Apocalypse Now! Reparations Later: Peru’s Post-conflict Peasants Manage the Victim Industrial Complex

• In Event: The Subject of Wrongs: The Politics of Victimhood in Latin America, Part 1

Abstract

A decade after Peru’s Truth Commission’s final report prescribed reparations for the victims of the country’s “dirty war,” the vast majority have received nothing. While opposition from political and military groups can account for much of this delay, one fundamental, yet less examined issue is the legal definition of who may be considered a victim. I analyze the disconnect between these official categories of victimhood and those held by Quechua speaking peasants in a highland village that was at the heart of the Huanta war zone.

In post-conflict Peru, legal definitions of who counts as a victim have excluded rebels entirely, assuming that Senderistas and counterinsurgents were mutually exclusive categories. However, in the 1980s and 90s, switching sides from rebel to “patriot” was a necessary part of survival in the rural highland war zone. In fact, according to Huanta villagers, promoting a former rebel combatant to counterinsurgent leader was a popular way to gain strategic military advantage over Sendero. This history confounds legal victim status, and official reconciliation projects, which represent Ayacucho peasants as victims only insofar as they were apolitical subjects, caught “entre dos fuegos.” In the village, in contrast, those who survived the war have some tolerance for the compromised nature of the conflict. Conversion to born-again Christianity appears to be part of this dynamic, offerings villagers a clear break with their past lives, and a theoretical orientation to the world that interprets Peru’s violence as a part of a more universal prophesy of the world’s end.

Author

• Caroline A Yezer, College of the Holy Cross