Abstract
In late 2000, after the then president, Alberto Fujimori, had fled the country following accusations of electoral fraud and human rights abuses, and, particularly, after some videos, secretly filmed by Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s intelligence chief, were broadcast, which confirmed what many suspected—that the Fujimori government had built a dense network of corruption, which reached into all sectors of society, including the military hierarchy, the business sector, and the bulk of the political class—a transitional government took over. The violence and corruption with which the Fujimori government ruled Peru between 1990 and 2000 prolonged a war that could have ended in 1992, following the capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman.1 In November 2000, the trusted center-right politician Valentín Paniagua was appointed head of a transitional government that had to oversee the restoration of democracy, institutional reform, and free elections. This transitional government quickly dismantled the Fujimori power structure. The National Intelligence Service (SIN) was abolished, high-ranking military officers were arrested, corrupt judges at the Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal dismissed, and criminal investigations were opened against them, as well as against leading officials at the electoral committee responsible for ratifying Fujimori’s fraud in 2000.2
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Notes
See Jo-Marie Burt, Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) for an assessment of Fujimori’s politics of fear during his ten years in government.
Lewis Taylor, “From Fujimori to Toledo: The 2001 Elections and the Vicissitudes of Democratic Government in Peru,” Government and Opposition 40 (2005): 565–596.
Ruti Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” Harvard Law School Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69–94.
For testimonies as performance during the public hearings of the TRC, see Rocío Silva Santisteban, El factor Asco. Basurización simbolica y discursos autoritarios en el Perú contemporaneo (Lima: Red de Ciencias Sociales, 2007), especially Chapter 3.
Fiona Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconcliation Commission in South Africa (London; Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2003);
Paul Lansing and Julie C. King, “South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The Conflict between Individual Justice and National Healing in the Post-Apartheid Age,” Ariz. J. Int’l & Comp. L. 753, no. 3 (1998): 753–789.
See: Katherine Hodgkin, ed., Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (New York: Routledge, 2003). Therein, especially, Chris Colvin “‘Brothers and Sisters, Do Not be Afraid of Me’: Trauma, History and the Therapeutic Imagination in the New South Africa Part III: Patterning the National Past,” 153–167.
Lisa J. Laplante, “The Peruvian Truth Commission’s Historical Memory Project: Empowering Truth-Tellers to Confront Truth Deniers,” Journal of Human Rights 6 (2007): 433–452.
Carlos Iván Degregori, “Heridas abiertas, derechos esquivos: Reflexiones sobre la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación,” in Memorias en conflicto: Aspectos de la violencia política contemporánea, ed. Raynald Belay, Jorge Bracamonte, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Jean Joinville Vacher (Lima: Embajada de Francia en el Perú, IEP, IFEA, Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú, 2004), 75–85. This generated criticisms from various quarters, of course.
Gonzalo Portocarrero, Racismo y mestizaje y otros ensayos (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2007), 23–24.
Eduardo Gonzalez Cueva, “The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Challenge of Impunity,” in Transitional Justice in the Twentieth-First Century. Beyond Truth versus Justice, ed. Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 70–93: 79.
Paul Gready, “Introduction: ‘Responsibility to the Story,’” Journal of Human Rights Practice 2 (2010): 177–190, 185. See also Fiona Ross, Bearing Witness, 6.
Luis Bickford, “Truth and Reconciliation,” Sistema Penal y Violencia 2 (2010): 15–21, 16.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Catherine Turner, “Gender, Truth and Transition,” UCLA Law Review 16 (2008): 229.
Paulo Drinot, “For Whom the Eye Cries: Memory, Monumentality and the Ontologies of Violence in Peru,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 18 (2009): 15–32.
Ross, Bearing Witness; Rashida Manjoo, “Gender Injustice and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Gendered Peace, ed. Donna Pankhurst (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 137–153, 147.
Ross, Bearing Witness, 18; Kimberly Theidon, “Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women and War,” Journal of Human Rights 6 (2007): 456–478;
A. Crosby and M. B. Lykes, “Mayan Women Survivors Speak: The Gendered Relations of Truth Telling in Postwar Guatemala” International Journal of Transitional Justice 5 (2011): 456–476. Crosby and Brinton Lykes, 2011.
Juliette Guillerot, “Linking Gender and Reparations in Peru: A Failed Opportunity,” in Where Are the Women?, ed. R. Rubio-Marin (Chicago: Social Science Research Council, 2006), 136–193, 149 –155.
Maria Eugenia Ulfe, “Sentidos de Identidad. La condicion de victima y el Programma Integral de Reparaciones en el Peru” (Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, May 29 to June 1, 2013).
U N Women 2011, Progress of the World’s Women 2011–2012: In Pur suit of Justice (New York: United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, 2011), 292;
Ruth Rubio, “The Gender of Reparations in Transitional Societies,” in The Gender of Reparations Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies while Redressing Human Rights Violations, ed. R. Rubio-Marin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 63–120.
Jorge Bracamonte and S. Paredes, “Violencia política, crimenes de odio, memoria y reparación,” (Lima, unpublished document, 2003).
The same happened after World War II, when homosexuals were not recognized as having been targeted victims by the Germans, see Angelika Von Wahl, “How Sexuality Changes Agency: Gay Men, Jews and Transitional Justice,” in Gender in Transitional Justice: Governance and Limited Statehood, ed. Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Ruth Stanley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 191–220. In a similar vein, Korean (and other) women forcibly prostituted by the Japanese were ignored for about 40 years and still have not received an official apology or redress from the Japanese government: Buckley-Zistell and Zolkos, “Introduction,” in Gender in Transitional Justice, ed. Buckley-Zistel and Stanley, 1–37, 13.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985), and see Chris Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women’s Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) 16;
Veena Das, Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
See, for example, Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Ross, Bearing Witness; Valentine E. Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Elizabeth A. Stanko, Intimate Intrusions: Women’s Experience of Male Violence (London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985);
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
Theidon discusses how the TRC imposed the idea of “trauma” upon and over existing interpretations and theories that Quechua-speaking victim-survivors of violence had to refer to the physical and mental consequences of their experiences. The language of trauma, Theidon asserts, turned “inconceivable things” into scientific understandings, and thereby “authorizes the suffering and the text”; Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies. Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 29. Of course, a language of trauma also allows for a language of healing.
See for an overview of peacetime rape myths: Irina Anderson and Kathy Doherty, Accounting for Rape: Psychology, Feminism and Discourse Analysis in the Study of Sexual Violence (New York, London: Routledge, 2008).
Julie A. Hastings, “Silencing State-Sponsored Rape in and Beyond a Transnational Guatemalan Community,” Violence against Women 8 (2002): 1153–1181.
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© 2014 Jelke Boesten
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Boesten, J. (2014). Transitional Justice, Truths, and Narratives of Violence. In: Sexual Violence during War and Peace. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383457_4
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