Unveiling secrets of war in the Peruvian Andes

This ethnographic study is about the unveiling of secrets of war and the impact of violence in the peasant community of Sarhua in Ayacucho, Peru, studied from 1996 to 1997. Secrets are linked to the period from 1981 to 1983 within the context of the armed conflict initiated by the Maoist Communist Party of Peru---Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in 1980, and are used to focus the analysis. The secrets discussed revolve around two controversial Sarhuino men whose stories are intertwined and associated with the escalation of violence in Sarhua. A historical analysis of the decade predating the armed conflict shows how preexisting conflicts contributed to Sarhuinos' involvement in the war not only as passive but active actors.; This study examines secrecy and its ambiguous relationship with visibility and invisibility, remembering and forgetting, and its role in the reorganization and renewal of the community in subsequent years. It also shows how secrecy is related with an Andean cultural logic in which ambiguity is part of reality. The research explores how secrecy played a major role in shaping Sarhuinos' memories of war, their social relationships and their visual depictions of the war in a collection of twenty-four paintings called the Piraq Causa ("Who Is Still to Blame?). I argue that what appears as incompleteness in Sarhuino historical narratives, whether oral histories or paintings, is a representation of the undeniable fact that secrecy was a reality during the war and in its aftermath, conveying the kind of "truth" made up of both what is "remembered" and what is to be "forgotten," and of which secrecy is an important part.