can’t study. She’s seventeen and she’s still in fifth grade. She says her head hurts, it burns. What could it be? Susto? Ever since she was a baby she’s been like this. I took her to a curandero and he tried to change her luck. But it’s no better—it just stays the same. I took her to the health post and they gave her pills [Dioxycillin] to take everyday. What could it be? Nothing helps her.
—Salomé Baldeón, Accomarca
There is another reason people, particularly women, attempt to forget and spare their bodies further martyrdom.47 Not only do toxic memories torment them; they also pose a danger to their children. Quechua speakers have elaborated a sophisticated theory regarding the transmission of suffering and susto from mother to child, either in utero or via the mother’s breast-milk. The term used in Quechua is mancharisqa ñuñu. Ñuñu can mean both breast and milk depending on the context and the suffix, and mancharisqa refers to susto or fear. In my Spanish publications, I have translated the term as la teta asustada (the frightened breast) to capture this double meaning. La teta asustada conveys how strong negative emotions and memories can alter the body and how a mother can transmit these harmful emotions to her baby.48 Quechua speakers insist the frightened breast can damage a baby, leaving the child slow-witted or predisposed to epilepsy.
In addition to Salomé’s daughter, there are six other young people in Accomarca with various congenital problems: they are deaf, mute, or suffering from epileptiform attacks. These young people are collectively referred to as “children of the massacre.” All of their mothers were pregnant when the soldiers entered Accomarca, rounded people up in Lloqllepampa, and killed them. The mothers of these seven young people escaped and watched the killing from their hiding places in the surrounding mountains. All seven women gave birth in the days and weeks following the atrocities.
Rather than disregard this as anecdotal evidence, it echoes the findings of a study conducted in Chile, where a team of researchers studied the impact of political violence on pregnant women. For the study, the researchers determined which barrios of Santiago had suffered the most political violence and disappearances. They selected a sample of barrios, ranging from low to high levels of political violence. They followed the pregnancies and deliveries of a group of women from each barrio and, when they controlled for confounding variables, the researchers determined that the women who had lived in the most violent barrios suffered a fivefold increase in pregnancy and delivery complications.49 Both the epidemiological study and the pervasive theory that villagers have with respect to the damaging effects of violence, terror, and llakis on both a mother and her baby are suggestive and warrant further study. These women and their children provide a painful example of the violence of memory.
Rural Afflictions
When I began working with rural communities in Ayacucho, I asked people which illnesses were most common. There was an answer that has stayed with me: “Well … coughs, colds, colic. But more than illnesses, it’s the males de campo50 that grab us.” On several occasions I was told los males de campo (rural afflictions) would not grab me because I was from the city and “did not believe in them,” which illustrates the ethnicized geography discussed earlier. In addition to marking territory and status, this phrasing distinguishes between the ailments that send one to the health post versus those that prompt a visit to the curandero.
Throughout Ayacucho, biomedically oriented health posts coexist with curanderos, healers whose innovative bricolage defies the term “traditional.” Villagers go to the health post for the bags of fortified powdered milk the government distributes, as well as for the treatment of bronchitis and malaria and for birth control. These are considered strictly “health problems”—medical issues for which the health post may be useful. It is with the curanderos, however, that villagers address what is wrong with the world: ancestors who are angry, the envious neighbor who has placed a curse, the llakis that riddle the body with pain, ex-enemies whose presence in the village irritates the heart, and the earth itself that reaches up and grabs those who carelessly tread where they should not.
Curanderos can serve as lay psychologists by treating the relational aspects of life; they diagnose “social ills.” While one may visit the health post for an acute but short-term problem, with curanderos there is follow-up and frequently a series of visits. Importantly, with curanderos there is respectful interaction. Within a population that resists the idea of spending two soles (roughly sixty-five cents) for a trip to the health post, patients may well pay the curandero with a sheep in exchange for his services.51
Males de campo refer to disordered social relations and to the spiritual and moral confusion that characterizes a postwar society. Indeed, these males de campo frequently arise from strong negative emotions. Michel Tousignant has noted that emotions are generally conceived throughout Latin America as important etiological factors of illnesses.52 In addition to causing individual illness, certain emotions are considered socially disruptive and dangerous. Managing strong negative or retributive emotions is one part of managing conflict.
Carlos Alberto Seguín has suggested many illnesses in these communities have an “ethnoreligious” aspect.53 In contrast with PTSD, which marginalizes the spiritual plane, these males de campo have a strong religious component. The separation of spheres of experience into nonporous categories (for example, natural/supernatural, secular/religious) is an obstacle to understanding the semantic world in which these villagers become ill, recover—in which they live.
“The males de campo grab us.” The verb in Quechua is qapiy and deserves a few additional words. A woman in Accomarca described her pain and how difficult it is to be alone because “When I’m alone, the sadness follows and wants to grab me.” Similarly, alcanzo can grab a person when they step or sit where they should not, angering the apus, who grab the person with vomiting, fever, and overall bodily pain. The harmful agent is not located within the individual: rather, the “badness” or “evil” enters and grabs the person. This exteriority is important when we consider the rehabilitation of perpetrators and the processes used to cleanse them of their evil or wrongdoing. This is one component of a complex understanding of agency, accountability, and the force of things: objects, words, and violence itself are imbued with their own agency.54
The healing processes used by campesinos emphasize cleansing and purgation. The idea of cleansing one’s interior and purging the “badness” is common and is invoked at the communal level as well. Villagers often exteriorize the violence (“the violence arrived here”) and the Senderistas (“they arrived here—where could they have come from?”). People attempt to locate the cause of sociopolitical problems outside the community, depicting the violence and its perpetrators as invading the collective. One long-standing sanction in communal justice is the banishment of the perpetrator, a form of “purging” the community.55 These ideas influence the processes of rehabilitation and reconciliation. The emphasis on exteriorizing harmful agents serves psychological and social needs: it opens space for one to regain his or her humanity via cleansing and confession, and permits people to assimilate more slowly just whom they are living with. These illnesses and their alleviation figure strongly in the violence, both its making and its unmaking.
Weakness
I’m already so old. I don’t even know how old I am! Maybe eighty. Before I was happy—now, there’s so much suffering. With so many pensamientos, with iquyasqa I’m so old. Those years were penitence, sacrifice. We had to hide in the hills, without eating, without sleeping. The soldiers killed my two little children when we were hiding in Lloqllepampa. We were escaping, hiding in the hills. So my little boy said, “Mami, I need to pee.” “Ya, go ahead,” I told him. When he was peeing, that damned soldier shot him in his penis. The bullet passed through him from behind. The same thing with my little
