"Because Otherwise Again": Political Violence, "State of Exception" and "Obscene Ritual" in "Las retiradas"
This thesis seeks to identify the different discursive practices developed by Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian Army from the perspective of the peasants of Chungui. I intend to demonstrate that both actors promoted a process of dehumanization and impoverishment during the period of political violence that our country experienced. Both actors were constrained by a shared ideological element: contempt for the Andean people and their ways of life. In this sense, their different ideological projects — the Senderista revolutionary project and the Army's project of defending the State from subversion — converge in subjecting the peasantry to totalitarian logic, in the case of Sendero Luminoso, and to authoritarian narratives, in the case of the Army.