A Return without Memory: The Political History of Peru through Its Civil Wars, from the Shining Path to Tupac Amaru

In Peru it is common to speak of the Shining Path insurgency (1980-2000) as a period of exceptional violence without precedents in the country’s history. This much is stated in the 2003 government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (TRCR). The duration of the conflict, the number of casualties, the degree of violence, and its extremist ideology are among the usually cited factors to substantiate the Shining Path insurgency`s exceptionality. Although for us who live through the war it is tempting to agree with the TRCR, their statements cannot be proved until studies on Peru’s civil wars, currently nonexistent (save for Nils Jacobsen’s, who presents in this panel) can put them in context.

This is what my paper attempts to accomplish by discussing not only Peru’s nineteenth-century civil wars but their memory, or lack thereof. Peru is different from other American countries not in that it lacked civil wars but in that it does not remember them. Peru’s nineteenth-century civil wars have not left enough memories to shape the country’s twentieth-century political identities, as nineteenth-century civil wars have in Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina or the United States, to put some examples. Peru’s civil wars have been overshadowed, on the one hand, by the War of the Pacific, that Peru lost to Chile and Bolivia (1879-1883) and, on the other, by the crushing memories of the Tupac Amaru rebellion of 1780-1781.

I argue that, although the Tupac Amaru rebellion was triggered off 40 years prior to the establishment of the national state, it ought to be considered a civil war by virtue of its lingering effects on the country’s memory. But insofar it was for the most part a suppressed memory, it was not integrated into an openly explicit political discourse, at least until the 1960s. Its pervasiveness lied in its “invisibly”.