Daniel Willis

Late 2020 saw a wave of civil disobedience in Peru, with young protestors calling for radical change in public spaces heavily coded with militaristic, colonial, patriarchal imagery. Yet this nothing new in Lima. Despite attempts by the government and tourism industry to cultivate an image of Lima as the historic and gastronomic centre of South America, artists, activists and social movements have regularly used public space as a battleground in which to contest this image through acts of protest, civil disobedience and commemoration of Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000). In this article, I examine the historic symbols and narratives embedded within Lima’s memoryscape, and how these are contested and undermined by acts of protest. I will then draw on two examples of public commemoration of the internal conflict, demonstrating how competing narratives of political violence are prioritised differently in Lima’s public space, while pointing to ways that protest and commemorative acts can reinforce, or undermine, competing narratives of Peruvian nationhood.

The Centro de Documentación e Investigación (CDI) is an online archive which provides free access to over 20 collections on Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000), a conflict which was distinctly shaped by racial and social inequalities. The digital nature of the archive is presented as an opportunity for democratising access to these historical sources and for promoting commemoration as a means of cultural reconciliation. However, there is a risk that pre-existing social geographies and material concerns will mean that the CDI replicates offline exclusions. This article argues that, whilst the CDI has made these documents accessible to a broader geographical audience, usage of the digital archive is still largely mediated through social hierarchies. Through its online archive and offline engagement activities, the CDI appears to have generated a more geographically distributed network of content producers, but one which remains biased towards university-educated participants in urban areas.

In this article, I seek to demonstrate how the 1986 massacre of nearly 250 at El Frontón and Lurigancho prisons can shed light on the political and social exclusion faced by Shining Path militants, during and since Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000). I will analyse how Peruvian prisons have been historically used as sites of exclusion for political opponents of the Peruvian state. Then, through an analysis of literary responses to the massacres and the wider conflict, I will demonstrate how cultural producers have sought to recover Shining Path memories of violence, in order to highlight both the persistent socioeconomic conditions that precipitated Shining Path’s insurrection and the continuing impunity for perpetrators of state violence. Finally, I will show that the recuperation of Shining Path memories in literary sources is undermined by the continuing silence of El Frontón in Lima’s memoryscape, and say what this tells us about the limits of acceptable memory discourse in present day Peru.

This thesis seeks to contribute to knowledge on Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000), in which the insurgent group Shining Path attempted to destroy and replace the existing Peruvian state, by analysing the key themes of violence, culture and memory through the lens of space. By deploying this spatial analysis, the thesis demonstrates that insurgent and state violence were shaped by the politics and production of space, that cultural responses to the conflict have articulated spatialised understandings of violence and the Peruvian nation, and that commemorative sites exist within a broader geography of memory (or commemorative “city-text”) which can support or challenge memory narratives in unintended ways. Whereas previous literature on the Peruvian conflict, by Carlos Iván Degregori, Nelson Manrique and Peru’s Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, has emphasised the fundamentalist nature of Shining Path’s Maoist ideology, this thesis highlights the ways in which party militants interpreted this ideology in their own way and adapted it to local realities. I also argue that counterinsurgent violence was premised upon a spatialised understanding of Peruvian society which conflated indigeneity with Leftist radicalism. Using a broadly Foucauldian framework, I argue that the state created spaces of exception in order to eliminate political and biopolitical enemies. In approaching cultural responses to the conflict, I use the work of Butler on grievability to argue that the perceived non-grievability of insurgents and indigenous communities has been produced by the vast (and to some extent imagined) cultural distances which exist between Peru’s disparate communities. I also tie these issues of grievability to post-conflict memory practice, arguing that commemorative sites have not only been shaped by spatialised understanding of the conflict and by two distinct memory narratives in Peru, but also by the politics and production of urban space in which each of these sites has been created.

In the last three decades of the 20th Century, several Latin American countries
experienced political violence, authoritarian rule and a reversal of previous Import
Substitution Industrialisation and nationalist economic policies. When Chile, Argentina
and Peru had all undergone a transition to democracy and neoliberal economic policies
following the Washington Consensus in the mid-1990s, it was taken by some as a sign that
Latin America was experiencing a shift towards the Western liberal democracy model of
development. The roots of this shift, however, lay in previous authoritarian regimes which
derived their legitimacy, and excluded political opposition, by exploiting deep fears of
communism, leftist economic reform and the racial Other. In Peru, in particular, President
Fujimori presented himself as the saviour of the nation, the sole pacifier of Sendero
Luminoso and the captor of their leader Abimael Guzmán. By reinforcing this foundational
myth, he retained popular support and legitimised his rule despite a brutal price
stabilisation plan and his 1992 autogolpe. 
This myth, however, was based on representations of violence which created
indigenous communities in the interior and the Peruvian Left as an internal enemy,
perpetrators of terrorism and obstacles to Peru’s economic modernisation. This paper will
highlight the narratives of violence constructed in Peru’s mass media and forms of cultural
production, such as literature and film. Examining these sources makes clear the themes,
motifs and narratives used when talking about violence, and shows that myths and
misrepresentations of violence which occurred during Fujimori’s rule continued into the
post-2000 Truth and Reconciliation era. Furthermore, I argue that neither Fujimori nor his
successors have brought a new style of governance which solves the structural violence
which precipitated the conflict, but rather they have relied on old, entrenched fears to
reproduce inequality and legitimise their own elite projects.

In June 1986, after several days of rioting in three penitentiaries across Lima, and in the midst of Peru’s internal armed conflict, the Peruvian armed forces attempted to quash the unrest by bombarding the state’s own prison fortress on the island of El Frontón. 118 inmates died at El Frontón, most of them accused of belonging to the insurgent group Shining Path, in addition to the 124 who had died during the suppression of riots at the Lurigancho state prison the day before. These prison massacres represented the failure of President Alan García’s attempts to, ostensibly, conduct a more humane counterinsurgency operation against the threat posed to the Peruvian state by Shining Path. The prison’s ruins, located just a short distance from Lima’s coastline, are therefore an important symbol of the counterinsurgent violence perpetrated by the Peruvian state. In this sense, the island is a physical testament to the internal armed conflict which claimed the lives of almost 70,000 Peruvians between 1980 and 2000.

The Informe Final of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2003, highlights a distinct geographical dimension to the violence, and established the idea that internal geographical distances in Peru amount to vast cultural divides, with the result many Peruvians remained ignorant for many years, perhaps wilfully so, of the violence perpetrated against their compatriots. Thus, in the Truth Commission’s interpretation of the conflict, Peru’s uneven socioeconomic geography is not only something which conditions vulnerability to violence, but also a factor which demonstrates the fragility of the Peruvian nation. 

Yet whilst the CVR’s report represents a pivotal moment in Peru’s truth and reconciliation process, and has been an invaluable source for a wealth of studies on the internal conflict, this geographical dimension to the violence, and the forms of constructed or imagined geography which the CVR highlights, remain understudied. In part, my PhD project seeks to rectify this by applying a spatial analysis to this violent period of Peru’s history.

The issue of space and geography is crucial to understanding Peru’s period of armed conflict between 1980 and 2000, as well as for identifying its historical precedents and afterlife in cultural memory. Indeed, the Final Report of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2003, establishes a spatial context to the violence, stating that more than 40% of reported deaths occurred in the department of Ayacucho, with a further 45% in the departments of Huancavelica, Apurímac, Junín, Huánuco and San Martín.
My PhD project has worked towards producing a spatial analysis of Peru’s internal armed conflict, and asks how this can contribute to current knowledge of this period in a number of ways. Specifically, I assess how space and geography produced, and were produced by, the violence of the conflict. I address how cultural responses to the conflict have been shaped by ideas about geography, and how they have reflected, or tried to bridge, the real and cultural distances between Peru’s disparate communities. Finally, I have used space to approach the theme of memory, analysing how distinct memory narratives have been produced from particular geographical perspectives, assessing the spatiality of numerous sites of memory, and highlighting the existence of a broader geography of memory, taking into account the ways in which different moments in Peruvian history have produced a common cultural heritage in urban and national landscapes.

William Booth of the Radical Americas Network speaks to Daniel Willis about Peru's long guerrilla conflict, and to Emily Baker about the representation of fascism in Latin American literature, while Graham McGeoch reflects on the life and work of Richard Shaull.

En 2018 finalicé mi tesis doctoral, titulada “El testimonio del espacio: sitios de la memoria y la violencia en el conflicto armado interno del Perú”, en University College London [3]. Este proyecto reevaluaba el conflicto, los antecedentes de su memoria y conmemoración, a través de la perspectiva del espacio.

Since the beginning of October, many Peruvians have doubtlessly been preoccupied by the national football team’s fixtures against Argentina and Colombia, and the increasing likelihood that Peru will soon qualify for their first World Cup since 1974. A recent statement by President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (known as PPK), however, has sparked fresh concerns that the former authoritarian leader Alberto Fujimori may be pardoned and released from prison, amid an ongoing power struggle between the President and the Peruvian Right.

Most sensible commentators will tell you today that the Pink Tide - the wave of Leftist movements and politicians which swept to power across Latin America between in the first decade of this century - is over. Disappointing election results, corruption investigations and the loss of inspirational leaders have meant, apparently, that the Right is now resurgent across the continent of Guevara, Castro and Chávez.

Or at least that’s what they want you to think.

It is difficult to interpret exactly why José Carlos Mariátegui is such an unknown figure among the pantheon of international Marxist thinkers regularly discussed or referenced by the British Left. In part, this lack of knowledge, of arguably Latin America’s greatest Marxist thinker, could be explained by his early death at only the age of 35. Another explanation could simply be a degree of snobbish Eurocentrism which dismisses figures from the so-called developing world as being unable to contribute to knowledge in the so-called Global North.

Originally presented at 'Musical and Other Cultural Responses to Political Violence in Latin America', a one-day conference at the University of Manchester, UK on December 6th 2013.

An exploration of the narratives created in the Peruvian press and in modes of cultural production to explain the political violence unleashed in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. Examines Alonso Cueto's 'La hora azul' and Mario Vargas Llosa's 'Lituma en los Andes' as well as films by Claudio Llosa and Rocio Llado.