Cynthia E. Milton

Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing

What happens when the invisible is made visible, when knowledge relegated to society’s margins or swept under its carpet is suddenly inserted into the public domain? The iconic images of German civilians forced to view the newly liberated Nazi camps, standing at the edges of hastily dug trenches full of emaciated bodies are emblematic of an era in which we have faced not only previously unimaginable episodes of mass violence, but have been consternated by how we might engage with these pasts: who should look, at what, how, and to what end? There is an enduring sense that reluctant publics must be forced to confront horrific realities with which we may be somehow complicit—if only in our desire not to really know.

Defacing memory: (Un)tying Peru’s memory knots

This article parses opposing currents in Peru’s collective memory of their bloody internal war (1980—2000) through an analysis of acts of vandalism perpetrated against one of the country’s few sites of memory, the Ojo que llora, in Lima. ‘Vandalism’ in this article is understood as a form of writing (though a violent one) of an alternative vision of the past. Originally intended as a space for remembering and paying homage to the victims of the armed conflict, the site has become a space for contesting disputed memories. As a site of performance of memory and human rights claims, and especially as the target of continued defacement, the Ojo que llora has become a stage on which the perduring presence of the past — in its still-conflictual strains — is made visible for national and international publics. It thus refuses the very closure that government narratives would impose, and thereby keeps open public engagement with the past. The ongoing conflicts over the past made visible at this site point to the struggles to define an over-arching memory, and in the process the very meaning of ‘victim’ is constrained.

Curating memories of armed state actors in Peru’s era of transitional justice

Ten years have passed since the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación) published their findings on the conflict that claimed over 69,000 lives from 1980 to 2000. While the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación placed primary responsibility for deaths and disappearances (54%) on the insurrectionary group Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), it also named armed state actors as having systematically committed acts of violence. Publicly shamed for their collusion in the corrupt Fujimori government, state security forces initially lent their support to the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación and to the transition to democracy. Yet, over the last decade, armed state actors have appropriated the language, imagery and mechanisms of human rights memory entrepreneurs to advance their own versions of Peru’s recent past which oppose the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación’s findings while highlighting state actors’ heroism. This article examines two such endeavors to reframe this past, the National Police Terrorism Unit (DINCOTE) museum and the Armed Forces Monument to the Heroes of Chavín de Huántar.

After human rights: literature, visual arts, and film in Latin America, 1990–2010, by Fernando J. Rosenberg, Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 304 pp., US

does about the caciques’ political ingenuity. Moreover, this form of “politicization” on the part of the cacique – actively working the system to their minimal disadvantage, while balancing internal and external interests – is hardly “novel” to the nineteenth century or to the historiography. Thus, while the author’s “small picture” stories outline the persistence of Maya caciques in the face of encroaching “modernity”, pieced together as a mosaic they do little to challenge the orthodoxy of “big picture”. To be fair, however, Rajeshwari Dutt’s primary goal is moremodest than a wholesale revision of the nineteenth century. In excavating the personal relationships between government officials and caciques, she challenges the notion that the process by which indigenous caciques were stripped of their power was linear, rational, or evenly applied. By reconstructing cases of caciques’ mediation between indigenous and non-indigenous society in disputes over land, labor, and taxes – and transforming them into tangible, detailed vignettes – Dutt demonstrates that the consolidation of liberal rule in the Yucatecan countryside was more mosaic than monolith; a matter of face-to-face negotiations rather than the application of universal laws. While these face-to-face relations, in their aggregate, do not tell a new story, they do put considerable meat on the skeleton of an older one. That it does so is a testament to the author’s straightforward prose, and commitment to leaving the evidence in; both of which make this book eminently readable and apt for undergraduate teaching.

29.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780822964162

When Mario Vargas Llosa arrived in the small hamlet of Uchuraccay in 1983 to investigate the murder of eight journalists and their guide, he realized that his speech about the Peruvian state and democracy was probably as strange to the peasants listening to him as Shining Path’s message of a Maoist revolution. Miguel La Serna’s study challenges this perception of Peruvian campesinos’ inability to engage and adapt outside ideologies. His study contributes to a growing body of literature that seeks to understand the motivations and historical roots of the conflict. Why did some highland peasants originally support Shining Path, while others did not? Why did Shining Path lose support? Through a rich combination of archival materials, testimonies collected by the Peruvian truth and reconciliation commission, and oral history, Miguel La Serna concludes that variations on local “power pacts” explain in large part the traction or lack thereof of both the state and Shining Path ideologies in highland communities.