Abstract
Drawing on the memory battles in contemporary Peru, Jelke Boesten explores victimhood, agency and representation across lines of class, race and gender. In particular, she looks at how gendered aspects of violence are recalled in artistic representations of the past, and if and how such representations may provide any form of redress, reparation or consolation for victim-survivors of war. Such a gendered reading of commemorative practices and symbolic reparations highlights what is not said, what is still hidden and whose trauma is at stake—and whose is not.
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Notes
- 1.
With thanks to Cynthia Milton for facilitating access.
- 2.
The report is online via www.cverdad.gov.pe.
- 3.
Eduardo Adrianzen, via Facebook, Cited in: Jack Hurtado, ‘Es la obra La Cautiva pro-terrorista?’ Diario16, 13 January 2015. http://diario16.pe/noticia/56537-es-obra-la-cautiva-pro-terrorista.
- 4.
Patricia del Rio, ‘La bella y la bestia’, El Comercio, 6 November 2014. http://elcomercio.pe/opinion/rincon-del-autor/bella-y-bestia-patricia-rio-noticia-1768471.
- 5.
Recent mass mobilisations around gender based violence in Peru, and indeed in Latin America more broadly, have put the debate on sharp, with powerful conservative opposition orchestrating a backlash against gender equality. As such, the battle to end violence against women, and indeed,gender equality, always seems a two-step forward–one-step backward process. Panel ‘Ni Una Menos: Avances y Desafíos en America Latina’, Latin America Studies Association Annual Conference, Lima, April 2017. For an analysis of policy achievements and challenges, see Boesten, Sexual Violence during War and Peace, 121–146.
- 6.
As I outline in my book Sexual Violence During War and Peace, the state armed forces used a range of rape regimes facilitated by the conflict, but not all unique to the conflict. Rape was certainly used as a weapon of war, but was also perpetrated opportunistically.
- 7.
For an analysis of the complex and mutually shaping relationship between national and international NGOs on the one hand, and victim organisations on the other, see de Waardt (2014).
- 8.
Arguably, this has created an introspective process, rather than a process of recognition and respect.
- 9.
The Lugar de la memoria, la tolerancia y inclusion social (LUM),a national museum to remember, funded by the EU and by the German government, has received little support from the current and previous governments, and its position and future seems precarious. Arguments over who is in charge, under which Ministry, and with what purpose are continuous. El ojo que llora, a monument in a central Limeño park designed and made by the Lima-based artist Lika Mutal, was several times vandalised by supporters of the Fujimori clan, see Drinot (2009).
- 10.
These divisions are also currently being played out in the response to mining conflicts in the country—with a neoliberal, conservative sector responding to social unrest by militarising social protest,and hence, making things potentially much worse, and a human rights community using the law, democratic consultation and support for the underdog (rural communities protesting infringements on their land) to defend human rights. Hence, these memory battles are not only backward looking, are not irrelevant to contemporary generations, and cannot be relegated to the past.
- 11.
According to Colonel Raul Pinto Ramos, his subordinates may have made minor mistakes when stationed in the high Andes during the 1980s, because of the temptation of ‘so many things’. Cited in Boesten (2014, 30). Statements by (ex) military are littered with references to the sexual availability of young indigenous girls, further examined in chapter 2 of my book cited above.
- 12.
Lurgio Gavilán (2015). ‘El mito de la comunidad innocente’, https://lurgio.lamula.pe/2015/05/06/el-mito-de-la-comunidad-inocente/lurgio/ [accessed June 2015].
- 13.
Idem. Agüero calls Gavilán’s manner of speaking about such atrocities as ‘mere anecdotal’, while Gavilán responds that telling is denouncing.
- 14.
- 15.
See Peruvian author Ivan Thays: http://notaszonadenoticas.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/viaje-vertical_26.html; and also: http://mate-pastor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/ivan-thays-sobre-la-comida-gastronomia.html.
- 16.
A recent film loosely based on the book, Magallanes, does recognise that this is about wartime rape and abuse, which the book only does half-heartedly.
- 17.
- 18.
The project Yuyarisun, managed by the Servicios Educativos Rurales (SER) was published in 2006. The website unfortunately does not work anymore.
- 19.
Anonymous. Archive Yuyarisun, SER, unavailable. Image can be requested with the author.
- 20.
This is an important image that challenges what actually happened in those years, as research by scholars and the TRC point to a much more complex reality, whereby alliances shifted, old conflicts escalated, and victims were perpetrators and vice versa. This is what the anthropologist Kimberly Theidon (2013) called intimate enemies: few people were caught in the middle; most of the people in the centre of the conflict were one way or another responsible for the violence as well as victimised by it.
- 21.
Two specific memoirs came out this year: Agüero (2015), concerns the reflections of the son of Shining Path militants, both killed during the war; Gálvez Olaechea (2015) contains essays written by one of the main leaders of the MRTA. Gálvez spent twenty-seven years in prison before being released in May 2015.
- 22.
- 23.
As referred to in Brown (2014).
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I am grateful to the editors of this volume, Lucy Fiske and Rita Shackel for inviting me to their 2015 workshop that formed the basis of this collection of papers, and the participants of that workshop for rich discussions about transformative gender justice. Independently of that event, Alexandra Hibbett provided sharp comments on my contribution for which I am very grateful. Needless to say the result is entirely mine.
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Boesten, J. (2019). Recalling Violence: Gender and Memory Work in Contemporary Post-conflict Peru. In: Shackel, R., Fiske, L. (eds) Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice. Gender, Development and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77890-7_9
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