“Se perdió el respeto”: Agrarian Reform, Politics, and Morality in Ayacucho Communities, 1969–83

This paper explores the impact of the Velasco reforms (1968-1975) on everyday life in Ayacucho communities and, by extension, on the political violence of the 1980s. I argue that the Velasco reforms impacted the core social and moral order of these communities, thereby altering relationships both within the communities as well as between those communities and the state. This process, understood by peasants as a time when they lost “respect,” revels how state-initiated reforms affected local political institutions and attitudes about authority, respect, and power. In this context of changes, by the second half of the 1970s, these internal conflicts intensified, fragmenting and polarizing relationships among families and neighbors. Consequently, the conflicts that the judicial system had failed to resolve were revisited in the form of insurgent violence when Shining Path started its people’s war in May 1980.

By locating the violence within communities, one can see how political motivations are often superimposed over local motives during times of armed insurgency. It is in this sense that rumors, gossip and past fights prompt community members to engage in political violence. Despite the clear political and ideological ties of a population to Shining Path, then, the factors that led community members to commit acts of political violence cannot be reduced solely to these ties. Rather, intra-and inter-familial clashes over land and prestige took on their own shape during the armed struggle. “Envy” is the code word that community members use to describe this process, and it is a term that condenses economic, political, and personal issues that triggered acts of violence. This knot of conflicted relations structured the violence during the first year of armed conflict in these communities, and it also constituted the principle frame of reference after the violence for peasants seeking to talk about and silence the past.