Peruvian state. However, uncertainty about the reports—and concerns from groups on the left that the military was involved in a misinformation campaign—prompted the journalists to travel to the site to investigate. In 1983 the war in the interior still had an enigmatic quality for many residents of Lima due to the profound cleavages that characterize Peru. Indeed, in part because the war was still a mystery to many urban Peruvians, the journalists fashioned their trip as an expedition in search of the truth.
They spent the night in the city of Huamanga before heading out at dawn the next day for the lengthy trip to Huaychao. Their route took them through Uchuraccay, where the journalists arrived in the village unannounced, accompanied by a Quechua-speaking guide. Although the sequence of events remains debatable, the photos taken by one of the journalists as he and his friends were dying established one thing: The villagers surrounded the journalists and began killing them with rocks and machetes. Their bodies were then buried facedown in shallow graves in the ravine that runs the length of the village.
At the national level, the events at Uchuraccay marked the initiation of the war in the highlands and thus the journalists’ deaths became an intensely debated national theme. Although Sendero Luminoso had initiated their armed struggle three years earlier and the armed forces had been sent to Ayacucho a month prior to the killings to begin the counterinsurgency campaign, until Uchuraccay the violence had not captured significant national attention. However, the photos that were subsequently developed from the camera that had been buried with journalist Willy Retto would be placed on the cover of every major Peruvian publication, constructing a “mediatic spectacle of political violence” that would become one of the emblematic national memories of the war.15 The “Eight Martyrs of Uchuraccay” would be commemorated annually in the press for the sacrifices they had made in their search for truth.
In the aftermath of the killings, President Belaúnde established an investigatory commission to determine what had happened and why. Headed by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the commission was composed of three anthropologists, a psychoanalyst, a jurist, and two linguists who were sent to study Peru’s “ethnic other” and the circumstances of the journalists’ deaths.16 The three anthropologists were well-known and respected members of the academic community and were included on the basis that anthropologists specialized in the study of “indigenous communities.” And so the members of the Vargas Llosa commission accepted their charge and headed via helicopter to Uchuraccay, where they spent one morning investigating the killings as background for their final report.
In their report, the Informe de la Comisión Investigadora de los Sucesos de Uchuraccay, the authors begin by reviewing material on the history and ethnography of the Iquichanos, an ethnic group allegedly comprising the villages of Carhuahurán, Huaychao, Iquicha, and Uchuraccay, among others.17 As they summarize, “This history [of the ethnic group Iquichanos] is characterized by long periods of almost total isolation and by unseasonable warlike eruptions by these communities in the events of the region or the nation.”18 The belligerence of the Iquichanos forms a central component of the history presented, as does the notion of a violent “ethnic latency.” The Vargas Llosa commission’s report offered a “hierarchy of causes” (truths?) that revolved around two key explanatory factors: the primitiveness of the highlanders, who allegedly lived as they had since the time of the conquest, and the intrinsically violent nature of the “Indians.”19 In the widely circulated Informe, the commission suggests that one could not really blame the villagers—they were just doing what came naturally. The commission grounded its findings in the assertion that two irreconcilable worlds coexist in Peru: modern/civilized/coastal Peru, with Lima as its center, and the traditional/savage/archaic Peru, mapped onto the highland communities, particularly Ayacucho. Somehow, in a perverse twist on John Murra’s concept of pisos ecológicos (ecological niches), civilization had never found a way to scale up the steep mountain slopes of Peru’s interior.20
In a subsequent interview with the journal Caretas, Vargas Llosa elaborated on the notion of “the two Perus” consisting of “men who participate in the 20th century and men such as these villagers of Uchuraccay who live in the 19th century, or perhaps even the 18th. The enormous distance that exists between the two Perus is what lies behind this tragedy.” As such, these highland villages were akin to museum exhibits, frozen in time and placed outside history, resulting in an “Andean world that is so backwards and so violent.”21
As one might imagine, the ensuing debates were vociferous. In response to the endemic violence arguments, a more indigenista perspective was elaborated, particularly by academics on the political left. This view insisted upon the harmonious nature of the villagers and the peaceful quality of lo andino—a cultural essence that imbued the lives of the villagers and subsumed individuality to the greater good.22 From this perspective, if indeed the villagers had killed the journalists, certainly it was due to being engañados—tricked or duped—by the military.
In an insightful article regarding the Informe and the subsequent debates, Enrique Mayer notes, “the result was an anthropological text rather than a fact-finding report. Anthropological input into the Commission thus lent an aura of legitimate expertise concerning indigenous affairs.”23 However, although it produced an anthropological text in tone, the commission did so without utilizing the key components of anthropological methodologies—prolonged fieldwork and the embodied experiences of the people with whom we conduct our research.
Several years later, in the novel Adiós, Ayacucho, Julio Ortega provided a thinly veiled political commentary on these same events, suggesting that anthropology as a discipline was one of the fatalities in the aftermath of Uchuraccay.24 As he suggests, if all anthropologists can do is offer up a mirror in which the “primitive’s savagery” is reflected back to them, then it would be best to count anthropology among the dead at Uchuraccay.
These debates formed the backdrop for my early research. I decided to focus on the highlands of Huanta, the province of Ayacucho that encompasses Uchuraccay, Huaychao, and Carhuahurán.25 I was convinced the answers to my questions about violence and its legacies did not lie in the distant colonial past—violence “then” does not explain violence “now”—or in primordial ethnic latencies. I wanted to explore how villagers understand the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s, the decision to kill that arose within the context of the war, and the communal processes employed to reclaim those who had “fallen out of humanity” and came around pleading for a way back in.
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In a wonderful toss-away line, Luise White reminds us that history is different in different places.26 So true! Over the years I have followed ideas, people, hunches, rumors, and the occasional consulting gig throughout Ayacucho. This movement in both time and space generated an abiding appreciation for the irreducible complexities of postwar social worlds, as well as the importance of local specificity. If I wanted to understand what motivated the revolution, this meant including communities that had been militant Shining Path bases. My work with the PTRC made that possible.
In 2002 my research team and I began working with the communities of Accomarca, Cayara, Hualla, and Tiquihua, all located in central-southern Ayacucho, the region Shining Path considered its “Principal Committee.”27 Here the Shining Path cadres had begun their political work a decade before launching the armed phase of the revolution with their 1980 attack on Chuschi. Sendero had much deeper roots in this region than in the highlands of Huanta, and this made for different memories, different truths.28
Importantly, the cadres were frequently lugareños—local people. While the revolutionary spark in the northern provinces was externally lit, the revolution burned from within these southern communities. In interviews with former militants, I sought to understand what motivated people to join or sympathize with Shining Path, how they view their participation now, and how they interact within these communities as well as with the
