Interruptores y Cortacircuitos de baja Tensión.

There, where you hear the voice of Ashaninka people, men and women, children, youth, and teachers bravely resist violence crying out for peace, justice, and the right to live. (Ashaninka woman in Fabian Arias 1997: 76)

In 2004 the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that, as a

consequence ofSendero Luminoso's attempt to topple down the Peruvian government,

approximately 10,000 of about 80,000 Ashaninka people were forcibly displaced in the Ene, Tambo, and Perene valleys. at least 6,000 died and almost 5,000 were under

Sendero's control.210 _{By 1990, at the height of its power in Amazonia, Sendero}

controlled the entire Ene River and the Tambo River down to Poyeni, the largest

Ashaninka community in the area. Fourteen out of thirty-fiveComunidades Nativasof

the Tambo and all thirty of the Ene disappeared as people escaped or were taken by

Sendero into the forest, in many cases voluntarily. By the end of the following year, the Comités de Autodefensa211 _{had rescued 2,800 Ashaninka people in the Ene and by}

1993 had rescued more than 1,000 in the Tambo and around Puerto Ocopa. These

people were taken to one of the five Nucleos Poblacionales212 _{in the Ene and Tambo}

which quickly became overpopulated and hit by food scarcity and a succession of

Senderoattacks.

The TRC counted 69,280 deaths for the war, almost three times the average

proposed by human rights organizations. Atypically, Sendero was found responsible

210 Ashaninka political federations insist that deaths are closer to 8,000.

211 Self-Defence Committees, the legal name for civilian militias during the war. See Espinosa (1995) for the laws and practices around these militias also common in the Andes.

212 Refugee Camps organised by the Army and Navy in AshaninkaComunidades: Poyeni and Betania in the Tambo, Puerto Ocopa in the Perene, and Cutivireni and Valle Esmeralda in the Ene.

for 53% of the deaths when in similar conflicts State forces are usually accountable for most deaths.213 _{It is usually cited that Ayacucho was the worst-hit area of the}

whole war, accounting for 40% of all its deaths and disappearances. In fact, the TRC concluded that if the ratio of victims to population for Ayacucho was the same for the whole country then there would have been 1,200,000 deaths and disappearances in the country as a whole. However, if we apply the same exercise to the worst estimates of Ashaninka case, the war would have caused 2,800,000 deaths, and disappearances.

Although many anthropologists have written about the Peruvian Internal

War, most of the attention has focused on the Andean region214_{, neglecting how}

Ashaninka people experienced the conflict. Indeed, there are a few articles written from a psychological perspective about orphan Ashaninka children growing up in the Puerto Ocopa Franciscan Mission (Villapolo and Vasquez 1999), an article condemning the war in Gran Pajonal (Hvalkof 1994), and some reports on the

tensions in Ashaninka people's lives in Nucleos Poblacionales commissioned by the

CAAAP215 _{(Espinoza 1995). However, there has been no attempt to understand the}

war from an Ashaninka perspective. This lapse could be due to the difficulty of reaching the area in the last decade or, as has happened with the academic silence on

child-witch executions216_{, it has been done to avoid “a negative stereotyping of}

‘others.’”(Whitehead 2004:6).

Leslie Villapolo (2003), a Peruvian psychologist that has worked for over a decade with Ashaninka children in the Puerto Ocopa Mission, found that the

presence of Ashaninka people that were active Sendero participants and are now

213 I am not trying to say that the Armed Forces were not responsible for human rights violations. However, the number of these is inferior to other Latin American experiences such as El Salvador where of 22,000 denunciations of human rights violations investigated by the Truth Commission, only 5% were attributed to the FMLN. Comparatively, the Army caused 85% of these and death squads with links to it committed the other 10% (Binford 1996:117).

214 See Degregori (1990), Palmer (1992), Isbell (1994), Starn (1995a; 1995b), Theidon (2000; 2004; 2006). 215 Catholic Church-funded Centre for Applied Anthropology

living inComunidadesis silenced from their collective memory of the war. I found the same contradiction in the Comunidades I lived in and visited. Instead, Senderos217 _are

described as outsiders who imposed violence on Ashaninka people as they forced them into their ranks, making them learn how to be violent as I was told their own violent practices had died with their ancestors. This idea is supported by a highly- romanticised vision of the decades before the war as a time of peaceful living and food abundance. Far from it, those decades were violent as many Ashaninka families were in debt-slavery to Atalaya’s White bosses and others were in violent confrontations with Andean colonists in the Apurimac and Ene valleys. This memory has become the hegemonic memory of how the war is remembered in the public and political spheres.

However, a closer look at how the war is remembered can tell us much more.

After being in a Comunidad for a while and seeing through the collective memory of

the war into the personal one, I found great resentment among Ashaninka people for

what some of theirpaisanosdid during the war. I found that many had been seduced

by Sendero’s impossible promises and had joined voluntarily, participating as combatants on their side. I also learned that cruel acts were not only performed by

Senderoas there are episodes ofRonderos, the members of the Ashaninka self-defence militia, being as cruel to those they captured.218 _{Still, it was very difficult to get}

Ashaninka people to explain why they thought some of their paisanos had

participated in actions that resulted in the death of their people and the destruction of theirComunidades.

Primo Levi (2004: 104) wrote that the worst violence in camps during the Second World War was not physical abuse but the destruction of everything he classified as human: honour, solidarity, compassion, and the ability to act. Similarly, Ashaninka people described the war as a negation of what it means to be an

217 Grammatically it should beSenderistasbut Ashaninka people call themSenderos.

Ashaninkasanori ('real Ashaninka person'). It became impossible to live following

kametsa asaiki practices which, I have shown up to now, they value greatly and believe they give them the moral high-ground over their neighbours and other

outsiders. I want to emphasise that the war was experienced as an attack onkametsa

asaiki practices and thus the very meaning of what it means to be a human being. Kinship was broken as ‘real’ kinspeople were separated for years as children were taken away to camps in which families were not allowed to live or eat together. Most of the fighting was between Ashaninka people in what became a war between brothers, cousins, parents-in-law and children-in-law. What made kin and friends turn on each other in such a cruel way disregardingkametsa asaiki?

The most common and traumatic memories of their experience in Sendero

camps are about the lack of food and the non-food people were made to eat. These memories are presented in narratives that highlight their worries about the emotions and their body. This is very significant, especially when combined with what many

people told me about their paisanos in Sendero ranks being kamaari ('demons'). What

can these clues tell us about how Ashaninka people understand their experience of violence during the war? It all becomes easier to understand when we consider their past, and in some parts present, practices of the banishing, torture, and murder of

child-witches. How do these children, the base for kametsa asaiki, become monsters

that can kill their own kin?

The following three Chapters are an attempt to reach an explanation of the violence experienced by Ashaninka people during the Peruvian Internal War following their ideas of the transformative nature of beings. By taking into account two types of memories of the war, the collective and the personal, I will explore how Ashaninka people understand the origin and nature of the violence practised during the war. I must point out that most of the accounts I recorded in the field are from

those who lived in the Comunidades that were not taken over by Sendero although I

their participation in attacks againstComunidades.

It is not my intention to assess the veracity of their narratives of war. This is

especially so with the details about the diet most believed Senderos partook of.

However, I think their narratives should be looked at as a clear example of the extreme terror caused by the war as they try to make sense of how their fellow 'real' humans became internal enemies in a reflexive exercise aimed at comprehending the process of extreme lethal violence from their own point of view. I am driven by the need to have a specific understanding of how people make and unmake lethal violence, especially in cases like this one that seem so out the parameters of humanity and so meaningless due to its cruelty. However, it is our task to fit this violence back into pre-existing social frameworks as “violence starts and stops with the people that constitute a society: it takes place in society and as a social reality; it is a product and a manifestation of culture. Violence is not inherent to power, to politics, or to human nature.” (Nordstrom and Martin 1992:12)

Achieving an understanding of Ashaninka people’s experience of violence during the war is only possible if we:

[F]irst deny it special status... [avoiding] quarantining war as a ‘disease’—a matter for security specialists—but try instead to grasp its character as but one of many different phases or aspects of social reality. ... [placing] war back within the range of social possibilities, as something made through social action, and something that can be moderated by social action... rather than viewing it as so exceptional as to require a ‘special’ explanatory effort. (Richards 2005a:3)

Even if the narratives of war discussed in this Section may frame it as ‘meaningless violence’, we must be wary of this type of analysis. The ethnographic study of cases of extreme lethal violence does not only provide us an important tool for a cross- cultural understanding of violence but also adds to our knowledge of these processes of violence in order to avoid those “tomes whose theoretical conclusions concerning field realities are grounded in personal politics and supposition, not in fieldwork.” (Nordstrom 1997:xvi)

I seek an understanding of Ashaninka people's experience of the war and its aftermath not as the passive control of indigenous people, common in interpretations of similar contexts, but as a social process packed with deep anthropological questions. I must note that even if for the purpose of this thesis I separate Ashaninka memories of the war into two main trends, these could be separated into more depending on agents’ different motivations and experiences of violence. Even if I have tried to be faithful to as many of these different voices as possible, I must note that the voice of males is more recurrent than that of females due to the access I had

to gendered moments in which the war was discussed.219

The first Chapter of this Section will give a brief description of the war in Ashaninka territory. The second Chapter will describe the collective and personal

memories of the conflict and show how it was experienced as the denial of kametsa

asaiki. Finally, the third Chapter will analyse how my informants understand the

participation of Ashaninka Senderos against Ashaninka Comunidades as a

transformational process that made them into demons. I close the Chapter by trying to find out what reconciliation looks like from an Ashaninka perspective.

219 Women’s roles in the kind of violence practised in Amazonia have been seriously understudied (van der Dennen 1995). Women’s voices are too often left out of stories of war and peace, and hence left out of our understanding of violence (Erickson 2008).

RONDEROFORMATION AT THE 2010 FABU CONGRESS RONDEROS PARADING IN A VERY MARTIAL MANNER