Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27(1)

War by other means at the extractive frontier: The violence of reconstruction in 'post-war' Peru

Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti

Abstract

This article examines the meeting of local and national reconstruction priorities in the wake of Peru’s
internal war (officially, 1980-2000). I focus on the impact of the state’s extractivism-led agenda on
indigenous Ashaninka people’s projects of remaking themselves into Ashaninkasanori (‘real Ashaninka
people’). Taking an Ashaninkasanori-centred analysis of their experience of war and post-war
violence, I propose an approach to understanding the impact of mainstream reconstruction efforts on
survivors that centres on the latter’s articulations of personhood. This approach, possible through
ethnographic engagement, sets anthropology at the forefront of the necessary re-thinking of
mainstream reconstruction interventions to foster approaches that are supportive of survivors’
priorities. The article explores a continuum of violence through war and extractivism that is undoing
the networks of relations through which a group of survivors constitute themselves as people and
communities and set their aspirations for the future.

Keywords

development; security-development nexus; political violence; personhood; Amazonia; indigenous

peoples
Introduction: between the politics of reconstruction and the politics of personhood

“During the time of fear we forgot how to be Ashaninkasanori1 [“real Ashaninka people”] and
care for each other. We forgot how to feel sorrow for each other. It was a time of fear and
sadness. We did terrible things to each other, as if we weren’t people and now we’re all
affected by it. We have to remember how to throw our anger and sadness away and live well
together in our village. Drink well everyone, drink with your stomachs and not your heads.
Don’t get into fights, have a good time. Let’s all drink!”
That is how Maximo, an Ashaninka village headman, concluded a speech in 2009 opening the 15th
anniversary celebrations of the reconstruction of Anapati, a village by the Tambo River in the central
Peruvian Amazon. The crowd around me clapped and cheered as they prepared to celebrate the
anniversary of their return to Anapati in 1994, after they were forced to abandon it during what
Ashaninka people call “the time of fear” - Peru’s internal war (officially, 1980-2000). The war was the
result of Sendero Luminoso’s (Shining Path) attempt to topple the Peruvian government and set up a
Maoist-inspired “New Democracy”. Although estimates vary, most sources consider that the war
caused up to 77,552 deaths and disappearances, of which three-quarters spoke an indigenous tongue
as a first language when only 16% of Peruvians do so (CVR 2003). This includes around 7,000 dead and
10,000 displaced Ashaninka people, out of a population of close to 80,000.

In this article I examine how my Ashaninka interlocutors describe war and post-war violence as an
attack on the essence of their personhood; this resulted in a desire to re-make themselves into
Ashaninkasanori (“real Ashaninka people”) in the wake of war, a process that they perceive to be
challenged by extractivism. In their experience, this re-making is in crisis. The Ashaninka people whose
statements I consider in this article explain that the making of Ashaninkasanori depends on re-making
interactions among people, but also between people and forest and river beings. However, forest and
river beings experienced violence during both the war itself and the later imposition of extractivist
projects as part of Peru's reconstruction agenda. As a result, these beings now refuse to interact with
people at all.

I argue that focusing on how survivors of war conceive of personhood, experience its unmaking and
remaking, and set limits on who holds it, sets up a productive analytical approach to understand how
they experience violence and set their priorities for a post-violence future. To do so, I concentrate
analytically on Ashaninkasanori-ness to examine the meeting of two models of reconstruction: Peru’s
politics of reconstruction through extractivism, exemplary of the mainstream security-development
nexus (Collier et al. 2003; UNDP 2016; World Bank 2016), and my interlocutors’ politics of personhood,
framed by their experiences of violence and their aspirations for the future. In doing so, I set
anthropology and its privileged ethnographic engagement with local experiences in a prime position
to inform a necessary transformation in mainstream reconstruction processes. This would shift the
current focus on reconstruction through development assistance, private investment and ‘improved’
governance, to one that seeks to understand how to most equitably and effectively collaborate with
and support survivors in enacting their plans and aspirations.

1 Terms in italics are in the original language they were recorded in (Ashaninka or Spanish). All statements from
my interlocutors presented in this article were recorded in Spanish or Ashaninka. I interpreted those in
Ashaninka into Spanish and validated my interpretation with bilingual speakers of Ashaninka and Spanish before
interpreting them into English. I interpreted those in Spanish directly into English.

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Anthropologists have engaged with the meeting of different models of reconstruction by revealing
how the global sectors committed to reconstruction often overlook local experiences of violence (Das
et al. 2001; Pouligny et al. 2007). Studies have focused on transitional justice and the interface
between initiatives like Truth Commissions and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and local justice
discourses and mechanisms (Honwana 2005; Viaene and Brems 2010; Waldorf 2010). Analysts reveal
how mainstream forms of intervention are not neutral and may clash with how survivors of violence
enact their own reconstruction projects (Teitel 2003; Wilson 2002, 2003; Jansen 2013). Studies
examine how survivors are affected by the imposition of mainstream international discourses and
standards aimed at rebuilding their societies, suggesting that this imposition affects both how violence
is processed and how its memory manifests in the present (Linke 2002; Kidron 2004; Zucker 2013).
Complementing this analytical line (see also Burrell 2013; Englund 2006), I seek to reconsider the
political contest and power differentials at play in post-war Peru from an Ashaninkasanori-centred
analysis. I propose this personhood-centred approach as a different frame to understand how
survivors experience these contexts as well the infliction, undoing and redoing of violence. This
approach allows for a different understanding of the source and performance of their politics of
reconstruction, one that is necessary to transform mainstream reconstruction processes.

This article is not an extended analysis of Ashaninka practices and discourses. Neither is it a claim of a
single Ashaninka reconstruction agenda. The people whose statements I present here experience war
and extractivism as a threat to their Ashaninkasanori-making networks; the existence of their accounts
highlights the centrality of extractivism as a driver for varied decisions currently made by Ashaninka
communities and individuals. The threat extractivism presents to a sustainable and equitable
reconstruction process is verbalised by them as an experience of politics as war by other means. I
engaged with this experience as a ‘continuum of violence’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 1)
where different forms of violence - ranging from physical violence to the less visible ‘little violences
produced in the structures (…) of everyday life’ (Ibid. 19) - are interconnected and overlapping and
blur war and ‘peace’-time violence.

In what follows, I analyze how communities deal with their experiences and perceptions of the events
of war and its official wake. As other anthropologists have noted, the discourses of reconstruction on
which post-violence life is built may be predicated on idealised notions that differ from the pre-
violence interactions survivors had between themselves and others (Theidon 2013; Hayner 2001;
Shaw 2007; Eltringham 2009). Noting this, I present accounts by different Ashaninka people recorded
during the 42 months of ethnographic work I have carried out in their communities on the Bajo
Urubamba, Ene and Tambo rivers of Peruvian Amazonia since 2006.2 I am less interested in the
veracity of their accounts than in what they tell us about Ashaninka positions within and aspirations
to escape the continuum of violence that they describe as undoing their possibility of living as people
ought to.

2The area is seldom visited by tourists as it is hard to reach, has extractive activity (hydrocarbons and timber)
and is a site for cocaine paste production. Most Ashaninka people live in villages and focus their production on
garden agriculture, hunting and gathering, supplemented with the small-scale planting of cash crops and timber
extraction and seasonal work for non-indigenous employers.

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I start by discussing how my interlocutors construct Ashaninkasanori-ness, to then explain how they
remember war as its undoing. I then examine how the post-war remaking of Ashaninkasanori-ness is
challenged by Peru’s extractivism-led development agenda which, as I discuss in the subsequent
section, is experienced by my interlocutors as a continuation of the violence of war. The conclusion
outlines the main lessons of a personhood-centred analysis for anthropological engagements with
survivors of mass violence.

A personhood-centred analysis of mass violence and its undoing

An Ashaninkasanori-centred analysis, that is, an analysis guided through an ethnographic engagement

with personhood, is necessary to understand how Ashaninka people remember war, understand their
present and plan their future. Anthropological explorations of personhood - the socially inflected
perception of the constitution of persons - tend to note that being a person is not a universal constant,
as it is mediated and negotiated in time and place and in reaction to social change and shifting
relationships (Hallowell 1960; Shweder and Bourne 1982; Allen and Malhotra 1997). Ashaninkasanori
are an expression of the interactions of the different beings that make them, in an effort experienced
as mutually constitutive of individuals and the group (Caruso and Sarmiento Barletti 2019). While my
discussion is not set around the idea that Euro-American and other experiences of personhood are
oppositions (see Smith 2012; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Hollan 1992), I do believe that both the
relationality of beings and who is included within people-making networks, are emphasised and
cultivated in different ways in different social contexts.3

Personhood, as an analytical category, is central to the development of the anthropology with

indigenous Amazonian peoples. Anthropologists have emphasized the socially constructed nature of
persons in the region (Seeger et al 1979; McCallum 2001; Belaunde 2001). These discussions have
been informed by Marilyn Strathern’s affirmation that persons constitute ‘the plural and composite
side of the relationships that produce them’ (1990: 13; see also 1988). Following this line,
anthropologists working with indigenous Amazonian peoples discuss how people are made, rather
than whether they are made or not (see Santos-Granero 2012 for a review). The two main analytical
positions diverge on whether persons are constructed in the everyday through convivial practices (see
the contributions to Overing and Passes 2000) or through wider relationships of predation (Viveiros
de Castro 1993; Vilaça 2002). Despite this difference, the understanding is that persons are in
permanent flux and consistently being made and unmade. Thus, personhood is socially and gradually
acquired through life, and is never complete, fixed, nor set in a biological body (McCallum 1996; Taylor
1996; Vilaça 2011).

Viveiros de Castro (1998: 476) notes that for indigenous Amazonian peoples, self-designation terms
like Ashaninka that are ‘usually translated as “human being” (…) do not denote humanity as a natural
species. They refer rather to the social condition of personhood’. Ashaninkasanori-making networks
rest on a relational sense of personhood that is inherent in the term Ashaninka itself, which carries a
plural inclusive sense that translates to English as “we the people” or “we the kin”. The term, however,

3See Conklin and Morgan 1996 for a comparison on the production of personhood in North America and the
Amazon.

4
does not correspond to a biological conception of personhood. Although people, animals and spirits
have a physical body (batsatsi; “meat”), the source of their agency and capacity to feel, remember
and make choices, is in their i/oshire (“his/her heart/soul/memory/thoughts”).4 As noted elsewhere
in indigenous Amazonia, all beings that possess i/oshire, including some animals, plants and other-
than-human beings such as aipatsite (“our earth”) and the ashitarori (“owners/masters”; see Fausto
2008) of plants and animals, are said to follow similar social practices. These social beings have
families; live in villages; drink manioc beer and get drunk; participate in rituals; cheat on their spouses;
see shamans when they are ill; and feel happiness, fear and anger (see Viveiros de Castro 1998; Vilaça
2011). This stems from the tendency among indigenous Amazonians to posit that the human body is
not a generic biological trait (Seeger et al. 1979) but is transformable (Viveiros de Castro 1998),
inherently unstable (Taylor 1996) and thus continually in the making (McCallum 1996). This instability
leads to the realisation of what Vilaça (2011: 247) calls ‘the peril of metamorphosis’ - the fear of
transforming into a being that is not recognised as a member of the community, such as an animal or
demon.

Over the years I have met Ashaninka people that resolve this instability through the continuous
everyday creation of Ashaninkasanori. Since my early visits to their villages I have been asked to note
how families eat from the same plate and how party assistants drink manioc beer from the same bowl
or smoke from the same cigarette. I have been constantly told that these are examples of people’s
active desire to relate as Ashaninkasanori. People become consciously related through their bodies
by sharing substances including food and drink and others like semen and menstrual blood through
sex. The result is illustrated in how the spouses of people undergoing shamanic treatment follow the
same diets and prohibitions as their partners, how the actions of a pregnant woman’s partner are said
to affect the foetus, or how spirits can make a hunter’s children sick by attacking his body.

Furthermore, most of the village anniversary parties and football championships that I have attended
were opened with a speech by a village authority in which attendees were advised to dance and eat
together, drink manioc beer responsibly and avoid drinking cane alcohol. It is common for village
leaders to remind attendants to “drink with their stomachs like Ashaninkasanori, not with their heads
like chori (“Andean people”).” This illustrates the value placed on the state of being shinkitaka
(“dizziness”), the ideal state of openness to interact with other social beings achieved through manioc
beer, ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) or tobacco. By contrast, speeches warn that being borracho
(Spanish for drunk) is an anti-social state that may lead to anger and violence. Speeches also include
advice for attendees on how to teach their children to control their strong negative emotions including
anger, stinginess and sadness, and thus avoid becoming omposhinitanakeri (“controlled by a strong
negative emotion”, translated into Spanish as loco, “crazy”). Parents are reminded to advise their
children to nurture positive emotions like love, happiness and feeling sorrow for others. They are also
reminded that they should share what they can with others, be it food or their work, and to advise
their children to do the same. Most speeches I have heard close by reminding people that they live in
a village to live in peace, like Ashaninkasanori, and should go live elsewhere if they disagreed.

I have also been made to note that people show their resolution to live like Ashaninkasanori by sharing

4This term can only be expressed in the possessive form: noshire (my), pishire (your), ishire (his), or oshire
(her).

5
their work. Families organize work parties and invite their kin and close friends to help them open
gardens, harvest cash crops, or build their houses. These are instances of group work that are
described as kametsa (“happy/beautiful/peaceful”) moments by their participants as people joke and
drink manioc beer throughout the workday, ending with a meal prepared by the host family, who also
offer manioc beer to drink throughout the night. Work parties are counterpoised to the war, when it
was impossible to organise them as men patrolled the forest while women defended their villages.
And even if people had been available to work, there was no access to manioc beer for participants as
all manioc was used for food. At the work parties I took part in I was told that now people can work
with whomever they want to invite to their gardens. Those that respond to invitations show they care
about work party organizers and renew bonds of friendship through their participation. Participants
expect that the organizers of the work parties they have attended will renew the relationship when
they organize their own.

These experiences are complemented with oral histories and the authoritative knowledge of the
parents or grandparents who tell them. Well-known oral histories tell of hunters who get lost in the
forest and meet the ashitarori (“owners/masters”) of animal and plant species and receive advice
from them. For example, the ashitarori of peccaries feeds them, gives them living spaces, and defends
them from over-zealous hunters by making them or their children ill. These beings will only release
animals for hunters if they respect their animals by not overhunting them, giving them clean kills and
keeping away from their deep forest homes. Similarly, young boys are told oral histories of what may
happen if they do not share their kills or catch with their family, as this is perceived as making boys
lazy and stingy. Ashaninkasanori, the oral histories conclude, share the product of their work and seek
to interact respectfully with forest beings.

In practice, the everyday creation of Ashaninkasanori cannot be enacted without the participation of
the other-than-human beings who play important roles in people’s ability to feed and care for
themselves. As with the ashitarori described above, my Ashaninka interlocutors explained that other-
than-human beings will only interact positively with those who treat them well. For example, aipatsite
(“our earth”) is not only the physical earth but a being that allows people to grow food and find
medicinal plants and materials to build their houses. Yet, it will retire its productivity, and thus
people’s ability to grow food, if the land is not worked in a socially constructive manner or if people
chop too many trees. Similarly, if the deep forest homes of maninkari (“those who are hidden”) spirits
are not respected, they will not answer the calls for healing assistance from shamans or will refuse to
lead the souls of the dead to the afterlife. This leads to the souls of the dead becoming kamaari
(“demons”) who will then make people sick. Humans can also be tricked into transformation by angry
or jealous spirits, who lure then into the forest and make them forget about their families (Gow and
Sarmiento Barletti forthcoming 2020).

Although in my experience Ashaninka people avoid speaking about their experiences of war publicly,
except for political meetings or when making demands on the national or local government, the
memory of violence is passed on to children by their mothers in the intimacy of their kitchens. Mothers
describe life during war to their children and conclude with advice about the importance of knowing
how to control one’s sadness and anger. Those two emotions are linked with violence and the
impossibility of having positive interactions with others. War stories act as warnings about the
possibility of carefully made Ashaninkasanori becoming something else. From the perspectives I

6
engage with in this article, this possibility became real as violence undid the networks through which
Ashaninkasanori are created. I now move to discuss this context.

Sendero, war and food

Sendero reached the Ene River valley in 1984. By 1987 it restricted all boat traffic on the Ene and upper
Tambo rivers and the paths leading out of those valleys. This was followed by the sacking and burning
of Catholic missions and NGO projects, and the assassination of Ashaninka headmen who refused
them access to their villages. By 1988 Sendero had disbanded 51 of the 66 villages in the area, mixing
their populations in forest camps. Although a minority of the captive population received military
training, most were charged with manual labour. In 1989, at the height of its power in the area,
Sendero had 57 camps of around 300 people each. Camps were led by non-indigenous men and
women that Ashaninka people describe as white or mestizo Peruvians or chori, a term used to
describe Andean people. In 1990, the free villages in the Tambo River valley formed a self-defence
committee at Poyeni, a village that became the largest centre for displaced people in Peru (see
Villapolo and Vasquez 1999 and CVR 2003 for more on the events of war in Ashaninka territory).

At Sendero’s camps, those who countered orders including work, marching through the forest or
attacking villages, or committed infractions like burning food, being ‘lazy’ or attempting to escape,
were put through a maximum of three public rituals of self-criticism and publicly executed after the
fourth infraction. Juan, a camp survivor explained described he felt like ‘a slave. We were always told
to work, but [Sendero leaders] never did (...) it was like working for a [white boss]. We worked all day,
all night (...) you felt like you wanted to die, nothing but work’. He continued: ‘I’d sit and think of my
garden, of eating peccary and fish. But you couldn’t show you were sad or let them see you [rest]. If
you rested your mando would come and shout at you and hit you. If you were too tired to work they
punished you in the name of the Party’. (Interview with the author, Anapati 2008) This is a common
description of life in Sendero camps, where escapees were discouraged by threats from Sendero
leaders that soldiers would rape and torture them when they surrendered to them and that the family
members they left behind would be tortured and killed (see Sarmiento Barletti 2011 and Caruso 2012
for more on Ashaninka accounts of war).

The war reached a turning point in September 1992 when Abimael Guzman, Sendero’s leader and
ideologue, was captured in Lima. That year, joint Ashaninka-army patrols rescued 2,800 people in the
Ene, forcing Sendero to move its captive population deeper into the forest. In 1993, Ashaninka patrols
rescued more than 1,000 people in the Tambo and Ene as Sendero lost control over the area due to
pressure from patrols, a cholera epidemic and their captives’ malnourishment. Gladis, part of those
group in the early 1990s, told me during an interview that:
Some died [of cholera], their skin was dark and their lips purple (…) others were too sick to
keep walking. They were skinny, pale (…) [Sendero leaders] killed them because they said that
if we left them they’d run to the army and snitch. But how would they run if they couldn’t
even walk! [Sendero leaders] didn’t know how to feel sorrow for us. All we did was walk, day
and night without eating, even under the rain. It was sad (...) we were always hungry, thinking
about our family. (Interview with the author, Meteni 2009)

7
Sendero’s demise in the area was confirmed later that year when Ashaninka patrols liberated over
3000 people at Centro Tsomabeni, where they discovered mass graves with more than 1200 corpses
(CVR 2003).

Most narratives of war I have recorded from interviews and informal conversations with Sendero camp
survivors recount experiences of hunger and having to eat things they did not consider as food. For
example, Marta told me during an interview with her husband Raul and her brothers-in-law Raul,
Martin and Pedro, all of whom had been at Centro Tsomabeni during the war, that: “[T]here was no
food (...) only bits of manioc, plantains (...) not even salt! It got worse, [we ate] watery soup made of
anything, snakes, leaves, footballs (...) People got sick, you can get sick from not eating (...) their bodies
were pale, you could see their bones”. (Interview with the author, Meteni 2009) Raul added: “[Sendero
cadres] made us eat soup made with corrugated metal and nails, they said it’d make us strong. (…)
[We ate] soup made from god knows what (…) some say that it was dog or people” (Interview with
the author, Meteni 2009). I know of cases when people in camps were killed and eaten due to extreme
hunger and cases when Sendero leaders forced people to kill and eat other captives as punishment.
Martin recounted: “We had to kill our own family, our own children. They’d say “kill him” and you had
to, they didn’t know how to feel sorrow for us” (Interview with the author, Meteni 2009). Pedro
expanded, “We were forced to kill. [Mandos] said: “If you don’t kill him I’ll kill you”, or they’d kill your
family. They were so used to killing (…) They were angry all the time. [They] made people eat people
(…) they made them drink blood to punish them (...) [and] forced [women] to make people into food”
(Interview with the author, Meteni 2009).

When I discussed these accounts with Ashaninka people who were not in Sendero camps, they
described them as confirmations that those who endured them became kamaari (“demon”) as only
demons feed on humans. Thus, war-time transformations are described as expected shifts. As Weiss
(1975: 165) explains, kamaari ‘consider human beings (...) their legitimate prey. [The] hordes of evil
spirits in the universe are driven by an insatiable urge (...) to attack and inflict maximum damage upon
any human being they encounter’. What those in Sendero camps ate, and their commensality and co-
residence with Sendero leaders -perceived to be demons themselves due to their actions- resulted in
the undoing of Ashaninkasanori. This process was explained to me in the same terms that Vilaça (2002:
351) sets out based on her work with Wari’ people in the Brazilian Amazon: ‘by modifying body
alimentation, change in habits, and the establishment of social relations with other subjects (…) the
world is now seen in the same way as the new companions’.

For some Ashaninka people, the undoing of Ashaninkasanori is also manifested in game and fish
shortages. During my first visit to the Bajo Urubamba valley, Gali, an Ashaninka woman who fled the
Tambo valley during the war, told me, “had you come twenty or thirty years ago you would’ve eaten
game every day! (…) There was so much game back then,” she laughed, “that even you would’ve been
a good hunter!” (Interview with the author, Nueva Esperanza 2007) Although I initially attributed
scarcity to the high rate of population growth and larger concentration of people in post-war villages,
I soon learned of a perceived connection between food scarcity and violence. In another conversation,
Gali explained that game shortages are the result of soldiers and Sendero cadres raping peccaries
during the war, angering their owner/master, who now refuses to release them for people to hunt:
‘[The owners/masters] get angry if we kill too many of their animals, or hurt them and not kill them
(…) They’re like us, if someone hurts our animals we get angry too” (Interview with the author, Nueva

8
Esperanza, 2008).

In an interview with Adela and Emilio, a couple that had fled the Ene during the war, I learned more
about how war had affected people’s relations with other-than-human beings. Adela told me that she
was unable to return to the Ene even if she wanted to because: “Aipatsite [“our earth”] has tasted too
much blood from all the violence, people have tasted too much blood (…) People can’t go back to
where their houses used to be, their kin have been killed and left [unburied or in mass graves]. (…)
[M]aninkari [spirits] have left (…), disgusted with what happened, and now [the dead have become]
demons and are making people sick.” (Interview with the author, Tzinquiato 2009) Maninkari spirits
are called upon someone’s death to accompany ‘them body and soul back to their place of residence
(…) up on the mountain ridges or up in the sky, becoming maninkari themselves’ (Weiss 1975: 438).
Statements about the war describe how violence made those spirits reclusive, trapping in this world
the souls of those that were killed during war. Those souls are becoming demonic, refusing to leave
their previous homes, and risking becoming peari. Weiss defines peari as ‘the soul of a dead person,
or any demon, taking the form of a game animal’ (ibid: 290). Peari animals have been pointed out to
me as those that have patchy fur, parasites or generally look unhealthy. They are never eaten.

Extractivism, Ashaninkasanori and the ashitarori of demons

The security-development nexus is a mainstream proposition within development discourse and

practice for post-conflict contexts (Fearon 2010; Beswick and Jackson 2011; Hegre and Nygard 2015,
and supported by the funds and policy initiatives of major donor and multilateral insitutions (USAID
2011; UNDP 2016; World Bank 2016). The idea is that that development and security reinforce each
other to create peace as ‘war retards development, but conversely, development retards war’ (Collier
et al. 2003: 1). Based on this idea, most reconstruction initiatives in post-war contexts follow the
premise that development and economic growth are the most effective strategy to avoid future
violence. For its proponents, minimising the social inequalities that lead to conflict is the only way to
undo cycles of violence and economic poverty.

Following this nexus, Peru received funding from multilateral institutions and donors, privatised its
national mining company, and deregulated the environmental requirements set for mining and
hydrocarbon extraction to kick-start its post-war economy (see Bebbington and Hinojosa 2011 and
Himley 2014). The government appealed to international investment to expand its extractive frontier
through hydrocarbon, mining and hydroelectric concessions in the traditional territories of indigenous
Amazonian and Andean peoples. The macroeconomic growth that came from this logic is undeniable
- 60% of Peru’s population lived below the poverty line in 2003, whilst 21.8% did so in 2015.5

Extractivism is the government’s main macroeconomic strategy, carrying a promise of poverty

reduction, social investment and the reconstruction of a weak state and public institutions in the
official wake of war.6 Successive governments have adopted slogans celebrating economic progress,

5 The World Bank: Peru (available Online at: https://data.worldbank.org/country/peru, accessed 4 September
2018).
6 The Ministry of Energy and Mines is tasked with the ‘efficient and effective promotion of [extraction] to
contribute to the country’s [economic] growth with social inclusion’ (available at http://www.minem.gob.pe,

9
demanding that Peruvians focus on economic reconstruction rather than on re-opening old war
wounds, thus linking peace, reconstruction, development and progress (Gianella 2015). However,
economic growth has come with a rise in protests by the indigenous and local communities living in
areas of extractive activity. These protests are motivated by their experience of a negative impact or
lack of significant improvement in their quality of life and income from extractivism (Alayza 2009;
Bebbington and Hinojosa 2011). In 2016 there were 139 on-going extractivism-related conflicts, which
led to 50 deaths and over 750 injuries during 2011-2016 (Defensoría del Pueblo 2016). Protests include
marches, the invasion of extraction sites and the blockade of rivers and motorways to disrupt supplies
to extraction sites and cities. As a result, sectors of the government have denounced protesters as
‘green terrorists’ and obstacles to Peru’s progress (El Comercio 2013).

Like most indigenous Amazonian settlements in Peru, Ashaninka villages are within native
communities, the legal term for the collective territories recognised by the state to indigenous
Amazonian peoples after decades of struggle (Monterroso and Larson 2018). Despite holding
collective titles and actively opposing large-scale extractive activity, the territorial security of
indigenous peoples throughout Peru is threatened by the imposition of extractive concessions. As the
government holds the rights to rivers and resources in the subsoil of the whole country, hydrocarbon
concessions can be imposed anywhere in Peru. Three-quarters of its Amazonian region, including one-
fifth of protected natural areas, are ring-fenced for extraction concessions. These overlap or are
adjoined to native communities and protected areas and span an average 10,000 km2; around 12 times
the average area of most titled territories for Indigenous people. This is the current manifestation of
a process of state-led dispossession in favour of foreign capital that has taken place since the 19 th
century (see Santos-Granero and Barclay 1998). The areas of Ashaninka traditional territory with
highest Ashaninka populations - the adjoining Bajo Urubamba, Ene and Tambo valleys - are flanked by
oil concessions to Gran Tierra Energy and Repsol; the Ene valley is engulfed by a natural gas concession
(PlusPetrol); and oil (Repsol) and natural gas (Petrobras) concessions overlap three-quarters of the
native communities in the Tambo and Bajo Urubamba. The Bajo Urubamba also hosts Peru’s flagship
extractive project, the Camisea natural gas extraction site. Ashaninka people are also affected by plans
for hydroelectric dams in the Tambo (Tambo 40 and 60), Ene (Pakitzapango) and Bajo Urubamba
(Mainique) rivers.

Large-scale extractive concessions have led to food insecurity due to forest degradation and increased
traffic of large boats. Boat traffic creates waves that turn over the canoes Ashaninka people use for
fishing and transport and has diminished fishing stocks as fish have altered their migration routes.
Extractive concessions have also led to the opening of roads to exploration and extraction sites,
facilitating invasions, land grabs and illegal timber extraction. Furthermore, planned hydroelectric
dams will flood parts of their valleys. In my experience, Ashaninka people and their representative
organisations have varied strategies to address their experience of food insecurity and health
problems (Izquierdo 2009; Sarmiento Barletti 2016). Valleys with projects in exploratory stages (e.g.
Ene) have mounted a united front against them. Areas with established projects (e.g. Bajo Urubamba
and Tambo) have mixed strategies where they oppose new projects, demand the retreat of companies
in exploratory stages, seek to negotiate compensations from standing projects and demand funds

accessed 5 March 2020). The Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion’s mission statement also makes this
link (available online at http://www.midis.gob.pe, accessed 5 March 2020).

10
from concession holders to develop fish farms, cacao and coffee production, and medical centres. I
also know many families that have relocated to the Ashaninka Communal Reserve, a protected area
adjacent to the Ene and Tambo valleys, and many more young people that have moved to towns and
cities to seek waged work.

Like war, extractivism is also experienced as a violent process undoing Ashaninkasanori-ness. During
the same interview with Adela I cited above, her husband Emilio explained:
Plants don’t grow as easy as they used to in our gardens, aipatsite [“our earth”] isn’t the same.
We plant like we used to but it’s like [aipatsite] doesn’t want to produce any longer because
of all the violence; it’s angry with people for all the deaths, all the people that were killed and
were left to rot. Aipatsite tasted so much blood. Plants start to grow and they dry up or rot.
And all those chemicals used when they make cocaine upriver makes it worse, they make
aipatsite angrier. There are also plans to build the [Pakitzapango] dam that will flood [the
villages in the Ene] (…) and all the companies that the government is bringing. Those
explosions [during exploratory work] make aipatsite angrier.7 (Interview with the author,
Tzinquiato, 2009)

In similar vein, an Ashaninka man called Julio told Emily Caruso (2012: 126) that: ‘[aipatsite] changed
after the violence. Until 1991, there were many good places to plant crops (…) But many places, after
the war, began to dry up, like a punishment. Or perhaps because so many people were killed, or maybe
we shouldn’t have buried the people where they died (…) maybe they were buried in sacred places. It
seems that we’ve bothered the land [hemos molestado a la tierra], which is a part of ourselves. Our
produce was always good before the war, but no longer’. Based on the usage of Spanish in Amazonian
Peru, Julio’s remark could also be translated as “we have angered the earth”, mirroring Emilio’s point.
Similarly, Joel, my Ashaninka host in the Bajo Urubamba, constantly noted as we fished together that
there was a link between fish shortages and increased boat traffic due to hydrocarbon extraction. For
Joel, Kiatsi, the owner/master of fish, is releasing less of its animals as it is angry due to the noise and
waves made by boats (Sarmiento Barletti 2016).

I have also taken part in many conversations about fears of demonic white female figures said to kill
Ashaninka children to take their organs, and pelacaras (“face peelers”), white male figures that kill
adults to peel their faces off (see Santos-Granero and Barclay 2011; see Adams 1998 and Weismantel
2001 for discussions of similar figures elsewhere in Latin America). In an embodiment of extractivism,
these beings take the organs and faces they extract from Ashaninka bodies abroad to transplant them
onto white foreigners. These fears have real consequences. In 2011 three Ashaninka men murdered
two Polish explorers in the Ucayali River after misrecognising them as these demonic figures. Bernabe,
an Ashaninka man I was sitting with when I heard the news, told me that he was sad that the explorers
had suffered but noted that people had to be careful as “face peelers”, like oil and gas companies, had
agreements with Alan Garcia, Peru’s President at the time. In a latter interview, Bernabe told me about
a case in which a demonic white female figure “was caught upriver but when they took her to the
police, she had a letter [signed by Garcia] saying she could do whatever she wanted so they let her go.
(…) [They take children’s organs] and leave money in the body (…) like a reparation or compensation

7Crook (2007) recorded a similar experience of ‘nature’ changing its ways of relating to people in contexts of
extractivism in Papua New Guinea.

11
payment!” (Interview with the author, Anapati 2011)8 Bernabe’s statements described an embodied
experience of extractive activity.9

The common element in these descriptions, as with Sendero cadres and extractive companies, is their
link to Alan Garcia. Garcia’s first term (1985-1990) coincided with Sendero’s arrival in Ashaninka
territory and his second term (2006-2011) brought extractive concessions and plans for hydroelectric
dams. As I travelled in Ashaninka territory during his second presidency, people referred to Garcia as
ashitarori kityoncari (“the owner/master of the reds”, a common name for Sendero cadres), ashitarori
kamaari (“the owner/master of demons”) and/or ashitarori empresa (“the owner/master of
companies”). The idea is that his Sendero cadres failed to destroy Ashaninka people and take over
their territory, so Garcia sent his companies and demons to finish the job. Like Bernabe above, there
is common speculation that reparation policies and conditional cash transfer programs for rural
populations in Peru are underhanded strategies to control Ashaninka people. Whenever I challenged
this and tried to explain these payments as some kind of justice after so much suffering, I was told
that to accept payments was to agree that Garcia’s demons can take over their territory, faces or
organs. Julian, a respected elder in the Bajo Urubamba, concluded one of these warnings by telling
me: “That’s how it is these days, [Alan Garcia] is going to kill us as if we’re [peccaries]” (Interview with
the author, Nueva Esperanza, 2009).

Julian’s warning was not far from Garcia’s vision of native communities as an obstacle to his brand of
progress (Stepputat 2004; Drinot 2011). His vision was exemplified an editorial he published in 2007
in El Comercio, Peru’s leading newspaper. The three pieces addressed what he described as the 'Dog
in the Manger Syndrome’, in reference to Aesop’s fable (Garcia 2007). His article attacked indigenous
Amazonian peoples, claimimng that they refused to capitalise the natural resources in their native
communities and insisted no one else did. Following his articles, Garcia announced the construction
of hydroelectric dams, conceded extraction blocks adjacent to and overlapping native communities,
streamlined decrees that threatened indigenous rights to self-determination and their ancestral
territories, and refused to regulate their right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, which Peru
recognised when it signed the International Labour Organization’s Covenant 169. Violent protests
followed, leading to the massacre of indigenous protesters by the police on 5 June 2009 outside the
city of Bagua in northern Peru (The Independent 2009). Interviewed on live television as the violence
erupted, Garcia commented: “These are not first-class citizens! How can 400,000 natives tell 28 million
Peruvians, you have no right to come here? (...) Those who think in those terms want to force us to
irrationality and primitivism.”10

Garcia’s response fits his role as the owner/master of reds, demons and companies. Chato, who fought
in the Tambo during the war before moving to the Bajo Urubamba, told me after I asked him if he was

8 In Peru, rather than setting foundations to address a history of state-led dispossession and transform historical
conflicts, reparation payments of up to GBP£2,500 were set out for individuals that the state recognised as
victims of war. In practice, these payments only sought to restore pre-war life (see Laplante and Theidon 2007).
For most Ashaninka people, pre-war life is marked by dispossession, structural discrimination and limited access
to state services.
9 This narrative resonates with Scheper-Hughes’ (2000) work on the neoliberal nature of organ trade in terms
of an unequal exchange in natural resources between the North and South.
10 Video available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjzxl1lBswc, accessed 5 March 2020.

12
scared of Sendero returning: “I used to be scared of [Sendero] killing my family and taking my children
away. But now, look at what’s happening (...) I’m scared of companies (...) [and] dams. Where will we
go? What will we eat? Where will our children grow? We’ll just have to fight again” (Interview with
the author, Cheni 2008). Chato’s statement reveals an experience of war and extraction as a
continuum of violence. Ruth Buendia, president of the Ashaninka organization for the Ene River,
similarly denounced extractivism as ‘economic terrorism’ (The Atlantic 2014). Buendia’s organization
states that despite their role in Sendero’s defeat ‘the government brings us new threats: the
concession of our lands to oil companies and the construction of dams. We see these attacks on our
territory as another direct attempt against our lives (…). This leads us to a single conclusion: that the
government intends to exterminate us’ (CARE 2009). This is, as Ruth told me when I asked her when
she thought violence would finally be over, ‘a past that won’t pass’.

War by other means

The imposition of large-scale extractivism has led some Ashaninka people to experience
reconstruction politics as war by other means. The pursuit of Ashaninkasanori-ness has taken people
to denounce extractive projects in national and international stages, organise strikes, take over
extraction camps by force and move out of their villages to urban areas or deeper into forests. This
movement, in great part, responds to the impact of war and extractivism on the networks through
which Ashaninkasanori are made. Paying attention to Ashaninkasanori-ness reveals why people
cannot transition from war to post-war through a single act of cleansing as in other contexts (e.g.
Hirsch 2008), such as those in which conversion to Christianity is deployed for these purposes (e.g.
Shaw 2007; Theidon 2013). Instead, it must be accomplished through the reconstruction of the
networks that war undid and extractivism keeps undoing.

The accounts I have presented in this article describe an everyday life framed by the expected impacts
of mass violence: the undoing of personhood, food insecurity, diminished land productivity and
demons making people sick. From this perspective, other-than-human beings are angry and refuse to
engage with people because they also suffered and are still suffering through a continuum of violence
that blurs the war and ‘post-war’ period. This leads to a contemporary resolve to address the different
layers of destruction caused by violence. I have been told by both political leaders and villagers that
the struggle through their political organisations is part of the post-war effort, one complemented by
the conscious re-making of Ashaninkasanori through actions including working together, relating to
each other like Ashaninkasanori should, staying away from the deep forest where the owners/masters
of animals live, and even attracting maninkari spirits back by planting tobacco, their favourite food.
This is an approach in which rebuilding relations among villagers is useless if their relations with other-
than-human beings remain unaddressed as their personhood is interconnected. This is a struggle over
what is at stake in ‘post-war’ reconstruction, starting from whether this is actually a post-war period
or just war by other means.

The politics of reconstruction and of personhood that meet in contemporary Peru seek to reconstruct
life. Yet, each carries different priorities, with their own relative power, regarding what should be
reconstructed, how it should be done, who should be recognised as survivors of violence and who

13
should take part in the reconstruction process.11 An Ashaninkasanori-centred analysis of this context
reveals the different layers of conflict at play. Firstly, there is a clash between reconstruction projects,
not only concerned with whether relations with other-than-human beings exist or not, but whether
forests and rivers have a role in reconstruction. For the state, these are objects to capitalise to
reconstruct Peru; for the Ashaninka people whose accounts I have examined in this article, these are
also other-than-human beings that are key to remaking Ashaninkasanori. Secondly, there is a clash
based on the consequences of the meeting of reconstruction projects: whether other-than-human
beings should also be recognised as survivors of war. Ashaninka people have been officially recognised
as victims by the Peruvian government but there is no political will to recognise or negotiate with their
priorities for territorial security. These priorities are disregarded in favour of economic reconstruction
through extractivist policies that further infringe upon their rights and do not address a history of
dispossession. Thirdly, this leads to a struggle for Ashaninkasanori-ness, for the right to create people
and communities in the way survivors want to. This is an alternative reconstruction project, opposing
an agenda that seeks to undo and homogenise what it knows as ‘primitive animism’ or ‘absurd
ideologies’, as former President Garcia called them in a TV interview.12 The desire to reconstruct these
people-making networks is one of the forces behind a movement against dams, hydrocarbon
concessions and large-scale timber extraction. This activism has led to the assassination of Ashaninka
leaders in their own territories (The Guardian 2014) and to the arrest of others under anti-terrorism
laws. Yet, the refusal to engage with aipatsite in purely capitalistic terms does not mean that there is
no desire to plant and sell cash crops and take part in wider trans-national markets (e.g. the Kemito
Ene organic cacao and coffee initiative13), sell timber and participate in the local economy or to fish
and hunt to feed themselves. As I have shown elsewhere, these productive practices are not
incommensurable with Ashaninkasanori-making networks (Sarmiento Barletti 2015b).

Read in light of the everyday roles of other-than-human beings in these networks, the demands set
out above transcend protecting territory and natural resources as they concentrate in defending the
necessary conditions for the reconstruction and reproduction of Ashaninka communities. The
importance of other-than-human beings in indigenous politics highlights how what has usually been
understood as ‘culture’, may have more to do with ‘politics’ (de la Cadena 2010). These politics may
not be obvious to the state, but its consequences are. This makes Ashaninkasanori-making priorities
political, in ways that are recognisable to hegemonic politics (e.g. the demands made by political
organisations) and others that are not (e.g. the everyday making of people; see Sarmiento Barletti
2012). Importantly, this rejection of extractivism is not a rejection of Peru or development per se, a
common attempt by governments to delegitimise positions against extractivism. Based on my
engagement with Ashaninka people, I understand it as a rejection of the imposition of extractivism
and the concomitant destruction of the networks that allow them to be people. The subordination of
these priorities perpetuates the subordination of indigenous ways of knowing and experiencing the
world (Povinelli 2002; Hale 2002), overlooking a politics and ethics that reconstitutes the world in
terms of relational subjects (Cruikshank 2005; Nadasdy 2007; Poirier 2008). Understanding this is key
to support the possibility of a sustainable transition to peace in these communities.

11 Although I do not delve into those debates, this experience is comparable with what de la Cadena (2008; 2010)
and Blaser (2013) have discussed for other South American indigenous peoples through the lenses of indigenous
cosmopolitics or political ontology.
12 Interview available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkDqSB6Wr0Q, accessed 4 March 2020.
13 See http://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org/news/2014-jul/kemito-ene-at-festival, accessed 4 March 2020.

14
Conclusion: towards a personhood-centred analysis of mass violence and its undoing

This Ashaninkasanori-centred analysis is guided by what my Ashaninka interlocutors told me about

the role of other-than-human beings in their construction of people. Based on this, I have shown how
their priorities set them against Peru’s application of the security-development nexus for post-war
reconstruction as a prioritisation of economic reconstruction over a transformational attempt at social
repair. As noted earlier, the nexus proposes that development and economic growth are the most
effective strategy to avoid future violence. This is a mainstream discourse and mode of intervention
for post-conflict contexts that is supported by the funds and political influence of multilateral and
donor institutions (USAID 2011; UNDP 2016; World Bank 2016) and by scholarly work (Collier et al.
2003; Fearon 2010; Beswick and Jackson 2011; Hegre and Nygard 2015).

I have made a case for the potential of personhood-centred ethnographic engagements with survivors
of mass violence. This engagement has allowed me do a number of things in this article. Firstly, to
reveal the clashes between local and national priorities in the official wake of war in Peru, inspired by
the anthropological literature on reconstruction but centred on the relegation of social repair to
macroeconomic growth. Like mainstream transitional justice mechanisms, post-war economic
processes are also influenced by international models that are transposed onto varied contexts with
different priorities. The development-security nexus, which has justified the imposition of extractivism
in indigenous territories in Peru, is one of those models. Secondly, in doing so I have shown how the
Peruvian state’s emphasis on economic reconstruction sets it against Ashaninka people’s priorities, to
the point that it blurs the official ‘post-war’ period with a continuation of war by other means. People
have had no transition in their interactions with the state as the violence of war was followed by that
of extractivism. Although at one level the conflicts stemming from this context may be read as conflicts
over natural resources, I revealed a conflict in how war and extractivism are experienced as a
continuum of violence undoing the networks that create Ashaninkasanori. Thirdly, I have claimed that
this experience of war and its wake is a politics of personhood that may not be easily recognisable as
political from the offset. My Ashaninka interlocutors’ refusal to engage with aipatsite (“our earth”)
purely as natural resources leads from their experience of how entangled they are to other-than-
human beings. Thus, to do so would be to deny their own personhood. Approaching this refusal from
their experience of personhood allows for a re-appreciation of the priorities and power relations in
this context, and of the consequences of the encounters of different reconstruction agendas. This
awareness denaturalises the security-development nexus at play in Peru’s politics of reconstruction
and the exclusion of the alternative priorities and aspirations held by victims.

The two approaches to reconstruction that I have dealt with here represent different yet linked ways
of knowing oneself in the world. The issue is that there are different levels of disparate power relations
between them that I have been able to reveal through a personhood-centred analytical focus. I have
sought to reveal these projects and the impact they have on each other to open a discussion towards
a sustainable and equitable articulation of both agendas through an approach that is sensitive to local
priorities and otherwise muted experiences. The accounts I discussed here experience extractivism as
an impediment to their own reconstruction priorities. The most obvious impediment stems from
extractivism’s legal and environmental threats to their territories, security and livelihoods. Yet,

15
exploring Ashaninka experiences of extractivism through their experience of personhood – the socially
inflected perception of the constitution of persons – has allowed me to reveal one of the muted
impacts of reconstruction on survivors of war. I note that a failure to listen to how survivors
reconstruct their humanity and the kind of relations that matter to them, prevents any positive
transformation of the relationship between survivors, states and wider national societies, through the
creation of ‘relationships today that are not haunted by the conflicts and hatreds of yesterday’ (Hayner
2001: 161).

I close by reemphasising the need for the consideration of alternative ways of knowing and engaging
the world (see also Escobar 2003; 2006) - such as those of Ashaninka people - for a transformational
shift in mainstream post-war practices. In engaging the world from positions within a network of
mutually constituted human and other-than-human actors that includes aipatsite (“our earth”) and
other forest beings, my interlocutors denaturalise the development complex and extractivism as post-
war reconstruction possibilities. The reconstruction of Ashaninkasanori-ness provides a ‘radical
solution for the rebuilding of humanity’ and to recosnider ‘our relationship with the Earth, and an
approach for transcending the excesses of the Anthropocene’ (Caruso and Sarmiento Barletti 2019:
222) in the wake of war but more widely in the context the turn towards low emissions development.

The pursuit of Ashaninkasanori-ness underlines both the challenges and transformative opportunities
of the incorporation of survivors’ ways of being in the world into reconstruction processes that break
continuums of violence like the one I have described for Peru. This is an extension of the struggle
against hegemonic initiatives and a homogenising politics that seeks to undo difference in order to
strip minorities of their rights and their projects to build their desired kinds of persons and
communities. Anthropologists, and the privileged access to the lives of those we work with, are
methodologically and analytically tooled to deploy a personhood-centred analtycial approach to
inform the necessary transition for more equitable and effective post-war reconstruction processes.

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