In the period immediately after the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR after the Spanish) issued their Final Report in 2003, academics sympathetic with the cause of truth telling and accountability over the preceding 20 years of political violence were careful in their intellectual critiques of the report. Some noted to each other in conversation or lightly in print that it seemed odd to have chosen such an exact number of dead and disappeared (69,280) rather than round up or down or simply publish the range (61,000–77,550); others questioned the intense focus on the Alberto Fujimori period over the earlier governments of Alan García and Fernando Belaúnde; and some asked how such a wide-scale human rights abuse as forced sterilisation did not make it into the commission's analysis. The CVR was under such fierce attack from its naysayers and political detractors that many of us did not want to add fuel to the fire. Time has passed, and though the Final Report is still not accepted as the ‘official’ account and though the CVR still faces a constant barrage, it has carved out an important space in Peru's public debates over the past and in judicial proceedings. Scholars have since turned to un-packaging and opening up the commission's report, and, while aware of its limitations, many have embraced what it has most to offer to scholars and future generations, its more than 17,000 testimonies.
It is to these testimonies that literary scholars Francesca Denegri and Alexandra Hibbett of the Pontificia Católica Universidad del Perú turn their attention, inviting a dynamic group of Peruvian(ist) scholars to engage with the CVR's trove of recounted experiences of the conflict years from 1980 to 2000. The title neatly summarises the project: Dando cuenta, which in Spanish means both giving an account and realising what took place. After an informative and theoretically rich introduction, the book is divided up into five sections: sexual and gendered violence; the representation of violence; violence of a normalised state of exception; military violence and the dark side of the law; and from the edges of testimony. Most of the contributing authors work with the testimonies gathered by the CVR team or offered before public hearings (audiencias públicas), all of which are housed in the Defensoría del Pueblo in the heart of Lima, open to all to consult. Some authors supplement the CVR testimonies with other accounts. Most of the testimonies and testimoniantes break with the scheme of the typical ‘victim’ as poor, rural, indigenous and young, not just in demographic profile but importantly in the agency often left unattributed to victims and pueblos.
This collection of essays brings to the fore lesser known experiences, such as the violence suffered by members of the LGBT community described before the CVR investigative teams, and the CVR's lack of direct discussion of their plight (seen by the author Rachel McCullough as a telling silence); or the testimonial account offered by a wealthy businessman (from the class of those whose inaction facilitated this tragedy) who had been held captive by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the MRTA (chapter by Víctor Vich).
In this volume, perpetrators’ accounts are analysed, such as the unfinished testimony before the CVR by ‘Waldo’, a Shining Path military commander (chapter by Alexandra Hibbett), and the testimonies of female combatants of the Shining Path and the MRTA both to the CVR and to the author as part of prison writing workshops (chapter by Rocío Silva Santisteban). In his analysis of perpetrator testimonies, Javier Pizarro Romero chips away at the heroic narrative of the military high command by showing the emotional suffering of the lower rank who were ordered to carry out atrocities on their fellow countrymen, a logic described by David Durand in his chapter as a ‘mutilating machine’ (p. 333). All these testimonies are often left at the margins of standard accounts of the conflict, for scholarship tends to focus on the ‘typical victim’ of the assaulted community caught between the two fires of non-state and state armed groups. The contributors to this book question these tropes. Looking at testimonies at key moments beyond the date of the massacre of the townsfolk of Lucanamarca (which became an emblematic case of Shining Path violence), Rafael Ramírez Mendoza shows a much wider context for understanding the community's experience. Claudia Almeida Goshi and Ignacio Carlos Pezo Salazar point to the silences in testimonial accounts: silences often produced by the communities themselves for important motives of societal cohesion. Tamia Portugal's astute interpretation of accounts and actions by the leader of a Putis community points not just to ‘grey zones’ and ‘loose memories’ (p. 267), but to the political intentionality behind them as a means to reconstruct his beleaguered community.
The theme of closely reading testimonies at the margins makes these chapters cohesive. Furthermore, many of the authors draw upon a similar pool of scholars to bolster their theoretical reading of these testimonies (such as Judith Butler). These theoretical discussions, for the most part, do not seem necessary, principally since the authors themselves provide such deep insights into the testimonies, and additionally since the editors Denegri and Hibbett provide a theoretically very rich and stimulating introduction. While not wanting to abandon the concept of ‘buen recordar’ – that is the idea of the need to recount, of the fidelity and transparency of such recounting – they offer an alternative ethic of ‘recordar sucio’ of the grey zones and messiness of memory as equally if not more important for societal reckoning.
For a non-Peruvianist it might be difficult to fully benefit from this book's potential contribution. Most of the chapters assume the reader knows the general outlines of the conflict in Peru, except for Jelke Boesten's chapter on the cultural and legal dynamics of marrying victims to their rapists. For instance, even a Peruvian might need a map to know where these communities are located (the geography of conflict is also a story). This wide array of experience of victims, perpetrators, stakeholders and bystanders (not by any means exclusive categories, as several authors illustrate) of the past elucidated here makes the book extremely useful for those wanting to broach the topic of testimonies after conflict, for it shows the diversity and complexity of how the conflict was lived and remembered.
