Don't look back

Arguing over a museum of memory

The Economist

IT HAS been much changed and improved by years of rapid economic growth and peace. But less than a generation ago Peru suffered an appalling bloodletting. A murderous guerrilla insurgency unleashed by the Maoist Shining Path and a small Marxist rival was met by indiscriminate repression by the armed forces. In 2003 a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by a democratic government and composed of academics and human-rights activists concluded, after an exhaustive investigation, that more than 69,000 people died in the violence between 1980 and 2000. Three out of four of the victims lived in the Andean highlands and were of Indian descent.

The commission tried hard to be even-handed. It reckoned that the Shining Path was responsible for slightly over half the killings, and the security forces for 37%. Out of its work came a harrowing exhibition of photographs and accounts by survivors. Called Yuyanapaq (“to remember” in Quechua), this toured Peru before finding a temporary home in the National Museum. Supporters of the commission want to set up a permanent “museum of memory”. Last month the German government offered to build the museum at a cost of $2m.

But Peru’s government has rejected the money, and says it doesn’t want the museum. Ántero Flores-Aráoz, the defence minister, said that it was “not a priority” in a country where “there are other basic needs to satisfy”, such as food, health and schools. (He also noted that the Shining Path survives and killed a soldier this month, though it numbers only a few score in remote parts of the Amazon jungle.) “Memory doesn’t belong to a particular group,” added Alan García, the president.

The rejection has been criticised across much of the political spectrum. In a withering article Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who is also Latin America’s best-known liberal thinker, wrote that “we need a museum of memory to fight the intolerant, blind and obtuse attitudes which unleash political violence”—attitudes exemplified, he said, by Mr Flores-Aráoz’s comments.

The plan for the museum coincides with a wider re-examination of Peru’s violent years. They are the subject of several recent novels. La Teta Asustada (“The Milk of Sorrow”), a film about the trauma of a woman raped during the war, directed by Claudia Llosa, a relative of the novelist, won the top prize at last month’s Berlin Film Festival. A court in Lima will shortly reach a verdict in the trial of Alberto Fujimori, an elected autocrat who, as president from 1990 to 2000, crushed the Shining Path but is accused of having authorised killings by an army death-squad.

Some Peruvians are uneasy about reopening the past. If they appear to include Mr García, that may be because worse abuses occurred during his first presidency (1985-90). His vice-president, Luis Giampietri, a retired admiral, took part as a junior officer in the suppression of a violent Shining Path prison rebellion in 1986 in which scores of inmates were killed after they had surrendered. Mr García is surely right when he says that the museum should “take all perspectives into account”. But that is all the more reason for building it.

12-03-09