The Mask and the Mirror: Facing up to the Past in Postwar Peru

Abstract

The Senderistas (Shining Path guerrillas) attacked at night. We'd be asleep. The smell of smoke woke us up, the roofs all in flames. Then the screaming. We'd grab our children and run toward the river. It was dark, but they wore masks. If they'd taken off those masks, we would have recognized them. They were our neighbors. Dios Tayta, we've seen what our neighbours can do.-Interview, a community in the highlands of Ayacucho1IntroductionOn August 28, 2003, the Commissioners of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) submitted their Final Report to President Alejandro Toledo and the nation. After two years of work and some 17 000 testimonies, the Commissioners had completed their task of examining the causes and consequences of the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s.Among the most striking conclusions in the Final Report is the number of fatalities-69 280 deaths, three times the number cited by human rights organizations and the government prior to the TRC-and the responsibility for these deaths. In the section of the Final Report regarding accountability, the Commissioners state that the Shining Path guerrillas (Senderistas) were responsible for 54% of the fatalities reported to the TRC (TRC 2003).I would like to follow the implications of this statistic, which supports what campesinos have been telling me throughout my years of research in Ayacucho, the region of Peru that bore the greatest loss of life and infrastructure during the war. There is a lament in the communities with which I have worked: Jesus Cristo, look what we've done among brothers.2 Although the Senderista leadership was composed of university-based provincial elites, the rank and file were peasants. Certainly I do not seek to diminish the atrocities committed by the armed forces; rather, I note the level of civilian participation in the killing. The forms of violence suffered and practised influence the reconstruction process when the fighting subsides. The fratricidal nature of Peru's internal armed conflict means that in any given community, ex-Senderistas, current sympathizers, widows, orphans and veterans live side-by-side. This is a charged social landscape. It is a mixture of victims and perpetrators-and that sizeable segment of the population that blurs the dichotomy, inhabiting what Levi called the grey zone of half tints and moral complexity (Levi 1989).What is it like to live in such a context? What is it like knowing just who one lives with, and living with what oneself has done? What are the social and psychological strategies that people use to address this reality and attempt to reconstruct social relationships?As a way of thinking about these questions, I would like to focus on a figure that appears incessantly in my conversations with members of campesino communities in Ayacucho. I refer to the figure of the mascarayuqkuna, the Certainly there were people during the political violence; however, more than the physical presence of armed actors, what interests me in the insistent, reiterative symbol of the masked ones. What lies behind the masks that haunt these narratives, particularly in those communities in which the masked ones were frequently neighbours and family members?In his study of public secrecy, Taussig asks, [What] if the truth is not so much a secret as a public secret, as is the case with the most important social knowledge, knowing what not to know? (1999:2). He suggests that such secrets are essential to everyday life. I believe there is a public secret at work in these communities, and the construction of anonymity and distance where neither of the two exists. It is to everyday life that I turn, convinced it is the realm in which people rebuild social relationships. As I will demonstrate, talk about masks, faces and facelessness is talk about morality and immorality. Local moral discourse is embodied, leading me to think in terms of a phenomenology of justice and injustice, as well as the complicated alchemy of remembering and forgetting that characterizes postwar social worlds. …