For whom the eye cries: memory, monumentality, and the ontologies of violence in peru

Abstract

This paper explores the polemic that erupted in early 2007 in Peru over the monument called The Eye that Cries (El ojo que llora). This monument, which commemorates the victims of Peru's recent political violence, has become key to Peru's ongoing ‘battles for memory’ or ‘memory struggles’, struggles that pit opposing memories of the decade and a half of violence in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that this polemic offers a privileged perspective from which to consider the ways in which two opposing interpretations of Peru's recent violent past have emerged in the last few years.