Kimberly Theidon

Justice in Transition: The Micropolitics of Reconciliation in Postwar Peru

This article draws on anthropological research conducted with communities in Ayacucho, the region of Peru that suffered the greatest loss of life during the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. One particularity of internal wars, such as Peru’s, is that foreign armies do not wage the attacks: frequently, the enemy is a son-in-law, a godfather, an old schoolmate, or the community that lies just across the valley. The charged social landscape of the present reflects the lasting damage done by a recent past in which people saw just what their neighbors could do. The author contributes to the literature on transitional justice by examining the construction and deconstruction of lethal violence among “intimate enemies” and by analyzing how the concepts and practices of communal justice have permitted the development of a micropolitics of reconciliation in which campesinos administer both retributive and restorative forms of justice.

Truth with Consequences: Justice and Reparations in Post-Truth Commission Peru

Truth commissions have become key mechanisms in transitional justice schemes in post conflict societies in order to assure transitions to peace, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. However, few studies examine what must happen to ensure that the transition process initiated by a truth commission successfully continues after the commission concludes its truth-gathering work and submits its final report. This article argues that while attention often focuses on prosecutions and institutional reforms, reparations also play a critical role. The authors share their observations of how government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society sectors and victim-survivors associations struggle over reparations in post truth commission Peru, offering a preliminary analysis of key theoretical suppositions about transitional justice: they explore whether the act of telling the truth to an official body is something that helps or hinders a victim-survivor in his or her own recovery process, and whether in giving testimonies victim-survivors place particular demands upon the state. The authors conclude that while testimony giving may possibly have temporary cathartic effects, it must be followed by concrete actions. Truth tellers make an implicit contract with their interlocutors to respond through acknowledgment and redress.

Hidden in Plain Sight

During the last decade alone, it is estimated that tens of thousands of children have been born worldwide as a result of wartime rape and sexual exploitation, yet we know very little about these living legacies of sexual violence. I complement research in Peru with comparative data to explore four themes. Influenced by the incitement to “break the silence,” the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission actively sought out first-person accounts of rape, understood to be the emblematic womanly wound of war. I analyze what a focus on rape and sexual violence brings into our field of vision and what it may obscure. I turn next to local biologies and theories of transmission. Children conceived of rape face stigma and infanticide in many societies, which in part reflects the theories of transmission that operate in any given social context. Theories of transmission lead to “strategic pregnancies” as women seek to exert some control over their reproductive labor and to identify the father of their child. The effort to determine paternity involves names and naming practices and the patriarchal law of the father. I conclude with questions to assist in making these issues part of the anthropological research agenda.

Commissioning Truth, Constructing Silences: The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Other Truths of 'Terrorists'

The authors contest the popular view that Peru’s war on terrorism was successful through a military clampdown revealing how this approach foreclosed responding to demands for careful accounting. It also resulted in a legacy that continues to polarize and divide Peruvian society which makes open and honest dialogue on the past nearly impossible. While the government may have defeated two revolutionary movements, it reduced the political space to consider what motivated thousands of the Peru’s poorest citizens to accept violence as an acceptable means for change. In this article, the authors disaggregate the term “terrorist” to reveal the vast motivations, actions and intents of those who affiliated themselves with violent oppositions. Moreover, they explore the often ambiguous line between victims and perpetrators by sharing archival research which revealed how hundreds of Peruvians imprisoned for terrorism engaged with the Peruvian Truth Commission through an unpublicized letter writing campaign that portrayed themselves as victims. They content that historical clarification projects must be more than mere exercises in reviewing the past, but must lead to questioning and scrutinizing collective identities which often exclude certain voices that are nevertheless needed to be heard for longer term societal change. It is in these silences that the marginalized may suffer dis content that leads to new cycles of protest and maybe even violence.