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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,” comprised of peasants themselves. In the words of many villagers, “we learned to kill our brothers.”

As late as 1991 there were concerns that Sendero would topple the Peruvian government. However, in September 1992, the Fujimori administration located the leader of Shining Path hiding in a safe house in Lima. The arrest of Abimael Guzmán virtually defeated the guerrilla movement. Although various would-be successors have vied for power, Sendero Luminoso remains an isolated group that has been pushed into the jungles of the coca-growing interior.

The man credited with “pacifying” the country was former president Alberto Fujimori. Elected in 1990, he campaigned on a platform of ending hyperinflation and defeating the guerrilla movements that had been waging war for a decade.⁶ In fulfilling his promises, Fujimori used draconian measures, including staging a self-coup that shut down a recalcitrant Congress, rewriting the constitution, and dismantling political parties and other institutional intermediaries in the development of his self-described “direct democracy.” Fujimori’s popularity and vast patronage apparatus enabled him to handily win reelection in 1995; however, his authoritarian tendencies increased during his second term. To remain in power, he removed members of the Constitutional Tribunal who blocked his illegal run for a third term and reinterpreted the constitution to allow for the perpetuation of his presidency.

Following a highly tainted presidential campaign in 2000, Fujimori fled the country, faxing his resignation from Japan. The massive corruption of his two administrations had become increasingly visible. Indeed, visibility was a key component in his downfall and the subsequent political transition. Hundreds of videotapes were discovered showing both Fujimori and his crony, former head of internal intelligence Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing a cast of characters that ranged from congressmen to talk-show hosts to body builders. The corruption charges forced Fujimori from office and provided the political opening for the establishment of the truth commission by interim president Valentín Paniagua in 2001. It was his successor, Alejandro Toledo, who added the word “reconciliation” to the commission’s name and mandate. That mandate was to clarify the facts of and responsibilities for the violence and human rights violations attributable to “terrorist organizations” as well as to agents of the state from 1980 to 2000.

Commissioning Truth

Wars are fought. They are also told, and the telling is always steeped in relations of power. As countries emerge from periods of violent conflict and authoritarian rule, reckoning with the past is a volatile endeavor. Memories and countermemories become both a means and an end of political struggle, and our historical époque is characterized by much faith in memory—not its infallibility but rather the work it is alleged to do in deterring future atrocities.⁷ Part of contemporary memory politics involves transitional justice, a field of postwar inquiry and intervention focused on addressing the legacies of past human rights violations in the hope that doing so will build a more peaceful future.⁸ Transitional justice may include tribunals, war crimes prosecutions, memorials, reparations, and truth commissions.⁹

The primary function of a truth or truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) is to collect testimonies from as many individuals as possible—including but not limited to victims, perpetrators, witnesses, political and religious leaders, institutional representatives—to clarify “the truth” of what happened during a specific episode of a country’s history. These temporary bodies focus on the past, investigating patterns of abuses that resulted in the derogation of basic human rights, including acts of violence such as torture, rape, unjust imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances.¹⁰

Based on these testimonies, a truth commission publishes an official public record of the past while also offering recommendations to the transitional or successor government. The recommendations may include a wide range of reforms, including moral, symbolic, and economic reparations for victims, institutional reforms, and the transfer of selected cases to the appropriate authorities for further criminal investigation.¹¹

The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) was a two-year process that involved focus groups, in-depth interviews, fourteen Public Audiences, ethnographic research, the review of archives including those compiled by the U.S. State Department, and the collection of almost seventeen thousand testimonies from people throughout the country, many given to the commission’s mobile teams that worked in rural areas.

The PTRC aimed to provide a structural analysis of the conditions that gave rise to the internal armed conflict and to the governmental response, as well as identify responsibility both institutionally and individually for what had occurred. Unlike other truth commissions, Peru’s investigations included the identification of criminal responsibility because the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had annulled Fujimori’s 1995 amnesty laws.¹² As a result, the PTRC was able to present state prosecutors with forty-two criminal cases, many of which related to human rights violations that had occurred during the Fujimori administration.

When the commission concluded its work in August 2003, it presented then president Alejandro Toledo with a nine-volume final report. Among the most striking conclusions in the report is the number of fatalities—69,280 deaths, double the number routinely cited by human rights organizations and the government prior to the PTRC.¹³ During the presentation, Dr. Salomón Lerner, head of the commission, posed a rhetorical question to the crowd gathered in the Government Palace: “We Peruvians used to say, in our worst estimates, that the violence had left thirty-five thousand dead. What does it say about our political community now that we know another thirty-five thousand of our brothers and sisters were missing and we never even noticed they were gone?” I say “rhetorical” because the answer lies in the demographics of those who died. Of the total number of victims reported to the PTRC, 79 percent lived in rural areas and three of every four people killed during the internal armed conflict spoke Quechua or another native language as their mother tongue. The dead were people who—in the national imaginary—had counted for little during their lives and went largely unaccounted for in their deaths.

Equally striking are the statistics regarding accountability for these deaths. In the section of the Final Report regarding responsibility for the conflict, the commissioners state that the Shining Path guerrillas were responsible for 54 percent of the fatalities reported to the PTRC.¹⁴ These statistics in no way diminish the atrocities committed by the armed forces; they do, however, point to a high level of civilian participation in the violence.

I collaborated with the commission in the Ayacucho office, directing research on community mental health, reconciliation, and reparations. This book is in part an exploration of the PTRC and how people interacted with this national initiative in the region of the country where the violence left its most damaging and enduring legacies. I worked with an amazing group of young researchers: Edith Del Pino Huamán, Leonor Rivera Sullqa, José Carlos Palomino Peña, Juan José Yupanqui, Dulia Lozano Noa, and Norma Salinas Mendoza. They appear throughout this book, along with two research assistants who accompanied me during my first year in Ayacucho: Efraín Loayza and Madeleine Pariona. Working with them figures among my fondest memories of Peru.

Memory Projects

It is not only a truth commission or the anthropologist who has a memory project. So do people who have lived through violent times and fiercely guard stories, secrets, and silences. Although there was technically one war, we could write many histories of the sasachakuy tiempo. Where to begin? Where to tease out the multiple registers of truth that may coexist yet rarely collide? The “Eight Martyrs of Uchuraccay” came to mind.

It was early in the course of Peru’s internal war when eight journalists from Lima’s leading newspapers headed out for the highland village of Huaychao, located in the department of Ayacucho. The men had arrived from Lima to investigate rumors that the peasants had been killing the Senderistas, who were ostensibly waging a revolution on behalf of the rural poor. Immediately following the killings of the Senderistas in Huaychao, President Belaúnde congratulated the peasants for taking action against the “terrorists” in defense of the 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.

* * *

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 state.

However, while insisting on the need to listen to the life histories of these former militants to understand their complex motivations for waging war, I do not lose sight of those who feel deeply aggrieved by “those people” (huk kuna, referring to the former militants). Daily conversations resonated with local moral idioms—detailed discussions of responsibility, degrees of guilt, and processes of redress. This is “justice talk” in another register, likely to involve references to aching hearts, lacerating ulcers, masks, faces and foreheads held shamelessly high. Local moral discourse is embodied, leading me to think in terms of a phenomenology of justice and injustice, as well as the complicated alchemy of remembering and forgetting that characterizes postwar social worlds. This local moral idiom is one of condemnation and transformation and provides great insight into how people conceptualize their elusive search for justice.

Terror’s Talk: Some Notes on Fieldwork, Witches, and War

What is involved in conducting research on political violence? We ask people to speak about life and death, about pain and how it etches the heart. If and when they decide to speak with us, there is no turning back without also turning away. To paraphrase Stanley Cavell, “The utterance ‘I am in pain’ is my acknowledgment of pain,” and it is our research participant’s claim upon us. We are “forced to respond, either to acknowledge it in return or to avoid it,” and any sort of shared future between the narrator and her listener is at stake.²⁹ In that encounter, the possibility of distance and impartiality must be surrendered.

Frankly, there is no “observation” when people are at war and you arrive asking them about it. You are, whether you wish to be or not, a participant. When terror weaves its way through a community, words are no longer mere information. Words become weapons and posing a question must mean you plan to do something with the response. How does one conduct fieldwork amid terror’s talk?

* * *

It was 1997 and I had been in the village of Carhuahurán for a few weeks when I finally met Michael, the commando of Los Tigres—a special self-defense unit that was paid to stand watch each night. I was interested in why the villagers had added this additional unit and expense to the preexisting ronda campesina (armed peasant patrol). I approached Michael with my hand extended, commenting on how happy I was to meet him and eager to talk with him. His feet shifted into a broad stance, his rifle was hoisted more firmly over his shoulder, and he looked me straight in the eyes: “Why do you want to talk to me?”

I began to explain, feeling more nervous with each awkward word that came out of my mouth. I had been introduced by the village president at a general assembly sometime before—certainly he remembered? I tried to explain my research and why I was there. I told him I was interested in the history of the villages, how they had lived during the years of the war, and how they were now rebuilding their communities. He gave me a quizzical look. Finally I felt rescued by a group of small children who approached—I noted how adorable the girls’ hats were, rimmed with flowers and ribbons. I made “small talk,” not understanding just how oxymoronic the term would be.

That evening in my room, I began mulling over what was happening. My experience with Michael was not unique. When I first arrived, many people invented names for themselves when we met. My earliest field notes are peopled by a phantom cast of pseudonyms. As I would learn, for years the guerrillas had arrived in the village with lists of names. The list was read, those villagers would be separated out, and there would be a juicio popular (people’s trial) followed by the execution of everyone whose name appeared on the list. The soldiers also arrived with their lists of supposed Senderista sympathizers; many of those named were arrested, killed, or disappeared. Giving one’s name was to place oneself at risk.

But it was not just war that made naming so powerful. Added to the political violence are long-standing practices of hechicería—witchcraft. These traditional practices are mobilized at times to new uses, as concerns about suspicious alliances during the war give rise to concerns about wrongdoing and revenge in the present.

A key figure in diagnosing witchcraft and settling accounts in Carhuahurán is don Teofilo, the curandero (healer). Teofilo is a tiny man—indeed, his nickname is El Piki (Quechua for “flea”). Teofilo is called upon to read the coca leaves and bodily symptoms; to name a perpetrator when witchcraft is determined; and to head out to the mountains and speak with the apus—the mountain gods who were angry that the villagers forgot them during the years of war, causing the gods to ally with the Senderistas.

Teofilo was wary of me when I first arrived, wondering what this gringa was going to do with all she learned. During one of our initial conversations, Teofilo issued a thinly veiled challenge: “So you want to know what I do? The words I use are so powerful that I could destroy you just by speaking them. Do you want me to speak them right now? Do you really think you have the power to handle my words?” He began to laugh, clearly pleased by my discomfiture. I felt very small indeed. He was, after all, the man who knew the language that allowed him to climb the sharp peaks surrounding Carhuahurán and converse with the mountain gods, soliciting advice and appeasing their anger.

The methodological challenges of conducting research during war go far beyond the routine concerns of establishing trust. Over the years, I was told of killing suffered and killing done. I knew who the ex-guerrillas were and why they had been allowed back in, their secret kept from the soldiers at the base. I knew what had happened to don Mario Quispe, the village president who demanded that the soldiers stop abusing the women—his body was never found; his widow went mad with grief. And there, in the freezing puna, I thought about Jeanne Favret-Saada and the French peasants with whom she had worked.

In her book Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, Favret-Saada sets off to study witchcraft in the provinces of France. As she writes, “In the project for my research I wrote that I wanted to study witchcraft practices. For more than a century, folklorists had been gorging themselves on them, and the time had come to understand them. In the field, however, all I came across was language. For many months, the only empirical facts I was able to record were words.”³⁰ As she comes to realize, “witchcraft is spoken words; but these spoken words are power, and not knowledge or information…. In short, there is no neutral position with spoken words: in witchcraft, words wage war.”³¹ And in war, words trigger terror. Rumor about who was seen where and doing what becomes a matter of life and death.

I reflected on her assertion that language is an act—the word is an act. Ethnographers frequently rely upon the spoken word as conveying information; however, witchcraft is spoken words as action. Informing the ethnographer for the sake of knowing is a contrary idea because a word can fix a fate and whoever puts herself in a position to utter the words is formidable. Knowledge is not neutral, and insisting that one is simply there to “study” keeps people guessing what purpose lies behind wanting to know.

The parallels were striking. Both witchcraft and war involve social relationships that are tense, dangerous, occult, violent, and potentially lethal. Again, there is no neutral place from which to ask, “What happened here? Tell me a bit about the war.” By merely speaking, I had entered into terror’s talk.

Mass violence provokes a recalibration of perceptual and moral frameworks. This world of altered perceptions and ruptured symbolic systems has been described as the “space of death.”³² In this space of death the signified and signifier come unhinged—the structuralist dream of a chainlink fence of order is disrupted, and the surplus meaning unleashed gives rise to tremendous portent. Everything becomes what it is and yet something more. The wind rustling through the laminated steel roofs of rural houses presages an imminent Senderista attack. A hollow in the mountain signals the opening in which the guerrillas slip out of view and disappear into the earth itself. Villagers assured me that it took the security forces so long to capture Abimael Guzmán because he could transform himself into a rock, a tree, a spring—and the soldiers had only thought to search for a man. Events, sounds, images—these become signs that are read for the warnings they offer or the evil they index.

The surplus of meaning also gives rise to duplicity and doubling. Villagers learned that survival might well depend on showing one face to the soldiers and another to the guerrillas. People lived their public and secret lives, masking their torn allegiances. Many people insisted that everyone became “two-faced” (iskay uyukuna), and one could never know which way anyone might turn. Duplicity gives rise to rumor, and rumor is divisive. As Luise White notes, “if we can historicize gossip, we can look at the boundaries and bonds of a community. Who says what about whom, to whom, articulates the alliances and affiliations of the conflicts of daily life.”³³ As villagers attempt to forge community as a strategic identity that allows them to make demands upon the state—to suppress internal conflicts in order to present a unified front to state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—gossip becomes explosive. In one community village authorities passed the Ley Contra Chismes (Law Against Gossip) in an attempt to control the power of words to rip the village apart. Authorities tried to control the verbal economy, recognizing that words wound.

This novice anthropologist sought to help, to heal, to demonstrate she meant no harm. I did not realize I was engaging in fields of power I did not perceive or comprehend. I had entered a world of stories, silences, secrets—a world in which trying to catch my bearings left me reeling more often than not.

Teodoro Huanaco’s Eye

One day a high-pitched voice sang greetings from outside our door in Carhuahurán. A slender man with smooth skin and a tightly clenched left eye stood outside, his hands grasped in front of him. I had never seen him before, but he brought potatoes to barter for sugar, and I invited him in.

Efraín and I learned his name was Teodoro Huanaco and that he was from Pera. He had come to Carhuahurán during the violence, as had so many people from his village. As he told us, Sendero arrived killing, not talking, in Pera.

We sat sipping miski yaku (coffee sweetened with sugar until it reached a syrupy consistency) and chatting for quite awhile. I did not want to be rude but was more than a bit curious about his left eye. It remained closed during his entire visit. I finally asked if he felt well, hoping that might lead us to the topic. It did, and he began explaining why his eye was clenched shut, only opening from three to five o’clock each afternoon.

Several weeks earlier, don Teodoro had gotten very drunk coming home from the feria (open-air market) when it was still held an hour-and-a-half walk away in Huaynacancha. He fell down a steep slope and passed out, spending the night in the bitter cold. The next day, he could no longer open his eye: he had been grabbed by daño (an illness caused by the mountain gods).³⁴

He had thought about joining the Evangelical Church to see if that would cure his eye, but he was reluctant to give up his trago (alcohol) and his coca. “Without coca we can’t do anything here. To work we need coca. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with chewing coca—it’s what the Virgin Mary gave us. During her flight when she was so tired and worried, she sat in the shadow of the coca plant and she began chewing the coca and she realized how good it was for fatigue. She said, ‘This plant is good for my children, and I will make the leaves increase for them.’ That’s why the coca leaves grew—this is a well-known fact,” don Teodoro assured us. “But I have been looking at the libro de los hermanos [the Bible] just in case.”

Efraín and I nodded, understanding he would have to give up his coca if he joined the Evangélicos. As our Evangelical friends explained, just as coca turns the teeth green, so does it stain the soul. Chewing coca was forbidden because you cannot walk through heaven’s gates with a green soul.

“Has no one been able to help?” I asked. “It must be so difficult to work.”

Don Teodoro nodded. “Arí mamacita linda. I’ve tried so many things for my eye. But nothing has helped.”

He left a bit later, and Efraín and I continued to wonder about his eye and why it only opened for two hours each afternoon. Daño worked in many ways, and evidently he had an unusual case.

A few days later, the same high voice called out, and it was Teodoro Huanaco again. He explained that he wanted to talk with us but could not do so in front of anyone else. “May I come back tonight?” he asked.

“Absolutely, we’ll be here,” replied Efraín. “Just come by, papi.”

It was around eight o’clock when Teodoro appeared again in our doorway, his poncho wrapped tightly around him and the candles casting his shadow against the wall. This time, it became clearer why he wanted to speak to us alone. Teodoro wanted to know if I could cure his eye. I was a bit surprised at first—daño was not an illness I knew how to treat.

“I’m not certain, don Teodoro. What would help your eye?”

“We could try flowers, candles, fruit, trago, a pagapu—it would need to be after midnight. Could you try?” he asked, looking straight at me.

Efraín glanced my way and we spoke softly to each other. He had heard about how people cure daño, although he had never tried before. I asked him if he thought we could figure it out and he nodded, reluctantly.

I then asked Teodoro exactly what we would need and that I would try to make the purchases the following Friday at the feria. He thanked me repeatedly and left.

Efraín and I were curious—why me? As a gringa, I hardly seemed like a sure thing. However, I had been giving people Ibuprofen for pain, antibiotics for infections, and massages to the women when talking about the violence made them ache. In one instance, amoxicillin probably had saved a man’s life.

A few weeks prior to don Teodoro’s first visit, a knock at the door had sent me scrambling for my flashlight. I slept with a rock propped against my door, figuring that if the soldiers planned a nocturnal visit, at least I would have a few minutes’ warning. But the voice that replied to my “Who is it?” clearly belonged to a child.

I slid the rock back, creaked open the rusty aluminum sheet, and found a little boy and his mother standing in a slender stream of moonlight, both in tears. The boy told me his father, Jesús, was very ill and asked me to come look at him. I gathered up my first aid kit and flashlight, and we made our way down past the preschool, silvery light reflecting off the roofs and barely illuminating the rocky path beneath my stumbling feet.

We entered their house and they directed me toward the heap of blankets piled on the bed. A man was lying there, breathing laboriously. I could feel the heat that emanated from his body before even touching him, and the gurgling congestion in his chest was audible with each strained breath. I thought he had bronchitis, perhaps even pneumonia. We began a seven-day treatment with antibiotics and aspirin, massages with mentholatum—and sugar, requested by his wife to give him strength.

He did recover, and the seriousness of his illness was impressed upon me during the rainy seasons I spent in Carhuahurán. The interminable rains of December–March left everything and everyone damp: we could go for days without a moment of dryness, torrents alternating with drizzles. Each rainy season the cemetery was filled with more children and adults who first had bronchitis and then, in combination with malnutrition and a reluctance to go to the health post, pneumonia. Jesús and his family insisted I had saved his life: the strips of dried beef hanging from the rafters in my room were the proof, along with the hugs and exclamations each time we crossed paths.

Thus it was not as strange as it might seem that Teodoro came to my door. Unfortunately, the Friday feria was poorly attended and we could not obtain all of the necessary supplies. We spoke with Teodoro and told him I would be heading for Huamanga and could make the purchases there. We agreed on this alternative plan.

When I arrived in Huamanga, I spoke with some of my Peruvian colleagues, mentioning Teodoro’s eye and his request for help. They immediately asked me what in the world I was thinking. Now, this “what in the world” was not referring to what one might assume—a “what in the world” bafflement that I could actually believe all that. On the contrary, my colleagues were concerned that I was involving myself in forms of power and politics I clearly did not understand. They shook their heads and asked why I would want to get involved with forces I did not know how to command. As they insisted, healing such afflictions is highly specialized, and the curanderos zealously guard their secrets and their clientele. If I did succeed in healing don Teodoro, this would confirm my status as competition for their services and as someone to be reckoned with. They convinced me I was walking into an explosive situation, and I was both frightened by my ignorance and ashamed of what must have struck them as arrogance.

When I returned to Carhuahurán, I relayed these conversations to Efraín. He looked profoundly relieved; he also had some new information. Several villagers had come by to let him know that Teodoro Huanaco was a powerful brujo—one of the most powerful witches in the region. Teodoro said he used el libro de los hermanos, but others implied the book he used was not the Bible.³⁵ We were warned to be very careful—he was a dangerous man. I felt responsible for having gotten us into this mess; Efraín had a wife and a small daughter, and I apologized for placing all of them at risk. I assured him I would take care of this. I think I was also trying to reassure myself.

Sure enough, Teodoro came by later in the day. After we exchanged greetings and invited him in, I brought out the bottle of rum I had carefully carried with me from the city. I poured the first shot for Teodoro, thus sending the tin cup on its way around our small circle. Two rounds into the rum, I knew I needed to give the clumsy speech I had been practicing over and over in my head. I explained that I had felt so much sympathy for him when he first asked for help—that I could only imagine how difficult it must be to maintain his family given how much he was suffering.

“Don Teodoro, I give people some pills when they have headaches—sometimes I clean wounds with rubbing alcohol. That’s really all I know how to do. I have no idea how to cure daño but hoped I could somehow figure it out because I wanted to help you. But I’m far too ignorant and the apus would never pay attention to me. I don’t know the palabras íntimas [intimate words] to use—the apus would never listen to me. I’m so sorry. I’m just a gringa with some pills. I don’t have any power to cure something like daño.”

Teodoro sat back in his chair looking at me with his one unblinking eye. Slowly an expansive smile worked its way across his face. He nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

Why had he sought me out? Why didn’t he go to El Piki, to Manuco—why me? As an outsider, why did he think I would know how to cure daño? Whereas El Piki did not want to talk to me—and when he did, he used the opportunity to assure me he could do away with me simply by uttering the right words—Teodoro had another way of sizing me up.

I was being challenged to a witchcraft duel: he wanted to test me. I thought I had cured Jesús of pneumonia; as I subsequently found out, his symptoms resembled those of daño, and there were a number of people who were convinced I was more than just a gringa with a first aid kit. I had been climbing the hills, scrounging for kindling, in complete disregard for where I stepped or sat. And yet the angry gods had not grabbed me for my lack of respect—I was not ill, and that made me suspect. I had also been treating people’s ailments, within my own limited understanding of their etiology. Teodoro wanted to see what others sorts of magic I might work. Was I truly powerful or simply a gringa with miski yaku, some pills, and a very large dog? The Senderistas had made pacts with the apus—did I have some sort of relationship with them as well?

But I did not have palabras íntimas that would cause the apus to recognize me. I can still see that big smile on Teodoro Huanaco’s face when I told him I was both ignorant and powerless: he was delighted.

So in the midst of such painful and dangerous times, why should people speak at all? What is the researcher’s responsibility in light of how much is at stake? If I wanted to stay, I had to take a stand and make it explicit. I had to demonstrate that I would put the knowledge shared with me to good use or get out.

Obviously I am not the first anthropologist to note the implausibility of neutrality in the face of struggle.³⁶ However, I am not simply noting the need to take a position as an ethical imperative; rather, I am arguing that one’s presence, one’s speech, elide neutrality. We are, to paraphrase Favret-Saada, already caught. Conducting fieldwork during times of armed conflict requires tremendous time—people will not speak with you if you arrive asking. Additionally, one simply cannot observe. You will not be permitted to if you ever intend to open your mouth. There will come a point when you must take a stand. People will remind you that you are far too implicated not to, just as they reminded me.

One morning I was called out of my room by gunshots and shouting. A crowd had gathered outside the calabozo—the room the ronderos (peasant patrollers) used to lock up prisoners overnight. I made my way through the crowd and found soldiers using their rifles to push away the women who were attempting to shove past them into the calabozo. I saw mama Juliana and mama Sosima, shouting at the soldiers. As I made my way to Juliana, I learned that her partner, Esteban, was one of the young men locked inside. La leva had made its way to Carhuahurán—the illegal forced “recruitment” by the army of young and primarily undocumented men. However, “men” seemed a euphemism for the adolescent boys locked inside. Juliana was distraught: Although several years her junior, Esteban was a good partner for her, bringing bright pink plastic shoes to her little daughter Shintaca. He was a kind stepfather and a hard worker. Juliana was not going to allow these soldiers to take him away. The mothers of the other two young men were also protesting, and before too long the women were grabbing the soldiers’ rifles and attempting to pull them out of their hands.

People knew I had a camera and told me to run and get it. Villagers began exhorting me to take pictures of the soldiers as they struggled with the women. I began shoving my camera up close and photographing their faces. I joined in the shouting and the grabbing. The soldiers began to back down: being photographed shoving unarmed women around with their rifles may have disturbed them. The mayor came down and in front of the soldiers agreed that I should take the photos to the Defensoría del Pueblo and show them what had happened. Mayor Rimachi and the women succeeded in freeing the young men—the women simply refused to back down.

I had previously been hesitant in my dealings with the soldiers, always conscious that my actions might have unintended consequences for the villages in which I lived and worked. Although an airplane could deliver me to safety, for villagers flight would not be airborne. However, in this situation, there was only one thing to do. Had I not stood side by side with the women as they grabbed those rifles out of the soldiers’ hands, who would I have been in that context when the soldiers moved on? I had spent many evenings around small cooking fires and blackened pots, listening to how the soldiers had treated the women and young girls when the military base was fully operational and positioned on the slope overlooking the village. The panopticon had brought daily life under the power of its gaze. I had heard the stories; I could choose a side or have one chosen for me.

I did indeed meet with the Defensor del Pueblo en Huamanga, as well as with the director of the Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CONADEH) in Lima. These groups knew that la leva continued despite official denial of the practice. Photos provided some proof, and the events of that day could become something more than just the routine abuse of rural villagers in the countryside. The women had made the difference; the photos were testimony to that.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes has asked, “What makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from human responsibility to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of historical events as we are privileged to witness them?”³⁷ She discerns between the anthropologist as witness and the anthropologist as spectator, and I agree with her insistence on our role as committed witnesses. To merely watch is to reduce the sensuous world and high stakes of events such as this to spectacle—the optic of the distant observer for whom the world is an intellectual project rather than a world in which one is engaged.

However uneasily, I have tried to work as an advocate. I have used my research to argue for where new schools should be built and where bilingual education programs could make a critical difference. I have listened to villagers’ criticisms of the NGOs and their endless surveys and workshops; I’ve suggested to the NGOs what “participation” might look like—distinct from the “top-down participation” that can amount to no more than a restructuring of control.³⁸ Whenever possible, I provided communal authorities with copies of the reports and recommendations that NGOs produced so people could have some sense of what had been promised versus what was delivered. Finally, I have used my ongoing research on sexual violence and reparations to argue for a greater measure of justice for women in the aftermath of war. “On the ground” these issues pull the anthropologist in many directions. The ethnographic particulars of the situation challenge one’s intellectual paradigms, theoretical constructs, the ground on which one stands. I trust we will always be challenged.

* * *

A note about the chapters that follow. There is no conventional chronology, no “telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.”³⁹ My beads are unstrung, and that is most faithful to the way I experienced my research. This was not a simple story to follow. It was full of switchbacks, dead ends, detours, bodies found and lost, whispers, outright lies, and silences. Think of concentric circles that ripple out from those deceptively simple questions that compelled me back to Peru.

We begin with some cross-cutting themes to establish a shared vocabulary, if you will. We look at the social ills people associate with the war and how they attempted to soothe these wounds of the body and soul. We then consider two iconic figures, The Rape Victim and The War Widow, to unsettle some commonsense notions about gender and armed conflict. Then we move from the northern communities to the central-south, exploring the complex local dynamics of making enemies, learning to kill, and the efforts people have made to reconstruct social life amid intimate enemies.