Pursuing the Perpetual Conflict: Ethnographic Reflections on the Persistent Role of the ‘Terrorist Threat’ in Contemporary Peru

Abstract

The question of how to remember twenty years of insurgency and state violence during the internal armed conflict (1980–2000) continues to polarize the social and political landscape of Peru. Dominant narratives of victims and perpetrators effectively silence more ambiguous and complicated memories. In this article I examine memories of the conflict that have been relegated to the margins of public discourse. Memories that tell stories of victims as perpetrators and perpetrators as victims are “placeless” because they upset a post-conflict order that is constituted by a form of civil contract through which mutual opponents coexist with each other without having to confront a conflicted past. I argue that in order to maintain a status quo, polarization is not merely a byproduct but a condition.