the face of deep moral injuries—for addressing the heridas del alma that sent so many people searching in the Clinic of the Soul.
PART II
Common Sense, Gender, and War
Chapter 5
Speaking of Silences
Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions … concludes.
—Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge
IN ACCOMARCA THEY told us about Eulogia, a young woman who died long before our arrival but who continues to appear in the memories of various women we spoke with. Eulogia was mute and lived during the time when the military base sat on the hill overlooking Accomarca.
The soldiers came down from the base at night, entering the house Eulogia shared with her grandmother. They stood in line to rape her, taking advantage of her inability to verbally express her pain. Her female neighbors told us, with a mixture of compassion and shame, that “We couldn’t do anything. We were afraid they would visit us as well.” So they listened to her at night, along with her grandmother who sat across the room, unable to protect her granddaughter.
Eulogia’s muffled, guttural sounds still resonate in her neighbor’s ears. “We knew by the sounds. We knew what the soldiers were doing, but we couldn’t say a thing.” The soldiers succeeded in depriving everyone of their capacity for speech.
There are two versions of how Eulogia died. Some told us she had fallen, walking down the steep cliffs toward Lloqllepampa. Others insisted she threw herself from those cliffs, unable to bear her pain.
Elaine Scarry has argued that pain and torture seek to “unmake the world” and to rob human beings of their capacity to speak and to make sense—a sense that one can share with other human beings.1 Eulogia could not resort to language: she could not put words to her pain; she could not denounce injustice. She also appears in my memories: it is impossible to erase the image of a young woman screaming with all her might, unable to say a thing.
When people talk about rape, they talk a great deal about silences. What to do with these silences—how to listen to them, how to interpret them, how to determine when they are oppressive and when they may constitute a form of agency—is a subject of much concern and debate.2 Clearly if there is a theme capable of imposing silence, it is rape. Women have many reasons to hide that they have been raped and, with justice a distant horizon, few reasons to speak about a stigmatizing, shameful experience.
My goal is this chapter is not redundancy. We know rape can be a strategy of war, and recent developments in international jurisprudence have recognized this.3 I am averse to presenting graphic details that may resemble a pornography of violence and that may be yet another violation of the women with whom I have worked. Rather, I want to share some of the conversations that my research team and I have had, addressing a series of themes that left a deep impression upon us.
First, I explore the historicity of memory, discussing how certain victim categories become “narrative capital” within the context of a truth commission. Second, I turn to what women talked about and how their narratives are “thick description” in the best anthropological sense of the term. Drawing on their thick descriptions, I examine some assumptions about what constitutes a “gendered perspective” on armed conflict. In doing so, I discuss how women talked with us about rape and the emphasis they placed on how they had attempted to defend themselves and their family members. Third, I examine how women were coerced into “bartering” sex to save their lives and the lives of their loved ones. I then discuss how rape between men and women—and between men—was a form of establishing relations of power and “blood brothers.” I conclude this chapter by considering some of the legacies of the massive sexual violence that characterized Peru’s internal armed conflict, reflecting on the possibility of reparations in the aftermath of great harm.4 But let’s begin with some “common sense.”
Commissioning Truth: A “Gendered Perspective”
One goal of truth commissions is writing new national narratives that are more inclusive of groups that have been historically marginalized within the nation-state. In her discussion of postconflict issues, Martha Minow writes: “The most distinctive element of truth commissions, in comparison with prosecution, is the focus on victims, including forgotten victims in forgotten places.”5 There is hope that democratizing history may exert a positive influence on the future and that truth commissions may be a better format for writing that inclusive history. In contrast to legal proceedings and the aggressive questioning that characterizes them, truth commissions are considered “victim centered” because they include empathic listening rather than an adversarial hermeneutics of suspicion.6
One group frequently included in the forgotten victims category is women. Indeed, the word “victim” conjures up a gendered set of images when the topic is war. However, although allegedly victim friendly, parallel with the rise of truth commissions in postconflict settings was the lament that “women don’t talk.” There are different reasons for this, but in her review of truth-seeking mechanisms, Priscilla Hayner determined that “Most truth commissions have not been active in seeking out, encouraging or facilitating testimony from women.”7 Additionally, the early commissions in Argentina and Chile assumed a gender-neutral approach to truth—an approach that has been criticized for overlooking the ways in which gender neutrality frequently defaults into a perspective that privileges men and their experiences.8
A concern for the lack of “women’s voices” prompted the commissions in Guatemala and South Africa—and subsequently Peru—to actively seek out testimony from women. These more recent commissions have argued that truth itself is gendered and thus have sought to incorporate a “gendered perspective.” In terms of sheer numbers, they were successful: in both South Africa and Peru women provided the majority of testimonies given to their respective commissions.9 In all three commissions women described in detail the harm done to their family members and to their communities, testifying to the ways in which armed conflict affects every aspect of daily life, frequently exacerbating the underlying structural injustices of their societies. However, they overwhelmingly did not talk in the first person about rape. Thus the lament that “women don’t talk” shifted to the concern that “women don’t talk about themselves.”
The concern that women do not talk about themselves but rather focus on the suffering and harm done to loved ones has prompted a variety of “gender-sensitive” strategies aiming to capture women’s experience of violence—generally defined as rape and other forms of sexual violence. That women do not talk about rape is thus posed as the problem that a gender-sensitive approach is designed to resolve. From this perspective, the incitement to speech is well intentioned. The problem may be the sort of speech that commissions “commonsensically” seek.
The Peruvian TRC was given a gender-neutral mandate, but feminists were successful in insisting the commission think about the importance of gender in their work.10 Drawing upon the earlier commissions in Guatemala and South Africa, they argued for proactive efforts to include women’s voices in the truth-seeking process.11 Thus the Peruvian TRC decided to include sexual crimes in its mandate because of the broad language used in the Supreme Decree, the importance of the topic, and “the need to recover the voices of women affected by such crimes.”12
Additionally, the TRC’s Linea de Género (Gender Program) persuaded the commission to adopt a broad definition of sexual violence that reflected changing international norms. Rather than strictly investigating rape, the commission
