Joseph Feldman reviews the fraught development of Peru's Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion in Lima, originally imagined as a site to commemorate the victims of massive human rights abuses and Peru's recent history of internal armed conflict. During the violence in the 1980s and 1990s, some 70,000 people were killed. Sendero Luminoso began an armed struggle against the state in 1980 and used brutal tactics, targeting civilians as well. Nevertheless, it had substantial campesino support, at least in the first years. The armed forces unleashed extensive counterinsurgent violence that included massacres, disappearances, torture, and killings. In 1992, right-wing president Alberto Fujimori launched an “auto-coup.” In the name of fighting terrorism, he authorized fierce new counterinsurgency campaigns. Army operations against supposed Sendero militants also targeted civilian populations suspected of supporting them, resulting in massacres in the highlands and urban areas, such as La Cantuta and Barrios Altos. Political opponents were labeled “terrorists” to discredit them.
Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 2001–03) issued a powerful report denouncing crimes and abuses carried out by both Sendero and the state, and highlighted the long history of social exclusion and political marginalization of peasant populations in the indigenous regions. It pointed out that three-quarters of those killed were peasants who spoke Quechua, “a sector of the population historically ignored by the state and by urban society” (TRC Report, Preface, 13). But when the museum at the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion in Lima took shape as a state project some years later, influential political voices insisted that the TRC report be left behind, calling it divisive and dated. Conservative leaders had rejected the TRC's findings for years, and argued for multiple voices and memories to be included in the museum rather than a single history (as in museums of human rights in Argentina and Chile, for example). Feldman shows how the exercise of political power by Lima elites and the limitations set by government officials established the dominant framework for the museum. The military demanded that its perspective be incorporated as well, alternating claims of its heroism and triumph with claims of its victimhood.
Feldman acknowledges that the armed forces were much more powerful than one “interest group” among many and that there was no comparison between the military and the human rights and relatives organizations (81, 99). Moreover, military assertions presented a false equivalency between the armed forces and indigenous populations in civil society and essentially rationalized crimes against human rights. And the military's pressures finally did result in representation of its view in the museum, for example, a display on its “countersubversive struggle, though not to the extent the military wanted.” Feldman does not explain its content.
Feldman is subtle in his critiques. One wishes he had presented in more detail the key findings of the TRC and the impact of racism in the process of minimizing the TRC report and campesino voices. There is little background regarding the social divisions or rural conditions in Peru, which would have helped the reader understand the conflicts Feldman describes. (The sharp divide between urban criollo Lima, and the impoverished countryside was again starkly visible in the 2021 election of rural teacher and unionist Pedro Castillo as president.) Human rights groups and relatives of the killed and disappeared—largely indigenous people of the Andean and Amazonian regions—found their voices deemphasized in the process of constructing the museum.
Feldman presents the context as the divergence between memory—seemingly defined as multiple perceptions of events—and history (for example, 7, 14–16, 24, 109, 144), without delving deeply into the meaning of this dichotomy or analyzing it. There is little interrogation of the model that uncritically presents all perspectives and how it might conflict with the aim of honoring victims and condemning human rights violations. There are many difficult questions. Are all perspectives equally legitimate, both perpetrators’ and victims’? Does presenting the military's view subtly validate state abuses and the justifications of the old regime? What “memory” is finally communicated by the museum?
The case of the Place of Memory is troubling: calls for “objectivity” and “neutrality” were used to distance the museum from the TRC's findings, to minimize the voices of victims, and, basically, to place considerations of state violence in a relative context. Should one be “neutral” regarding state atrocities? In the end, despite the valiant attempts of some of the museum's experts and staff, traditional political hierarchies, social divisions between coastal cities and the indigenous highlands, and elite interpretations seem to have been perpetuated.
The book is written in a conversational style, making the narrative accessible but sometimes resulting in the loss of important points amid the descriptive detail. Feldman's subject—Peru's disinterest in achieving a shared collective memory of the recent past—is crucial, and the book provides an entry into such study.
