with whom they have lived for years? How can family members and neighbors become enemies one is willing to track down and kill? But it was not just the violence that gave rise to questions. More was at stake here. There was no invading army that would gather up weapons and return to some distant land. Not this war. When the killing stopped, former enemies would be left living side by side. What would happen then?
It is common these days to hear the term “new wars” used to contrast contemporary armed conflicts with conventional warfare and the battlefield strategies with which two or more nation-states trained their armies and engaged in combat.2 These “new wars” are more likely to be civil wars fought with guerrilla tactics and counterinsurgency responses, and the front lines blur into the home front as civilians frequently bear the brunt of the violence.
One particularity of civil wars is that foreign armies do not wage the attacks. Frequently the enemy is a son-in-law, a godfather, an old schoolmate, or the community that lies just across the valley. The forms of violence suffered as well as the forms practiced matter greatly and influence the reconstruction process when the fighting subsides. The fratricidal nature of Peru’s internal armed conflict means that ex-Senderistas, current sympathizers, widows, orphans, rape survivors, and army veterans live side by side. This is a volatile social world. It is a mixture of victims, perpetrators, witnesses, beneficiaries—and that sizable segment of the population that blurs the categories, inhabiting what Primo Levi called the gray zone of half tints and moral complexity.3 The charged social landscape of the present reflects the damage done by a recent past in which people saw just what they and their neighbors could do.
I returned to Peru in 1995 in the hope of answering those deceptively simple questions. I headed to Ayacucho, the region of the country that bore the greatest loss of life and infrastructure during the internal armed conflict. I began working with Quechua-speaking communities to explore how people reconstruct individual lives and collective existence in the aftermath of war. I studied the process of social reconstruction—what some have deemed social repair.4 Social repair involves much more than laying down weapons, reviving economies, or rebuilding infrastructure: it also consists of reconstructing the social ruins that are among the most enduring legacies of war. My years of research have convinced me that the theories and practices Peruvians have elaborated about political violence and its effects—about social life and their struggles to rebuild it—are relevant in many other contexts in which people strive to reinvent community amid landscapes steeped in blood and memory, fully aware of the danger human beings pose to one another.
Intimate Enemies
PART I
The Difficult Time
Chapter 1
“Ayacucho Is the Cradle”
The blood of the people has a rich perfume,
It smells of jasmine, violets, geraniums and daisies,
Of gunpowder and dynamite!
Carajo! Of gunpowder and dynamite!
—Refrain from “Flor de Retama,” the unofficial anthem of Shining Path
IN QUECHUA PEOPLE refer to the internal armed conflict as the sasachakuy tiempo (difficult time). The political violence is bracketed as a finite period in which normal moral codes were suspended, people engaged in the previously unimaginable, and many individuals grew strange unto themselves. It was a time most people fervently hope will never happen again.
The sasachakuy tiempo began when the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) launched the armed phase of its revolution in 1980 with an attack on the Andean village of Chuschi. Militants burned the ballot boxes on the very day Peruvians were voting for the first civilian president in twelve years—and on the day that many campesinos (peasants) were voting for the first time since the 1979 Constitution eliminated the literacy requirement that had effectively excluded them from suffrage.
Founded in the Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho by professor Abimael Guzmán, this band of revolutionaries positioned themselves as the vanguard in a revolution to guide the nation toward an imminent communist utopia.1 Drawing upon Maoist theories of guerrilla warfare, they planned a top-down revolution in which the cadres of Sendero Luminoso would mobilize the peasantry, surround the cities, and strangle the urbanized coast into submission.
Initially Shining Path was considered a marginal group of fanatics. Espousing antifeudal rhetoric, hanging dead dogs from electrical posts with signs assuring passersby that a similar fate awaited enemies of the revolution—they may have raised a few eyebrows but little alarm. Even intelligence reports submitted to then president Francisco Morales Bermudez (1975–80) gave no indication there were any problems brewing with Sendero. They were wrong.2
After a twelve-year military regime, the civilian government of President Fernando Belaúnde was voted into power in 1980. Given the recent transition, there was reluctance to summon the armed forces to deal with the insurgents. The new government was hesitant to “knock on the barracks door” just when the armed forces had been sent back to those barracks. Sendero grew, particularly in rural areas, without confronting any coordinated response from the state and did so within the context of a democratic government.
During the initial period of Sendero’s growth (1980–82), Senderista militants concentrated their efforts on political work rather than armed actions. The cadres were not yet imposing the summary execution of campesinos or inhabitants of popular urban barrios for being spies or “traitors to the revolution.” It was during those years that Sendero launched an assault on the jail in Ayacucho, freed their political prisoners, and drew a crowd of ten thousand mourners to the burial of fallen Senderista militant Edith Lagos. Confronted with the guerrillas’ dramatic display of force, the ill-equipped police withdrew from rural posts located throughout the department of Ayacucho.3
In the countryside, Shining Path grew in part because it filled the absence of the state. Following the Agrarian Reform (1969–75), no other authority filled the void left by the hacendados (large landholders). The authority that did exist was communal and limited to the jurisdiction of each individual campesino community.4 The Senderista cadres began to administer their own brand of justice. In their so-called juicios populares, they utilized physical punishment for common crimes and a bullet to the head or knife across the throat for more serious infractions. The party’s decisions were not open to appeal, thereby imposing an authoritarian order that resolved conflicts lethally—frequently with the rousing support of the campesinos, for whom the elusive search for justice was a feature of daily life.
The ill-conceived response of the police and the armed forces was another factor that contributed to the growth of Sendero. In their rush to “drain the water and isolate the fish,” the “forces of order” practiced indiscriminate repression and committed serious human rights violations. These abuses generated resentment and a desire for revenge among various sectors of the population, and it was precisely these sentiments that the Senderista cadres channeled to their own ends.
However, only a simplistic reading would reduce this conflict to a war between the guerrillas and the armed forces. Although the Senderista leadership was composed of university-based provincial elites, the rank and file were peasants. This internal armed conflict was fought among Shining Path, the Peruvian armed forces, and the peasants themselves.5 Without denying the pressures exerted by the Shining Path cadres as well as the armed forces, the idea of being “caught between two fires” does not help us understand the brutal violence that involved entire pueblos or the fact that there was a “third fire,”
