As the Peruvian state uncovers mass graves, relatives find ways to honor their missing loved ones.
An enlarged identity card photo of a boy wearing his school uniform alongside one of his class notebooks are among some of the most moving artifacts displayed at the Museo de la Memoria—the small museum that the Quechua-speaking mothers of the disappeared built in memory of their missing relatives in Ayacucho, Peru. The notebook displays what could be the work of any Quechua-speaking boy in a Spanish-speaking state institution such as the school: the unsteady lettering, the misspellings and grammatical errors, the playful drawings. It is the work of a joyful boy preparing to enter into adult society and the political community by mastering the state’s writing and reading practices. But at midnight on June 24, 1984, a military squad burst into his house and kidnapped him. He was never seen again. Only his class notebook and the enlarged identity card photo remain.
Pablo Gerardo Albites Pariona is one of the thousands of people “disappeared” by the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru’s central southern Andes. In August 2003, at the end of its mandate, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) compiled a preliminary list of four thousand “disappeared” people. In 2011, another state-sponsored institution, the Central Register of Victims, registered 8,661 cases. Yet, as the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances observed as recently as July 2016, the real figure may be much higher. Citing such institutions as the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, the UN Working Group considers that figure “to lie between thirteen thousand and sixteen thousand victims of enforced disappearance.” According to Peruvian human rights organizations, the actual figure may be as high as eighteen thousand disappeared.
Abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced.
While the UN Working Group has rightly called for the need to reconcile these figures by means of centralizing the information that these institutions hold, the numbers gesture towards the enormity of a particular form of violence that was visited upon thousands of mostly poor, Andean families, during Peru’s internal war. They speak to how, despite being a democracy, Peru joined the ranks of military dictatorships in the region, like Argentina and Guatemala, which waged campaigns of state terror against civilian populations in order to confront leftist militants. Yet abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced. In several respects, the disappearance of their relatives was for them an unprecedented world-ending event. They experienced firsthand how the state can kill with impunity and also how human bodies “disappear” at the snap of the state’s fingers whenever the state sees itself as being under threat.
I recorded several of these individual stories of terror and suffering during the time I worked as a professional human rights activist in Peru, between 1987 and 2001. I also routinely wrote about the Peruvian authorities’ practices of denial, impunity, and their callous unwillingness to respond to the plight of Andean relatives of the dead and disappeared. The refusal on the part of the state to acknowledge this dark history was supposed to change with the emergence of a new democratic regime following the late-2000 collapse of former President Alberto Fujimori’s rule. In direct opposition to a politics of impunity and oblivion characteristic of the previous two decades of internal war, the new regime adopted a broad project of accountability, memory, recognition, reparation, and institutional reform as a means of coming to terms with the legacy of mass violence, unjust death, and unspeakable atrocity. This project established a truth commission, animated the prosecution of human rights crimes, and began the process of exhuming mass graves to identify the dead and to search for the disappeared.
Like other members of the Peruvian human rights community, I was enthusiastic about these transitional justice initiatives at the time. But I was particularly hopeful about the impact that the official search for the disappeared through forensic exhumations would have for Andean families such as Pablo Gerardo’s. I knew that finding their missing loved ones had been their central demand for justice. And now, for the first time in two decades, they would have a chance to cast light on the whereabouts of the disappeared, perhaps recover their remains, and be given the opportunity to offer their loved ones a proper burial. In fact, the first demand that Andean survivors and relatives placed on the CVR was to conduct exhumations in former war-torn areas of rural Peru.
Recovering the disappeared through exhumations has proven to be a daunting task. Citing official sources, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance reported that between 2002 and January 2016, a total of 3,410 bodies were recovered. Of these, 1,973 bodies were identified and 1,804 were returned to their families. However, about half of the identified bodies belonged to victims of summary execution—meaning their identities were already known or presumed. The other half, about 986 bodies, belonged to victims of forced disappearance properly speaking. This means that in more than a decade of exhumations, only a tiny percentage (about 6 percent) of the presumed sixteen thousand disappeared has been recovered and returned to their relatives. These results indicate the complexity of the problem. Recovering human remains scattered throughout the formidable Andean landscape is an overwhelming task. But one of the main reasons for the failure is that in many cases the victims’ bodies were shattered beyond recognition, making their postmortem individualization and identification impossible.
Recovering the disappeared through exhumations has proven to be a daunting task.
One such a case concerns the military fortress of Los Cabitos, the regional headquarters of the counterinsurgency in Peru’s central southern Andes. The CVR concluded that this fortress, located in the Andean city of Ayacucho, had been a major center of detention, torture, and disappearance of suspected “terrorists” during Peru’s “war on terror.” In early 2009, the Public Prosecutor’s Office completed a six-year forensic investigation at the fortress’s former training and shooting field known as La Hoyada, in which the authorities uncovered dozens of mass graves containing the remains of an unknown number of the disappeared. The forensic experts unearthed 109 bodies (about half of them were complete skeletons and the rest were partial remains) along with an uncountable amount of ashes and burned fragments of human bones. The authorities also uncovered the foundations of industrial-style furnaces where the bodies of the victims had been incinerated, presumably so that no trace of them could ever be found. A former director of the Legal Medicine Institute said that probably more than one thousand people had been disappeared at the site.
Thus, in the legal search for the disappeared, the forensic investigation at Los Cabitos uncovered evidence demonstrating that some practices of state terror resulted in something resembling what Hannah Arendt called a “fabrication of corpses,” referring to the factory-like production of mass death in Nazi concentration camps. The resemblance lies not just in the fact that mass killing took place on a bureaucratic site or in the methods used to dispose of the bodies of the victims. Rather, the primary resemblance lies in the kind of death that the Peruvian military inflicted upon perceived transgressors of the sovereign’s rule. At Los Cabitos not only were individuals’ lives taken away anonymously but their deaths and the memory of their deaths were also eliminated. The victims were subjected to forms of asocial death—death without mourning, rituals of remembrance, and even grief—death “robbed of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life,” as Arendt put it.
Quechua mothers of the disappeared, such as Pablo Gerardo’s, participated in the forensic procedures at Los Cabitos as plaintiffs, in the agonizing hope that they would finally be able to find their missing loved ones’ remains. They must now confront the truth that what remains of the disappeared is mostly ashes and burned fragments of human bones. Yet this truth of atrocity has not led these mothers to paralysis and surrender. Rather, in response to the failed promise of the law and forensic sciences, they have attempted to bring the disappeared back into the human community in a collective gesture of mourning that weaves together materiality, biography, and nonhuman agency through everyday practices and technologies of self and truth. By means of retellings, rituals, dreams, singing, and memorialization, the mothers of the disappeared have endeavored to redraw the ontological boundaries between life and death, and thus rearrange senses of community, belonging, authority, and the human, in the aftermath of atrocity. In doing so, they have reclaimed death as human experience in a powerful response to the state’s “fabrication of corpses.” This response to the legacy of state terror also unsettles, and becomes an alternative to, the state’s project of securing the future of the body politic by means of governing past atrocity through the rational means of the law, science, and modern politics.
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