*Social Reality: Cultural Diversity*

This is a special entry for my class on Peruvian Social Reality. I'm required to do 4 blog entries on the different areas we'll be discussing this semester. It's a little long and there aren't any pictures but feel free to read for enlightenment anyway!
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      In the original article, “Inquest in the Andes,” prominent Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa described how eight journalists, five from Lima and two from the city of Ayacucho, traveled to the highlands to investigate reports that comuneros of a small peasant community of Huaychao had killed seven "terroristas, " members of the insurgent Communist Party of Peru commonly known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). They had spoke with the local people, but then were suddenly massacred with stones, sticks, and axes. The journalists' bodies had been horribly mutilated and buried upside down, two to a grave, in shallow pits away from the village cemetery. Anthropological testimony described these mutilations and burial practices as typical of the way local people treat their enemies. To the police patrol that came looking for the missing journalists two days later, the comuneros declared that they had killed eight Senderistas. Then-President Belaunde appointed a commission to investigate the events and asked fiction writer Vargas Llosa to head it. The Commission concluded that the killings were a mistake that arose out of cultural misunderstandings and psychological stress during the heat of a war declared on their society by the Shining Path guerrillas and brought about through police encouragement.


Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa's "Inquest in the Andes" Reexamined is author Enrique Mayer’s attempt to investigate the flaws in the findings of the article by Mario Vargas Llosa. Mayer finds many flaws in the acts of the Commission headed by Llosa to investigate the deaths of the 8 journalists and also in the trial proceedings that followed. In keeping with the theme of diversity, I will attempt to highlight three instances or facts that I find exemplify the diversity of Peru. In other words, I will show how these instances are a lack of acceptance or care for the diversity of Peru.

Although Mayer investigates other issues such as the validity and cohesiveness of the entire proceedings, I will speak on those issues which I found most interesting. The first is the use of the phrase “Peru profundo,” which I believe is the inspiration and definition of Mayer’s title. Secondly, I will discuss the background information and statistics offered in reference to the Senderistas, which I believe is interesting and paradoxical. Finally, I will discuss the issue which I believe to be most troubling, the court proceedings in which the voices of the comuneros were never heard.

Before discussing it, the definition of “diversity” must be clarified. When I say “diversity,” I mean not only racial diversity, but also social and economic diversity. Diversity just means different. It is a word that transcends race, meaning: gender, social class background, age, mental and physical capability, and religion, as well as any other factors that may make people different from each other.

The first instance of the rejection of diversity is the “Two Peru Argument.” Historian Jorge Basadre first used the phrase “Peru profundo” in 1943. Basadre made a distinction between legal and profound Peru. For him, the distinction of the two Perus is between the state (pais legal) and the nation composed of its people (pais profundo). According to Vargas Llosa there are two Perus, one official and the other profound, separated by an enormous gulf that has its origins in the brutal conquest of the indigenous population and that continues to keep them apart from the rest of the nation. The two Perus are separated in space and time. Vargas Llosa stated in an interview: "That there is a real nation completely separate from the official nation is, of course, the great Peruvian problem. That people can simultaneously live in a country who participate in the 20th century and people like the comuneros of Uchuraccay and all the Iquichano communities who live in the 19th-if not to say the 18th century. This enormous distance which exists between the two Perus is behind the tragedy that we have just investigated."

This is a prime example of what has been discussed in my Peruvian Social Reality course. Rather than accept the diversity and try to create understanding, the native communities are seen as something negative and inferior. For Vargas Llosa deep Peru is "archaic," "primitive." It is economically depressed, with poor resources. Modernity, education, civilization, and the existence of other laws and customs characterize the "other," or official, Hispanic and Westernized Peru. All the positive valuations fill the compartment of official Peru; the negative ones are the properties ascribed to the other. In trying to discover why this massacre happened, the Commission and police simply thought that they were poor and didn’t know any better. Deep Peru is not considered a place where people are content as they are in their traditions and set way of living. Instead, they are “needy” and stupid because they are uneducated and don’t speak Spanish. They assume that because there is no electricity, plumbing, formal medicine, etc, that these people must want it and simply don’t know what they are missing. These people speak Quechua and in effect, represent everything that so many try to reject and deny when leaving these communities for larger cities.

A interesting sentence I found is “Senderistas vehemently reject Andeanism.” This is interesting because it makes me think about who the Senderistas were. Where did they come from and why do they so strongly reject all things Andean? If almost half of the population speaks the Andean language of Quechua then what are the chances that all of the Senderistas happen to be white (or more appropriately, of Hispanic descent) and from a major city like Lima? The paragraph in quotes below is a comparison of records from common criminals and political terrorists.

“A comparison of the sociological characteristics between people sentenced for common violent crimes and those sentenced for acts of political terrorism in the judicial records of Lima provides a profile of the rank-and-file revolutionaries of Peru. Chavez de Paz (1989) finds that 76% of those sentenced for terrorism are from the rural hinterland of Peru, and of these, 60% come from the impoverished highland areas. Whereas most common criminals are high school dropouts (46%), 30% of those sentenced for terrorism tend to have pursued university studies (24% list their occupation as students). Only 2% of those sentenced for violent crimes have some university education, and 6% give their occupation as students. Overwhelmingly the sentenced terrorists are in occupations that sharply contradict their educational achievements. Eleven percent are in agricultural occupations, 22% work in proletarian situations, 10% are peddlers, and 15% have technical or white-collar occupations. Half of the men earn their living in occupational categories that are precarious and generate low incomes. In economic terms, there are similarities to the sentenced common criminals: 44% of the common criminals work in proletarian occupations; 11% as peddlers and 23% in technical or white-collar jobs. Revolutionaries are overwhelmingly young, highly mobile, better educated, provincial migrants earning a precarious living in occupations far below the levels that their education had led them to expect.”

Maybe it should be but it comes as no surprise that 60% come from impoverished rural areas. It is interesting that 30% have pursued higher education. It is surprising that 58% work in positions that they seemed to be rejecting. Most children want to grow up and go higher in life than their parents, reach for the stars. But it makes me wonder at what point did the Senderistas decide to completely reject these people and communities that make up almost half of the population. It seems like they could have just as easily accepted it and decided to turn the negative associations into positive affirmations. Why not take the power that they had as young, educated, motivated people and reinvigorate the Andean people.

Finally, what I find to be the most shocking part is that during the court proceedings, the comuneros were never heard directly. Their points of view were through translators, mediators, and experts. They gave a testimony but only three words from the comuneros were quoted by Vargas Llosa. During the trials, translation was only one-way, from Quechua to Spanish, and only when Spanish monolingual court officials wanted to ask questions of Quechua monolinguals. The accused comuneros never even understood the court proceedings.

If this isn’t the most tragic form of rejecting diversity then I don’t know what is. The comuneros were not given a voice and, therefore, were not given a fair trial. They did not understand Spanish and didn’t know what was going on. They probably had no idea what they were really on trial for. So much vital information was probably lost in translation. Because the comuneros were Andean, meaning poor, uneducated, and lower class, they were not even given the option of being heard. This is an example of diversity at it’s worst. Although all parties are the same in that they’re Peruvian, the Andeans are viewed as inferior because of the socio-economic differences, or diversity.