Ayacucho Before the Barbarism

Since the war ended, Ayacucho has suffered a peculiar collective memory disorder. Psychologists call it retrograde amnesia — that is, the difficulty of recalling information and events from before the onset of the "illness." That illness, for the people of Ayacucho, was called terrorism, as their memory has remained frozen in those two decades of violence that besieged and terrified them. Juan Mendoza Montesinos is not a psychologist but an engineer; nonetheless, he has set out to relieve both newer and older generations of Ayacuchans from this social affliction, dispelling that involuntary forgetting generated by terror with revealing images of the past. Mendoza has managed to gather 147 photographs in various formats showing the true Ayacucho of the twentieth century: the Ayacucho of the heirs of the independence struggles, the Ayacucho of overflowing religiosity and an unbeatable drive to embrace development and modernity. Published May 28, 2007.