Peru: The Past Is Present

This text presents a synthesis of the research findings of the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and the Ford Foundation: "No hay mañana sin ayer. Batallas por la memoria y consolidación democrática en América del Sur", directed by Carlos Iván Degregori for the Peruvian and Colombian cases, and by Peter Winn for the Southern Cone cases (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay). The results of this research will be published soon by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Also participating in this research were: Gabriel Salazar, Renzo Aroni, Rosa Vera, and Iván Ramírez. Between 1980 and 2000, Peru experienced its most recent civil war, with a toll of 69,280 dead and disappeared. Months later, with the fall of the Alberto Fujimori regime, what would become the most important milestone of the post-conflict period began: the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, whose final report, presented on August 28, 2003, changed the country's intellectual and political agenda. The objective of this presentation is to take stock of the memory processes that have unfolded in Peru since that moment, considering the particular characteristics that led to the most violent stage of our recent past, and that explain the trajectory of "national" memory (taking into account the complexity of this term, especially for the Peruvian case) following that important milestone of recognition of internal violence, and which may also give us clues about the "projections" that can be made of that memory toward the future.