Memory of a War. Peru 1980-2000

The central theme of this book is the intense class struggle that took place in Peru during the period 1980–2000, and the positions taken by social classes, political parties, the Church, NGOs, and other institutions. Above all, it traces in detail the form and brutal methods employed by the army in carrying out counterinsurgency warfare. Our analysis shows that the Catholic Church was not so saintly in this conflict and took sides, not in favor of the oppressed but rather in support of the armed forces and power groups. The legal Left — now, with more than 70,000 dead in the wake of the internal conflict — claims to be a defender of human rights, yet in the dramatic and violent moments of the internal war it collaborated with crime and genocide organized by the State. Its concern was not the poor, as it claimed in its electoral discourse, but rather saving and protecting the State. Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), which multiplied like mushrooms in a blood-soaked and pain-filled land, turned the tragedy of a people into a means of enrichment and of gaining positions on the rungs of power. Abimael Guzmán himself, who began as a revolutionary and ended as a capitulator, is in himself a distortion of social history. Hero to some, fraud to others — these labels, beyond an analysis of his political and ideological nature (as addressed in this book), only serve to further confuse the social history of Peru. (Excerpt from the prologue).