Inter-

Informal Truth Telling and Alternative Paths to the Past

Figure 1. The Peruvian cartoonist Eduardo Rodríguez Díaz, known as “Heduardo,”

Figure 2. The President of the

as well. People who suffered violence

napped, Disappeared and Detained Relatives of Peru), the Asociación de Jóvenes

(fig. 11). In her arms, she carried a ribbon-adorned

After completing the walk around the

These public demonstrations against forgetting or repressing memories are a

more well meaning, understanding of how individuals and communities “remem-

Figure 14. In the last panel of

Figure 15. “Huamanguino” (“The Man from Huamanga”) by Edilberto Jiménez.

timism about peace and reconcilia-

In “Hombre,” Jiménez depicts the drama and central protagonists in Ayacucho’s

Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos, Sofía Macher, later nominated by Toledo

63. Clark, “Performing Truth,” 84.

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