The Peruvian Internal Armed conflict between the Shining Path, a militant group that attempted to dismantle society by using paramilitary techniques, and the State resulted in approximately 75,000 deaths, forced disappearances, more than half a million displaced people, racial profiling, and the use of gender violence. According to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 79% of the total victims were Indigenous peasants of the Peruvian Andean region. Discrimination based on ethnicity, language, culture, and gender, played a key role in the killing of thousands. As late as in the 2000s, this shows the persistence of a colonial legacy in which Andean persons represent marginality and hispanism hegemony. Coloniality, a matrix that operates through hegemony over authority, labor, sexuality, and subjectivity in terms of Anibal Quijano, constructed different levels of humanity, categorizing Indigenous Peruvians as second-class citizens.
In terms of gender violence, poor Indigenous women were the foremost victims. After collecting almost 16,000 testimonies and publishing an Official Report, the TRC concluded that acts of sexual violence perpetrated by Peruvian Armed Forces were not isolated occurrences, but rather widespread practices against women accused of militancy. Sexual violence was used as a form of punishment and intimidation to subjugate combatant women. As many scholars such as Jelke Boesten and Rocio Silva Santisteban have noted, the use of gender-based violence against iwomen represents the overall victim-profile and shows how much race, class, and gender are intertwined in informing hierarchies in Peru. National authoritarian narratives have created otherness and reorganized categories of humans while normalizing discourses that position insurgent women as disposable, killable.
My talk focuses on testimonies from Andean women incarcerated for treason charges to examine how they represent themselves as victims and survivors of extreme gender-based violence. I include diverse voices that register the labors of memory and dispute the silence and normalization of torture against female bodies identified as Indigenous and insurgents. By beginning with an overview of shining path and female movements in the Andes, presenting accounts of women's reasons to join armed struggle and examining how combatant women are articulated in visual representations and official discourses, I posit questions concerning the politics of memory and human rights. My objective is to address the denial to recognize the victimization, both physical and psychological, of women collaborators, supporters and militants of the Shining Path. Specifically, I contend that the narration of memories referring to femicide and torture not only visibilizes the insufficiency of the Peruvian legal system to deal with cases of human rights violations, but also opens up liminal spaces from which women question shining path stereotypies and victim/perpetrator binaries. By exposing their truth on an official platform such as the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, their voices and experiences complicate state reconciliation policies and reveal the lack of empathy to their pain.
