Abstract:
The war between the Peruvian state and the Maoist Shining Path rebels
began in the Department of Ayacucho, an area with a majority of indigenous
Quechua- speaking peasant villages. After twenty years of violence (1980-2000),
this region of South America’s Andes began a critical period of demilitarization,
refugee resettlement, and reconciliation. In this transition, the rebuilding of villages
devastated by the war raises critical questions about indigenous autonomy,
citizenship, and the role of international human rights initiatives in local
reconciliation.
I examine the tensions between interventions by national and transnational
organizations, and the insecurities that continue to define everyday life in villages
like Wiracocha - a newly resurrected community that was in the heart of the war
zone.1 Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in this village and ten months of
comparative fieldwork in villages across the Ayacucho region and in the city of
Huamanga, my research shows that villagers were often at odds with the aid and
interventions offered to them from the outside. I focus on the complicated nature of
village war history, paying attention to the initial sympathy with Shining Path and
the village's later decision to join the counterinsurgency. In Ayacucho, memory has
itself become a site of struggle that reveals as much about present-day conflict,
ambivalences, and insecurities of neoliberal Peru as it does about the actual history
1 Wiracocha is a pseudonym that I am using in order to maintain subject
confidentiality.
of the war. Villagers sometimes oppose official memory projects and humanitarian
initiatives - including Peru's Truth Commission - that that they see at odds with their
own visions and agendas. Finally, I examine the less predictable ways that villagers
have redefined what it means to be Andean, including: the maintenance of village
militarization, a return to hard-handed customary justice and the adoption of bornagain
Christianity as a new form of moral order and social solidarity.
