Difficult Politics and Poetics: Encountering “Truth” and Violence in Peruvian and Colombian Sites of Memory

ABSTRACT

Peru and Colombia are prominent cases within museological debates on memorializing conflict. Following extended armed conflicts and Peace Accords in the latter decades of the twentieth century (Peru: 1980–2000; Colombia 1964–2016), attention to the countries’ transitional justice periods and the creation of memory sites has been widespread. In this article, we focus on visits in 2017 and 2019 to the Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social in Lima and the Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín to engage debates in Latin American studies on the politics and poetics of museum memory work. By focusing on how “truth” and multiple violences are encountered via museological tools such as metaphors, journalistic reporting, and audiovisual affective encounters in the sites’ permanent exhibitions, we reveal the nuances and tensions of difficult memory work when continuing conflict and state denialist politics are at play.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• truth
• museums
• Latin America
• transitional justice
• conflict

Notes

1. See for example Joseph P. Feldman, Memories Before the State: Postwar Peru and the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021); Maria Emma Wills Obregón, Memorias para la paz o memorias para la guerra: las disyuntivas frente al pasado que Seremos (Bogotá: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2022).

2. Alcaldía Medellín, “Este año, más de 27.000 personas han conocido en el Museo Casa de la Memoria la historia del conflicto en Medellín” (2022), https://www.Medellín.gov.co/irj/portal/Medellín?NavigationTarget=contenido/12647-Este-ano-mas-de-27000-personas-han-conocido-en-el-Museo-Casa-de-la-Memoria-la-historia-del-conflicto-en- Medellín (accessed July 22, 2022).

3. Michael J. Lazzara and Fernando A. Blanco, Los futuros de la memoria en América Latina: Sujetos, políticas y epistemologías en disputa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 1.

4. Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo pasado. cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusion (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2006).

5. Lazzara and Blanco.

6. Arturo Arias and Alicia Del Campo, “Memory and Popular Culture,” Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 5 (2009): 11.

7. See for example Feldman, Memories Before the State; Wills Obregón, Memorias para la paz o memorias para la guerra.

8. Joseph P. Feldman, “Memory as Persuasion: Historical Discourse and Moral Messages at Peru’s Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion,” in Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights, ed. Joyce Apsel and Amy Sordaro (London: Routledge, 2019).

9. See for example Andrea Witcomb, “Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums,” Museum Management and Curatorship 28, no. 3 (2013), 255–71; Laurajane Smith, Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites (New York: Routledge, 2020).

10. Francesca Denegri and Alexandra Hibbett, eds., Dando cuenta: estudios sobre el testimonio de la violencia política en el Perú (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2016).

11. Smith, Emotional Heritage.

12. Andrea Witcomb, “Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling: Understanding How Museums Create a Space for Cross-Cultural Encounters,” in Museum Theory: An Expanded Field, ed. Kylie Message and Andrea Witcomb (Chichester: Wiley, 2015): 321–44.

13. Witcomb, “Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling.”

14. Lazzara and Blanco, 28.

15. Comisión de la Verdad, Informe final, 2003, www.cverdad.org.pe (accessed July 22, 2022).

16. Human Rights Watch, “Prosecutions Should Follow Truth Commission Report,” 2003. https://www.hrw.org/news/2003/08/28/peru-prosecutions-should-follow-truth-commission-report# (accessed November 26, 2021).

17. Unidad por las Víctimas, “Informe de gestión: Unidad para la atención y reparación integral a la víctimas,” 2019, https://www.unidadvictimas.gov.co/sites/default/files/documentosbiblioteca/informedegestion2019.pdf (accessed September 12, 2023).

18. Diana E. Guzmán Rodríguez, Expanding Transitional Justice Processes to Include Social and Economic Justice: The Cases of Peru and Colombia (Stanford: Stanford University, 2020).

19. Rebekka Friedman, “Implementing Transformative Justice: Survivors and Ex-Combatants at the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación in Peru,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 4 (2018): 701–20.

20. Cynthia E. Milton, “Curating Memories of Armed State Actors in Peru’s Era of Transitional Justice,” Memory Studies 8, no. 3 (2015): 361–78. Laura Rodriguez Castro, “The Politics of Memory in post-Accord Colombia: Interventions from Women Social Leaders and Decolonial Feminisms,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 27, no. 7 (2020): 669–82; Daniel Willis, “Scratched from Memory: The 1986 Prison Massacres and the Limits of Acceptable Memory Discourse in Post-Conflict Peru,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (2020): 231–50; Juan Carlos Arboleda-Ariza, Isabel Piper-Shafir, and Gabriel Prosser Bravo, “Reparation Policies in Colombia: Memory as a Repertoire,” Memory Studies 16, no. 4 (2023): 777–93; Wills Obregón, Memorias para la paz o memorias para la guerra.

21. Friedman, “Implementing Transformative Justice.”

22. Paul Gready and Simon Robins, “From Transitional Justice to Transformative Justice: A New Agenda in Practice,” International Journal for Transitional Justice 8, no. 3 (2014): 359.

23. Friedman, “Implementing Transformative Justice,” 712.

24. Charles F. Walker, “Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (2018): 770–72.

25. Grupo de Memoria Histórica, “¡Basta Ya! Colombia: Memorias de guerra y dignidad (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 2013).

26. Indepaz, “Informe especial: registro de líderes y personas defensoras de DDHH asesinadas desde la firma del Acuerdo de Paz” (Bogotá: Indepaz, July 2020).

27. Arboleda-Ariza et al, “Reparation Policies in Colombia,” 13.

28. Sanchéz Medina, E, “Memoria destierro del olvido,” (2016) https://issuu.com/museocasadelamemoria/docs/operaurbana (accessed 16 September, 2023).

29. Willis, “Scratched from Memory.”

30. Medina.

31. Museo Casa de la Memoria, “About Us,” https://www.museocasadelamemoria.gov.co/en/elmuseo/acerca-de-nosotros/ (accessed October 12, 2021).

32. Hacemos Memoria, “El Museo Casa de la Memoria aún no está terminado: Cathalina Sánchez,” (2020) https://hacemosmemoria.org/2020/07/23/el-museo-casa-de-la-memoria-aun-no-esta-terminado-cathalina-sanchez/ (accessed October 5, 2020).

33. Jairo Estrada Álvarez, Acuerdo de paz: Cuadernos de la implementación (Bogotá: Centro de Pensamiento y Diálogo Político—CEPDIPO, 2020).

34. Maria Emma Wills Obregón, “Darío Acevedo y la batalla por la memoria,” Cero Setenta, March 6 2020, https://cerosetenta.uniandes.edu.co/dario-acevedo-y-la-batalla-por-la-memoria/ (accessed August 1, 2020); Wills Obregón, Memorias para la paz o memorias para la guerra; Rodriguez Castro.

35. Museo Casa de la Memoria, “About Us.”

36. Feldman, Memories Before the State.

37. Ponciano Del Pino and José Carlos Agüero, Cada uno, un lugar de memoria: fundamentos conceptuales del Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (Lima: Lugar de la Memoria la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social, 2014).

38. Feldman, “Memory as Persuasion.”

39. See note 29 above.

40. Daniel Willis, “A Politics of Placelessness? The Limits of Democratising Memory in the Centro de Documentación e Investigación of Lima’s Lugar de la Memoria,” Memory Studies 14, no. 3 (2021): 663–74.

41. See note 5 above.

42. Del Pino and Agüero, Cada uno, un lugar de memoria.

43. Ponciano Del Pino Huamán and Eliana Otta Vildoso, “Extreme Violence in Museums of Memory: The Place of Memory in Peru,” in The Andean World, ed. Linda J. Seligmann and Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, trans. Juan Caballero (London: Routledge, 2018), 355–69.

44. Olga González Castañeda, “Imágenes ‘sin sentido aparente’ en el Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social,” Encartes 5, no. 9 (2022): 28–58.

45. Laura Rodriguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia (Cham: Palgrave, 2021).

46. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 199.

47. Lea David, “Against Standardization of Memory,” Human Rights Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2017): 297.

48. Betty Ruth Lozano, “Feminismo Negro—Afrocolombiano: ancestral, insurgente y Cimarrón. Un feminismo en—lugar,” Insterticios de la Política y la Cultura 5, no. 9 (2016): 23–48.

49. Lozano, “Feminismo Negro—Afrocolombiano;” Rodriguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place.

50. David, “Against Standardization of Memory.”

51. See note 13 above.

52. Witcomb, “Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums.”

53. See for example Milton.

54. Lazzara and Blanco, 53.

55. Danielle Drozdzewski, Sarah De Nardi, and Emma Waterton, “Geographies of Memory, Place and Identity: Intersections in Remembering War and Conflict,” Geography Compass 10, no. 11 (2016): 447–56.

56. Witcomb, “Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums:” 267.