Art from a Fractured Past

Front matter

Memory and Truth-Telling in Post—Shining Path Peru

CYNTHIA E. MILTON, cotor With an afterword by Steve J. Stern

ART FROM A FRACTURED PAST

Part One Visual Representations Of Recent Pasts

ONE | CYNTHIA E. MILTON Images of Truth: Rescuing Memories of Peru’s

Internal War through Testimonial Art 37

TWO / EDILBERTO JIMÉNEZ QUISPE Chungui: Ethnographic Drawings of Violence and Traces of Memory 75

THREE | MARÍA EUGENIA ULFE Narrating Stories, Representing Memories:

Retablos and Violence in Peru 103

PART TWO TELLING STORIES OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE FOUR / VÍCTOR VICH Violence, Guilt, and Repetition

Alonso Cueto's Novel La Hora Azul 127 viii | CONTENTS

FIVE | Luis ROSSELL, ALFREDO VILLAR, AND JESUS COSSIO

Rupay: (Hi)stories of Political Violence in Peru, 1980-1984 139

SIX | PONCIANO DEL PINO Ayacuchano Cinema and the Filming of Violence:

Part Three Performing A Fractured Past Seven | Ricardo Caro Cárdenas

EIGHT | CYNTHIA M. GARZA Colliding with Memory: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani’s Sin Título, Técnica Mixta 197

NINE [JONATHAN RITTER The “Voice of the Victims”:

AFTERWORD | STEVE J. STERN

The Artist’s Truth: The Post-Auschwitz Predicament after Latin America’s Age of Dirty Wars 255 Bibliography 277

Contributors 293

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project started ten years ago, almost to the day, when I wandered through Ayacucho’s central plaza on the late afternoon prior to the Peruvian Truth Commission’s arrival the next day to submit their Final Report. Colorful carpets (alfombras) made by schoolchildren and local groups from flower petals, chalk, and other materials surrounded the plaza, posterboards displayed images of the conflict and visitors’ comments about them, in the corner stood an enormous stage in a style of a wooden triptych retablo. Nearby, an exhibition displayed some of the entries for an art contest on memories of the internal conflict. On this day, and those that followed, I was struck by how visually rich the conflict was and its aftermath as Peruvians engaged with their recent fractured past. As an historian, I wondered what stories and memories emerged from these representations. A few of us were pondering similar questions at the time, Olga Gonzalez, Jonathan Ritter, Maria Eugenia (Makena) Ulfe, and Victor Vich, among others. Soon it became clear that the range and array needed a cooperative and collective approach to begin to understand the myriad of cultural responses to the conflict. This edited volume is the result. However, the work is far from complete. A whole new generation of Peruvians and Peruvianists are continuing to ask about the cultural impact and means of broaching Peru's conflict.

The intellectual origins of this book also trace back to a workshop held on Robben Island, organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Legacies of Authoritarianism (LOA) Research Circle. With its infamous history as a former leper colony, holding spot for immigrants, and later apartheid prison, the island has since transformed into a memory museum and education center. Here in June 2000, activists, artists, practitioners, former and future truth commissioners, academics, journalists, and students from around the world came together to reflect on the dark heritage of authoritarian rule. Over the course of those few x | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS days, both art as a medium for truth-telling and the creative practices necessary for transition away from authoritarian regimes came to the fore. One result of our conversations was a book that tried to visually lay out the possibilities of artistic engagement with difficult pasts, The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule. I thank Leigh A. Payne, Ksenija Bilbija, and Jo Ellen Fair for this experience, and Louis Bickford as well for bringing me into the larger project.

Another root of this book lay deeply in the Social Sciences Research Council (ssrc) training and research project led by the faculty scholars Elizabeth Jelin, Carlos Ivan Degregori, Eric Hershberg, Steve J. Stern, among others. While I was only indirectly involved in this ssrc project (via the LOA Research Circle) and only one contributor to this book, Ponciano del Pino, had an official role in it, it created a whole generation of Latin and North American scholars dedicated to studying the aftermath of dictatorships in Peru and the Southern Cone. This SSRC project inflects this book, and many of us have benefited from the energy and dynamism that continues to be felt in the region.

Many, many people have contributed to this book in conversation and public presentations (in particular at a panel on this topic held at Latin American Studies Association meeting in Montreal in 2007 and at the 2008 conference in Lima coorganized by the 1zp and IDEHPUCP five years after the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission). Just to name only some people who have participated in discussions leading to this book: Carlos Aguirre, Claudio Barrientos, Karen Bernedo, Ralph Buchenhorst, Jo-Marie Burt, Gisela Canepa, Peter Dietsch, Eduardo Gonzalez, Olga Gonzalez, Elizabeth Jelin, Richard Kernaghan, Catherine LeGrand, Erica Lehrer, Salomón Lerner, Lika Mutal, Nelly Plaza, Félix Reategui, José Luis Rénique, Javier Torres, Alberto Vergara, Maria Inez Vasquez, and Markus Weissert. Others are acknowledged in the following chapters. I express my gratitude to all the artists whose works are included here, and to the different organizations that have granted permission for their inclusion, especially the Servicios Educativos Rurales. I heartily acknowledge as well those people who have helped with the tricky mechanics of putting this mélange of languages, texts, and images together: Jen Akers, Elizabeth Becker, Jane Remick, and Katherine Saunders-Hastings for their assistance in various stages of translation; Andrea Garcia, Socorro Naveda, Vera Lucia Rios, and Sofia

Vera for information that they helped gather; Bill Nelson for the maps; and

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | xi

Lori Curley for the index. Thanks to Geneviéve Dorais, Marc Drouin, Marie- Christine Dugal, Steve Lamarche, Tuong-Vi Nguyen, Louis Otis, Nicolás Rodríguez, Hélene Rompré, and Guillaume Tremblay for their comments inside and outside the classroom. Monica Eileen Patterson (another LOA connection) and Camille Boutron have also commented on earlier drafts, for which I am grateful. I thank Raúl Hernández Asencio and Pati Zárate for their friendship and for overseeing this project since its early stage as a loose idea. Stephan Rinke at the Latin American Institute at the Freie Universitát and Barbara Góbel at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institute in Berlin provided me with an ideal setting in which to complete this manuscript. I am fortunate to have had such dedicated external readers for this project, one anonymous, the other Paulo Drinot. They both provided very insightful comments and more examples to consider. Paulo continued to participate in this project until the final version and thus deserves special recognition for his hand in this book. Many thanks to Valerie Millholland, who heard of this project many years back and showed enthusiasm for it, and to Gisela Fosado, Jessica Ryan, and Martha Ramsey for their help to bring it to fruition.

My gratitude to the many funding organizations that have contributed to this book and to the larger research projects on alternative truth-telling and art in the aftermath of violence of which this book is a part: the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Faculté des arts et des sciences at the Université de Montréal, and the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation.

This book is dedicated to Carlos Iván Degregori, who has been a mentor without borders for many of us and an inspiration to all. He understood the importance of the intersection between academia and public obligation. Through his compassion and intellect, Carlos Iván shows us how with one life it is possible to touch many, to listen, to learn, and to share with others.

INTRODUCTION | CYNTHIA E. MILTON

ART FROM PERU’S FRACTURED PAST

T n Adiós Ayacucho [Farewell Ayacucho] Julio Ortega recounts from the perspec-

Í tive of Alfonso Cánepa, a community leader from the department of Ayacucho,

the travails of finding postmortem justice in a country that offers little justice for the living. When he was accused of being a terrorist—rather than a peasant leader—the military mutilated his body and threw what was left of it into a pit, leaving out many of his bones and thus denying him the possibility of a proper burial and eternal peace. Since his death Cánepa has worked to reconstruct his body, trying to get a sympathetic hearing from the president of the Republic in the hope that the head of state will return his bones to him. Rejected, he climbs into the tomb of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and takes some of Pizarro’s bones to complete his own skeleton. Written in 1986, this novella evokes the tragedy and brutality of the war in highlands Peru, the racism and indifference that lay at the heart of the conflict, and the long-standing historical violence dating back to the arrival of the Spanish.'

Alfonso Cánepa's story, though fictional, recalls the experience of hundreds of thousands of Peruvians whose lives from 1980 until the mid-1990s were convulsed by an internal war.’ According to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which studied the years from the launch of Shining Path’s “People’s War” to the fall of the Fujimori government in 2000, over 69,000 people were killed or disappeared, some 4,600 clandestine burial sites pockmark the country, over 40,000 children were left orphans, over 20,000 women were left widowed, and some 600,000 internal refugees migrated to the cities in search of safer lives.* The scale of the destruction, loss of family and loved ones, personal suffering, and fracturing of life trajectories and social bonds impedes comprehension. Yet the internal war of Peru necessitates reflection and historicization.*

Art—such as Ortega's short story —offers a powerful means for recounting the past and for reaching a kind of understanding. The ability of art to speak about atrocity has been debated since Theodor Adorno famously remarked that to write poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric.” His aphorism has often been interpreted to mean that it is impossible, both actually and morally, to represent the Holocaust, and perhaps more broadly any atrocity, via art. Yet Adorno later in life acknowledged poetry as an important means of communication for “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.”° Over the half century since the Holocaust, a plethora of artworks has emerged to broach the difficult—in the meanings of both sensibility toward and comprehension of—thus allowing us decades later to move beyond the taboo of representing and giving expression to shameful and horrific pasts.” Art may express what formal language cannot.* We should recognize the significant role art can play in making difficult pasts comprehensible, even if only in part. Thus, in a reworking of Adorno’s famous words, Steve J. Stern suggests that to not produce art in the aftermath of suffering would be to allow barbarity to reign unchecked.”

Indeed, in Latin America, one of the intended aims of art in response to atrocity seems to be this: to contest the barbarity committed and to restore the humanity of citizens who have been harmed. In the transition from state violence to democracy and the post-transitional period, issues of representation and memory have come to the forefront of political and cultural analyses and debates about conflict and repression in Latin America. Protest art against authoritarian regimes and violence has made way for memorial art. In Argentina, for instance, siluetazos (silhouettes), which stood out as silent protests and evocations of missing citizens, now adorn memory sites dedicated to the desaparecidos (disappeared). Yet art may maintain continuity in its role regardless of regime type: whether under dictatorial or democratic rule, art contests any totalizing vision of state power. During dictatorships, to make art could be an act of resistance, as when Chilean women stitched picture arpilleras (appliqués) whose imagery denounced the Pinochet regime's human rights abuses.” So, too, in post-conflict democracies, art reminds audiences of the ongoing tensions of the unresolved past in the present. For instance, post-civil war novels in Central America reference the violence of earlier decades in the context of today's insecurity;" and the creativity of the escraches (public denunciations of perpetrators) by Argentine and Chilean youth “remind us that while the dictatorships and even democratic regimes have tightly controlled our understanding of the real, cultural practices constantly subvert that discursive order.” ”

Art may help to achieve a fuller expression and better understanding of difficult and contested pasts. In a conversation between the historian Gonzalo Sanchez and the artist Maria Elvira Escallón, who made a photography exhibition after a bombing of a social club in Bogota, Sanchez reflects on the limits of written texts in recounting the Colombian violence: “a text cannot say everything about the pain that covers our daily tragedies. We need to turn to images, and the multiple possibilities of artistic language.” Art may help not only those who have gone through traumatic events to put shape and give meaning to their experiences—to express something about the pain, to paraphrase Sánchez— but art may also help those who have not directly experienced such events to come closer to a sympathetic awareness of them. As Kyo Maclear has written in the context of post-atomic bombings Japan, art can move viewers “emotionally and intellectually toward the unknown.”* For some survivors, art came out of necessity and a desire to record what happened for future generations: “even now [thirty years later] I cannot erase the scene from my memory. Before my death I wanted to draw it and leave it for others,” said Iwakichi Kobayashi, a seventyyear-old survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.” Thus, art also asks contemporary and future others to bear witness to the artists’ acts of witnessing.

It is this combination of telling, witnessing, and drawing others toward the unknown by representing it through artistic means that is explored here. This book considers the role of literary, visual, oral, and performance arts in the sharing of individual and collective memories as a means to complement our historical understanding of Peru’s fractured past. This combination of artistic forms of expression is of fundamental importance, for it allows a much broader swath of society to participate in the reconstruction and re-presentation of the past—often marginalized groups who would otherwise be excluded from mainstream media and modes of communication.” In societies where the written word may impede the narration of their experiences, and in the wake of severe violence when the ability to speak may be blocked,” art may be one of the few modes by which people can recount the past. Thus, the compilation of artworks in this book represents a call for an expansion of the archive to include other repositories of memory and history, beyond state-produced, written records and the collection of oral testimonies that emerge through official inquiries like truth commissions and trials."

From the Internal Conflict to Memory Battles

Much of the art studied in this book is in dialogue with or takes as its point of departure the work of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación; cvr), a formal body assigned to investigate Peru's internal conflict of 1980-2000. While artists had been producing art during this period, the emergence of a truth commission in 2001 broadened the public sphere for discussing this past by other means.

After the sudden fall of Alberto Fujimori in November 2000, the option of a truth commission—an established mechanism used by other countries in the post-Cold War era—stood out as one of the ways that Peru's government could mark regime change.” Unlike Latin American truth commissions that had investigated periods during military and authoritarian regimes, Peru’s commission addressed violence that had occurred mainly under the stewardship of democratically elected governments: those of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980— 1985), Alan García Pérez (1985-1990), and Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000, with the suspension of Congress in 1992). In addition, whereas other truth-seeking mechanisms in the Southern Cone had named state forces as primary perpetrators, Peru’s truth commission found the armed group the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Partido Comunista del Perú—Sendero Luminoso) largely responsible. Furthermore, the Peruvian truth commission held a wider mandate than those of its neighbors. For instance, the cvr’s scope was considerably broader than that of the first Chilean truth commission, known as the Rettig Commission, which at the time could investigate only the cases that led to death and disappearance.” In Peru, the cvr investigated assassinations and kidnappings, disappearances, torture and other serious wounds, harm against collective rights of Andean and native communities, and other grave violations of people's rights. The cvr’s mandate was to determine the responsibility for abuses and violations, identify and report on the experiences of victims, and develop proposals for reparations and reforms. The cvr sent out investigative teams to collect testimonies from remote regions. Furthermore, the cvr held public hearings (audiencias públicas) wherein local community members could participate, unique among Latin American truth commissions and perhaps a modified form of South Africa’s sessions for victims and their families. As part of their attempt to make the past accessible, the cvr’s documentation is openly available in an archive constructed especially to house it.” Internationally, the Peruvian truth commission is considered successful because of the depth and breadth of their investigation, which was based on almost seventeen thousand testimonies in Peru’s twenty-four departments, collected, compiled, and analyzed by a staff of over five hundred members.” In addition, the cvr forwarded forty-seven cases to the Office of the Prosecutor General to pursue.

In the case of Peru justice and truth were both goals of the cvr, thereby breaking with the expected framework of previous transitional justice scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s that assumed states could pursue only one at the expense of the other. After the strong civil society protests against Fujimori’s third five-year mandate, which contributed to his sudden resignation, the subsequent interim president, Valentin Paniagua, took on parallel projects of accountability and truth-seeking. Paniagua’s transitional government returned Peru to the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights while also establishing an ad hoc state and civil society committee to consider forming a truth commission. Human rights groups, who for years had been coalescing under the umbrella of the National Human Rights Coordinator (Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos), played a key role in both the broad societal efforts to topple Fujimori and in establishing an agenda for public truth-seeking.” A series of pivotal events further combined to create a propitious environment for a truth commission. First, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Peruvian state was responsible for the deaths of residents of Barrio Altos in 1991 and repealed the 1995 amnesty laws protecting security forces from prosecution for any abuses committed since 1980. Second, videos were leaked that incriminated opposition parties, the armed forces, and businessmen in the Fujimori government's web of corruption. These events, in particular the damning videos, weakened the political and military elites and bolstered their resolve to publically distance themselves from the Fujimori regime and to support the new democracy.” As Carlos Ivan Degregori noted, in Peru the truth commission, unlike those of other countries in the region, emerged not from a “pacted transition” but from the auspicious political vacuum left by the “collapse of the authoritarian regime.””

Despite this favorable setting for a broad-reaching truth commission, and despite having the benefit of other countries’ experiences with truth commissions, the cvr nevertheless faced constraints: it had a confined period of twenty-four months to conduct investigations into the previous twenty years, limited resources, and difficulties with translating from Quechua and other indigenous languages into Spanish.” Furthermore, the public, though openly embracing the return to democracy, had a mixed reaction to a call for a truth commission. Some survivors and groups distrusted this newer manifestation of the state that had previously harmed them; some evangelicals chose to move on, not look back; and people questioned such expenditures of money; among other concerns.” With the change of president from Paniagua to Alberto Toledo, “reconciliation” was added to the commission’s tasks, which had originally focused on truth-telling alone, thus perhaps laying the groundwork for frustrated expectations and fears of impunity and amnesty.” The cvr itself was a compromise, bringing together different sectors of society, including members from Peru’s diverse political spectrum. The appointed commissioners came from various political parties and societal groups, including a retired air force general, a former Fujimorista congresswoman, academics, members of church and human rights groups.” This compromise, however, was not as marked as those of other countries in transition had been: since Shining Path and the Revolutionary Movement of Túpac Amaru (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru; MRTA) no longer posed a threat, the interim government did not need to negotiate with an armed movement, nor did the government need to make large concessions, such as a blanket amnesty, to the political and military elites, since they had been weakened by scandal.

The cvr’s Informe final (Final Report), made public August 28, 2003, attempts to give both an account of the violence, of what happened, and an explanation of the violence, of why it happened.” Looking at this period of conflict from 1980 to 2000 (including the years from the capture of Shining Path’s leader, Abimael

Guzmán, in 1992 to the end of Fujimori’s authoritarian regime in 2000), the cvr’s Final Report presents searing data of the nation’s suffering, whose extent had been much greater than had been imagined at the time.” The many conclusions of the CVR added up to a historical narrative that evinced the long-standing problems of racism against the nation’s indigenous population, centralization of power in the hands of the predominantly coastal mestizo-white elite, and implementation of “rule by abandon” whereby the state was largely absent in large swaths of national territory.** Three out of every four victims were speakers of Quechua or other indigenous languages, many of whom had not finished primary school and were poorly literate, lived in rural regions, and were engaged in agricultural production.* The regions hardest hit were small, isolated villages in the Peruvian highlands (in the departments of Ayacucho, Huanuco, Huancavelica, Apurimac, Junín, and San Martin), representing 85 percent of the victims. Many were literally pueblos perdidos, small forgotten villages and hamlets with only difficult access to urban centers. The violence affected victims differently as to not only region and ethnicity but also age and gender: over 55 percent of the victims were men (most between the ages of twenty and forty-nine) targeted by Shining Path and state armed forces alike; most of the women who died (nearly 20 percent of all ages) were the victims of indiscriminate violence and massacres leveled against communities.” Almost all cases of sexual violence reported to the cvr were committed against women, mainly rural.” It was these profound class, ethnic, and gender cleavages which ultimately explained why, according to the president of the cvr, Dr. Salomon Lerner, “tens of thousands of citizens can disappear without anyone in integrated society, in the society of the nonexcluded, noticing a thing.”**

In their findings, the Cvr spread the blame widely for the violence and its escalation. While the commission condemned the armed group Shining Path as the main perpetrators of violence (in 54 percent of cases of death and disappearance) and to a much lesser extent the urban-based MRTA (1.5 percent), the commission also placed responsibility in the hands of successive governments (Belaúnde, García, and Fujimori) and the political parties who had abdicated authority to the armed forces (found responsible for 29 percent of the deaths and disappearances), and police (7 percent).*?

Thanks to the work of the cvr, we now have more testimonies, statistics, and case studies that contribute to our awareness of the conflict’s hard facts

COLOMBIA

ECUADOR

TUMBES

LORETO

PIURA E E [AMAZONAS

LAMBAYEQUE +,

CAJAMARCA

LA LIBERTAD

ANCASH

HUÁNUCO eto * PASCO

UCAYALI

MADRE DE DIOS

PACIFIC OCEAN

APURÍMAC

¿ AYACUCHO PUNO

AREQUIPA

Number of deaths and disappearances

1-20 cesses Department boundary

MAP 1. Deaths and disappearances (1980-2000) according to Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe final (Lima: Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003), vol.

1, 157. Reproduction by Bill Nelson.

and historical truths.*® The Peruvian truth commission was the main national effort to reconstruct what had happened and create a new (potentially national) narrative about the internal conflict. Yet, probably as in all post-conflict regions, the history remains contested, far from any kind of consensus or single version. The difficulty comes perhaps in trying to give an explanation of why events happened and to string together the years of violence into a coherent historical narrative, one with a beginning, middle, and end. According to Lerner, the human rights violations suffered during this period “exceed the amount of human loss suffered by Peru in all the external and civil wars that have happened in its 182 years of independence,” thus making comprehension difficult.”

Yet, despite the lack of a single, coherent narrative, most Peruvians would probably agree on a vague outline of the internal conflict: that the nation underwent a wave of violence that affected predominantly highland and Amazonian communities, and that by the early 1990s this violence could be felt in Lima (especially after the July 1992 car bombing on Tarata Street in Miraflores, an affluent neighborhood in Lima). Nevertheless, much heated debate is fueled by competing versions of details of the conflict (and even of what to call it— conflict/war/political violence) and, particularly, of who was responsible for the violence and to what extent. These memory battles continue to rage today.

It would be too simple to say that there is an official versus a nonofficial version of the conflict, since a plethora of camps exists, each with their own experiences and memories. That said, the two most prominently circulating narratives of this period can be characterized as “salvation memory” and “human rights memory.” In “salvation memory,” espoused mainly by the armed forces and neoliberal elites, human rights violations were committed by a few rogue elements in the armed forces, Fujimori’s heavy hand and disregard for human rights was the price paid for breaking Shining Path, Shining Path as instigator was thus solely responsible for the violence, and “we” in Lima did not really know the extent of what was going on (and with this lack of knowledge comes a kind of absolution). This narrative presents Fujimori as the economic and physical savior of Peru: he saved Peruvians from Garcia’s hyperinflation, captured Abimael Guzman, thus effectively decapitating Shining Path, and he later crushed the last of the much smaller guerilla group MRTA, in a dramatic resolution to a nearly four-month hostage crisis.”

The “human rights memory” narrative, held by many human rights groups and organizations of affected family members, does not portray the end of the internal conflict as a victory over terrorism but situates the violence as an extension of ongoing legacies of social and political inequalities of which Shining Path was a symptom and on which Shining Path was able build its movement. Shining Path, the main perpetrator of violence, launched a conflict that was exacerbated by the armed forces “dirty war” tactics, which did not respect the rule of law.** In this narrative, the role of civil society, the self-defense patrols (rondas), and individual acts of heroism are highlighted. The “human rights memory” narrative further points to what the “salvation memory” effaces: Fujimori's failure to root out the causes of Shining Path’s strength (endemic poverty, racism, unequal access to economic and social resources and the benefits of inclusion within the nation-state). This narrative clearly allocates blame for the escalation of violence to two competing forces—Shining Path and the state—yet tends to focus more on the violence committed by the state and perpetuates the image of Peruvians as caught between these “two fires.” This focus on responsibility is slightly different from that of the cvr’s Final Report, which emphasizes Shining Path’s violence and acknowledges the armed forces’ human rights abuses but also points a finger at the nonviolent actors in Peruvian society in general for having produced a “grammar of violence”* that fostered the injustices that lay at the heart of the violence.

The Final Report of the cvr is the closest thing Peru has to an official version of the conflict. Yet, even though the cvr was government mandated, no administration has claimed it as their own, thus, eschewing any self-reflection by the state that would bring about the changes recommended within the Final Report. The work of the cvr—whose impact continues as a reparations program slowly advances, cases come before the judiciary, and a proposed national memory museum (Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social [Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion]) takes shape—has occurred in the context of antagonistic relationships with subsequent administrations. Thus it is not quite accurate to refer to the cvr’s Final Report as “la historia official”; it is an “official” history with which most officials are ill at ease.

Domestically, the commission faced serious challenges in the diffusion of their findings, particularly from the political party Alianza Popular Revolucionaria

Americana (APRA), Fujimoristas (supporters of Fujimori), some high-level church officials, and the armed forces, all of whom were named as responsible for facilitating the violence. A campaign to discredit the commission’s findings led to accusations of conflicts of interest among commissioners, claims of malfeasance, and the use of the appellation “lie commission.”** The Office of the Prosecutor General seemed reluctant to pursue the criminal cases forwarded to them by the commission, making public statements that potentially undermined the public reception of the commission’s work overall.“ Importantly, the statistical findings, while most likely giving general indicators of tendencies, remain in question.** The Final Report held the limelight for a relatively short time after its publication. Indeed, it may have spurred more debate prior to its actual publication than immediately after.* After the report’s release, the media quickly turned to issues of the nation’s economy.

Former members and advocates of the commission have found it difficult to engage the public in a sustained way or get the Final Report adopted as the national account of the conflict years, despite their efforts to disseminate the cvr’s findings through public hearings, photography exhibitions, workshops, and the publications of a book-length version of the Final Report, Hatun Willakuy,” and a forty-page bilingual summary, among other initiatives. Nevertheless, the commission’s work and memories of this recent past have continued to take center stage, abruptly at times, in the national media—as happened during Fujimori’s trials, on the occasion of the vandalizing of the memorial to the nation’s victims El Ojo que Llora (The Eye That Cries) in Lima, and when the political wing of Shining Path (Movimiento por Amnistia y Derechos Fundamentales) attempt to register as an official political party.