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I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
7.1
The presidential elections of 2000 and the fall of the Fujimori regime
Falling debris from a government building engulfed in ravenous sheets of flame was
the last image of Peru that I saw on an airport-lounge television screen, just before
boarding my return flight to Amsterdam in July 2000. “What is happening to my
country,” the portly Peruvian passenger standing close behind me whispered to himself, in a voice that seemed to echo the nation’s general mood of utter confusion and
despair. In spite of having come through the years of revolutionary terror, when the
sound of exploding car bombs and sudden bursts of gunfire were so common as to
become a part of daily life in what seemed to be a nightmare with no end, Lima and
other Peruvian cities were ablaze once again. And the nation appeared to be heading
once more into the yawning abyss of rampant violence and chaos. It was indeed ironic that the political wildfire that now ravaged and threatened to consume the nation
right down to its very soul had been kindled not by the forces of terrorism, but by
those of democracy. Fire, death, and destruction was the climax of what would perhaps go down as the most turbulent, controversial, and divisive general elections in
the nation’s history.
Few people expected the April 2000 elections to have to be decided in a run-off,
so entrenched and omnipotent did Fujimori’s power appear. Needless to say, he
strategically campaigned on the twin themes of pacification and public works, which,
of course, were the success stories of his two previous administrations. Although stabilising the economy was also one of his notable achievements, from 1998 onwards
the rising unemployment, underemployment, lack of employment, steadily dropping
income levels and a stagnant job market—in short, a general worsening of the economic situation—must have caused him to avoid emphasising his government’s earlier fiscal and economic accomplishments as a campaign booster. Nevertheless, few
would dispute that by the year 2000, he had succeeded in substantially improving the
quality of life of many poor Peruvians. For years, his government poured significant
resources into infrastructure development. It had also succeeded in decreasing the
number of Peruvians living in “extreme poverty,” mainly through its extensive food
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aid programmes. As Youngers points out, “...42.5 percent of all Peruvian households
receive food aid. In the countryside, 65 percent of families depend on food provided
by the government. Amongst the poorest Peruvians, the donated food they receive
represents over 20 percent of their per capita income” (2000:14). Furthermore, for
the most part, Fujimori had made good his pledge to crush terrorism and restore security in the country. By decade’s end, Abimael Guzmán and Victor Polay Campos were
both languishing behind bars. The vast majority of Shining Path and Túpac Amaru
(MRTA) militants were either imprisoned or dead. The dramatic seizure of hundreds
of hostages in the Japanese ambassador’s home in Lima by MRTA guerrillas, on 17
December 1996, was successfully ended four months later by a highly professional
and flawless rescue operation mounted by army commandos, thus reinforcing
Fujimori’s image as an unflinching and uncompromising opponent of terrorism. The
police captured “Camarada Feliciano,” Guzmán’s controversial successor, in July
1999, just in time to make a calculated impression on the electorate (it did, but
proved short-lived). By the start of the new decade, then, pacification had essentially
been achieved where once there was pandemic political violence; and now Fujimori
vowed to deliver on his promises of shared economic prosperity for the nation,
should the people elect him for an unprecedented third term.
However, the rising public discontent with his leadership manifest itself in an
inconclusive first-round election result that would require a run-off before the outcome could be decided. Of course, at the outset of voting many people had hoped for
a democratic miracle that would put an end to what they perceived as a corrupt and
increasingly callous dictatorship. The strongest opposition to Fujimori from within
the electorate would come from Peru’s urban classes, particularly the thousands of
disgruntled and disaffected people who had lost their jobs and pensions, and had
become impoverished as a result of “Fujishock” and the government’s subsequent
neo-liberal economic programme. In addition, with internal security largely restored,
a growing number of citizens looked beyond the issue of personal safety and concluded that it was simply time for a political change after Fujimori’s “decenio.” Many
were fed up with Vladimiro Montesinos and his underhanded machinations. They
were sick and tired of his growing influence and power in the political life of the
nation, especially since Hermoza Rios’s retirement in August 1998 “contributed to a
greater concentration of power in the hands of Montesinos and Fujimori” (Cameron
2000:5). Many also had enough of the “dark side” of the Fujimori government, which
Coletta Youngers describes as characterized “by systematic intimidation, harassment
and blackmail in order to maintain political control and eliminate or discredit those
who threaten it,” and “by efforts to manipulate the courts and electoral apparatus”
(2000:41).
Nevertheless, most Peruvians believed that Fujimori was bound to win through a
combination of both “legal” and unscrupulous means. Indeed, ever since the autogolpe of 1992, he had been busy stacking all the cards in his favour. Constitutional
rules regarding re-election were bypassed or interpreted to his advantage; the
Constitutional Tribunal was politically manipulated to ensure a pro-Fujimori composition; Congress repeatedly undermined all grassroots initiatives to hold a referendum
on the “re-re-election” issue. All this helped to pave the way for Fujimori’s bid to
become president for a third consecutive time (see Cameron 2000, Youngers 2000).
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In the months immediately leading up to the elections, opposition candidates complained that despite the government’s advantage of having a formidable electoral
apparatus at its disposal, it nevertheless still resort to “dirty tactics.” These took the
form of defamation campaigns waged through state-owned media, harassment and
intimidation of opposition leaders and supporters by the military and by what were
widely believed to be SIN agents, the falsification of over 1 million signatures in the
registering of Fujimori’s Peru 2000 party, and the withholding of public works funds
from opposition mayors (Cameron 2000:10-12, Youngers 2000, Transparencia
2000a, 2000b). Furthermore, it was also frequently reported that State resources, like
ministry vehicles and food donations, were systematically utilised by pro-Fujimori
authorities in conjunction with Peru 2000 propaganda activities. For its part, the proFujimori tabloid papers—which is what most poor Peruvians read, if anything at all,
and which are “widely believed to be subsidized and heavily influenced by the intelligence services” (Youngers 2000:66)—waged a relentless campaign to discredit opposition politicians (see Appendix B).
In reference to the first-round results, I asked Gabriél Carrasco, regional coordinator in Ayacucho for the independent and respected election monitor Transparencia,
to comment on any significant patterns in the voting (See Appendix C). “The first
point,” he said, “is that Fujimori received a greater number of votes in Ayacucho’s
rural zone than in the urban zone, and Toledo gained more of his votes in the urban
centres than in the countryside. On average, the ratio of votes was three for Fujimori
to every one for Toledo.”1 It is worth noting that the Avancemos party gained a significant percentage of the rural opposition votes in the department, and Carrasco suggested that this could be attributed to the presence of Susano Mendoza on the party’s
list of congressional candidates. Other possible reasons why some rural inhabitants
who opposed Fujimori may have chosen to vote for Federico Salas’s party instead of
Toledo’s were, so I was told by my desplazado friend Eusebio (who himself had voted
for Avancemos), because of widespread rumours claiming that Toledo was sympathetic to the terrucos (hence red as his campaign colour). Moreover, it was also
rumoured that he intended to disarm the communities and to abolish grassroots
organisations and initiatives, such as the Clubes de Madres (Mothers’ Clubs) and the
Vaso de Leche (Glass of Milk) programme, should he become president.2 It is, of
course, impossible to ascertain the source of these rumours, though it is not unreasonable that suspicion should fall heavily on the government and its militaryintelligence branch. Whatever the source, the rumours had their probable intended
result of helping to turn rural voters away from Toledo. Another notable pattern in
rural areas of the department was that most of those who voted for Toledo were men,
while women in general tended to cast their votes for Fujimori. As an explanation for
this, Carrasco hypothesised that it may have been a reflection of a fundamental difference in interests. The men who voted against Fujimori did so, he suggested,
because they felt it was time for a political change, while the women who voted for
Fujimori did so for the pragmatic reason of wanting to ensure the continuation of the
various government-sponsored poverty alleviation programmes that help to feed their
children (eg. the Vaso de Leche programme, PRONAA’s popular kitchens and food
distribution initiatives, the military’s civic action programmes, etc.).
Given that in the past, CAD leaders had grown to play a central role in mobilis-
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ing the population for pro-government political rallies, I expected to find them operating as key agents of the President’s electoral machinery in the countryside of
Ayacucho. I was therefore surprised to discover that this was not entirely the case.
Numerous independent observers had reported on the prominent role that governors,
lieutenant-governors, and district mayors played in trying to generate political support in the campo for Fujimori in the months and days leading up to the first round
of voting.3 “Until the middle of March, practically the only source of information for
the orientation of votes in rural districts, in general, were the lieutenant-governors;
and they, for the most part, along with other state functionaries, orientated the peasant votes exclusively in favour of Fujimori,” Carrasco told me. Yet, interestingly
enough, Ayacucho’s CAD commanders, as a group, did not appear to have been
among the incumbent president’s principal electoral protagonists in the countryside.
This may simply have been because the ending of the state of emergency on 1 January
automatically resulted, at least legally, in the simultaneous deactivation of comités de
autodefensa everywhere. However, it was also true that Fujimori did not command
the unanimous good will and loyalty of all CAD leaders and CAD members in
Ayacucho. Indeed, Susano Mendoza, ex-alcalde of Quinua and once the General
Coordinator of the Comités de Autodefensa of Frente Huamanga, was running as a
congressional candidate not on Fujimori’s Peru 2000 ticket, but as a member of one
of his rivals, Federico Salas’s Avancemos party.
What possible explanations are there for this apparent reluctance among some
high-ranking CAD commanders, at least in Ayacucho, to provide active support for
Fujimori’s electoral campaign, especially given that in past years the CADs had served
as the very core of Fujimori’s “grassroots” political support in the south-central
Andean departments? It has been suggested that within the CADs, affection for
Fujimori had already begun to diminish since about 1998, owing mainly to the fact
that the government had, to date, failed to deliver on long-time promises to indemnify militiamen (or their widows) killed or made invalid in the line of duty (Chávez
Duran 2001). In addition, Fujimori’s attempt to claim full credit for defeating
Sendero—utilising this as a central theme in his campaigning—generated substantial
resentment among militiamen, like Comando Zorro. “Fujimori was not the one who
brought about this pacification,” he told me with unconcealed indignation. “It was we
who fought and we who died to defeat the terrorists, not he. It was we who have had
to sell our own animals to buy our Mausers.”4
All the same, it was “El Chino” who garnered the most votes out of all the presidential candidates on April 9, just as everyone had expected. Yet even though he had
won re-election in a landslide victory in 1995, this time he unexpectedly confronted
stiff opposition in the figure of Alejandro Toledo, a Stanford-educated economist of
humble rural background, who seemed to come from nowhere in the final weeks
before election day to become Fujimori’s main contender. Playing up his indigenous
ancestry, the anti-Fujimori electorate gradually recognised him as the strongest opposition candidate in the field, and the one most capable of giving the President a run
for his money. Consequently, Toledo obtained a little over 40 percent of the total
number of votes. In contrast, Fujimori’s tally of votes was a hair’s-breadth short of
the “50 percent plus one vote” needed to declare him the absolute winner with a
majority of votes. To everyone’s surprise, Toledo’s challenge succeeded in forcing
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Fujimori into a second round of voting, scheduled for May 28.
In the weeks leading up to the runoff, enormous street protests and demonstrations rocked cities throughout the country. It was soon apparent that a political crisis, and the most serious democratic challenge to President Fujimori’s power yet, was
rapidly unfolding. Toledo repeatedly rallied tens of thousands of supporters to Lima’s
Plaza San Martin, where he accused the government of running fraudulent elections
and urged the people to boycott the runoff. By now, Toledo’s campaign had become
more than just a bid to become president; it had also shaped up into a personal, selfdeclared moral crusade to “restore democracy to Peru.” Although he called for peaceful civil disobedience, violent clashes nevertheless erupted between police and protesters in Lima, Arequipa, Iquitos, Chimbote, and other major cities. Government
buildings were attacked and sometimes burned, and opportunists used the chance to
loot and vandalise local shops. In the city of Huancayo, a temporary curfew was
declared and hundreds of violent demonstrators arrested. (Toledo never publicly
denounced any of these destructive acts of mob violence.) In Huamanga, institutions
and organisations like the Frente de Defensa del Pueblo de Ayacucho, the SUTEHuamanga, and the UNSCH, jointly planned a general strike and civic mobilisation
for 25 May, reminiscent of the massive demonstrations in defence of free education
in ’69. The violent protests literally touched even the President himself: after a campaign rally in Huamanga on 18 May, a few dozen students pelted Fujimori’s jeep with
stones and vegetables as it drove out of the main plaza on its way back to the airport.
The local police, many of whom were also disgruntled with the government on
account of their low salaries, seemed to take their time in chasing the students away.5
Why was it that people had submissively endured an authoritarian regime for
close to ten years, and only now decided to protest so vigorously? There are numerous cumulative and interrelated reasons, of course. One might consider these anti-dictatorship protests as a sort of delayed response, the popular backlash that perhaps
should have materialised in the wake of the government’s emasculation of the
Constitutional Tribunal in 1996, but didn’t. But clearly it was also an outpouring of
anger, pent up for so many years, at frustrated expectations and the progressive deterioration of the quality of life for so many of Peru’s middle and lower-middle classes.
While Toledo cried fraud and boycotted the second round of voting, Fujimori
went ahead with what had now become a farcical one-man runoff, shunned even by
international monitors. Voting in a Peruvian election is mandatory, and failure to vote
incurs a hefty fine. Yet even those of Toledo’s supporters who could not afford to boycott nevertheless spoiled their ballots by casting blank tickets, or by scribbling the
words “No to Fraud” on them. When official reports showed that he had won over
50 percent of the votes with just over half of the ballots counted, Fujimori was
declared the winner. His opponents responded with ever larger street protests, which
culminated with over 80,000 demonstrators converging on central Lima on 28 July,
the President’s inauguration day, in what was cleverly titled the “Marcha de los
Cuatros Suyos,” in reference to the four corners of the ancient Inca Empire.
Clearly, Toledo had astutely recognised the powerful symbolic resonance that his
humble indigenous background could have on the urban electorate, and accordingly
used it to the full. Indeed, he had already become a natural role model for many of
the younger, poorer, urban Peruvians of indigenous ancestry. On the one hand, he
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could lay claim to being the legitimate leader of the Peruvian people by virtue of his
ostensible “cholo” identity; on the other hand, his impressive educational credentials
and professional accomplishments plainly broke the stereotype of the “stupid and lazy
Indian.” Ridiculing Fujimori’s penchant for donning ponchos and chullus (knitted
caps), Toledo once bellowed to a massive crown in Lima’s Plaza San Martin: “I don’t
need to dress up to look a Peruvian. Just look at my face!”6
All the same, at the start of his third term, Fujimori’s hold on power, though shaken, seemed nevertheless to be as firm as ever. He had the continued backing of the
armed forces, and his supporters in Congress once again held a majority of seats after
various opposition members defected to the government’s side. In addition, he still
remained highly popular with most peasants and poor shantytown inhabitants.
Despite the persistence for a short time after his inauguration of scattered (though
much-diminished) street demonstrations, the deaths of six employees at the Banco de
la Nación, after it had been set on fire by protesters on July 28, had done great damage to the opposition’s political and moral image. Fujimori’s supporters in Congress
even threatened to lay criminal charges on the organisers of the Marcha de los Cuatros
Suyos, including Toledo, for having “irresponsibly” rallied more than 80,000 protesters to Lima.
In the months that followed, Peru settled down to an uneasy calm, and most
opponents appeared to resign themselves to the political reality. But then the most
astonishing and unlikely sequence of events unfolded. Less than two months after taking the oath of office, Fujimori made the shocking announcement that he planned to
call early elections in which he himself would not run. Although the ostensible reason he gave for this decision was that he did not wish to make himself “a destabilising factor, still less an obstacle to the democratic process,” in fact, what had prompted it was something altogether less altruistic. A most unsavoury scandal slowly came
to light. It turned out that one of the opposition leaders had got his hands on a secretly filmed videotape showing Vladimiro Montesinos handing over a thick wad of
cash—$15,000 to be exact—to an opposition congressman, so as to entice him to
cross over to Peru 2000 during the recent general elections (Faiola 2000:A01).7 In
responding to the public outcry, Fujimori subsequently promised to shut down the
SIN and to put Montesinos on trial, though some time would pass before he finally
ordered the arrest of his former chief of intelligence. That after so many years of
amassing thousands of compromising videotapes and files on prominent Peruvians,
Montesinos himself should be brought down by his own sordid and underhanded
methods was, in the minds of most Peruvians, nothing short of poetic justice.
This bribery scandal not only discredited Fujimori. It also exacerbated what were
already deep divisions within the armed forces, between those who supported
Fujimori, those who continued to back Montesinos, and those who thought the best
thing to do was to get rid of both men altogether and to have new elections.
Furthermore, a number of Peru 2000’s congressmen, extremely disturbed by this latest evidence of deep-seated corruption in the government, began to defect from the
party, and instead sat as independent members of Congress. His own vice-president,
Francisco Tudela, submitted a letter of resignation to Congress when Montesinos was
permitted to re-enter the country in October, after failing to obtain asylum in Panama.
In what would have been an unimaginable scenario six months earlier, the once-
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formidable regime that Fujimori and Montesinos had so carefully built up around
them was now rapidly crumbling down. In anticipation of the President’s inevitable
exit sometime in the near future, various political actors—politicians, senior military
officers, opposition leaders—began to strategically manoeuvre themselves in preparation for the coming power struggle.
To everyone’s surprise, the final act of this Shakespearean drama was played out
not in Peru, but in Japan. At the Tokyo hotel where he was staying, on what had been
a stopover during a return trip from an Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation summit
in Brunei, a tired-looking Alberto Fujimori announced at a press conference that he
wanted to stay in Japan indefinitely. His Japanese parentage would eventually entitle
him to Japanese citizenship; and Japan’s lack of an extradition treaty with Peru would
ultimately ensure that he remained safe from impeachment and prosecution under
Peruvian law.8 On 20 November, the Peruvian Congress received his official letter of
resignation, and with it a remarkable yet turbulent and thorny era in Peruvian history came abruptly to an end.
7.2
“Informal politics” in a post-violence context
What about the peasant militias? How were they affected by the fall of a regime that
had for all practical purposes become their patron during much of the past decade?
Has peasant society merely been reacting to these recent dramatic events, or has it
also been able to design its own processes and outcomes?
In answer to these questions, perhaps it is helpful to turn to David Scott Palmer,
who proposes the useful analytical concept of “informal politics.” Palmer argues that
informal politics offers a way to understand the behaviour of citizens who organise
themselves in search of alternatives to satisfying their fundamental political and economic needs when the formal political system becomes unresponsive and falls into
crisis.9 They do this “outside of such formal political entities as political parties,
unions, or government organisations” (2000:7). For Palmer, the formation of peasant
self-defence committees and of mothers’ clubs were initiatives developed by the local
population for “protection, survival, and the advancement of basic needs” (ibid.:6),
and as such are examples of “informal politics.”
Though the armed self-defence committees were widely condemned in the late
1980s as “manipulated” organisations “imposed” by the military on local peasant
populations (e.g. Degregori 1989b), by the mid-1990s most commentators (including
former critics) had turned to praising them. By the second half of the 1990s, it
became common to hear CADs being described as having been “interiorised,” “assimilated,” “integrated,” and “institutionalised” into the social life of the Andean communities from which they came (Starn 1998:245; Coronel 1996:106-109; del Pino
1993b:53). However, given their close working relations with the army, and the existence of legislation that regulated their organisation and function, one of the main
questions in my mind at the end of my first fieldwork in 1997 was: “If the state of
emergency were to be lifted, would the comités de autodefensa y desarrollo, as an
institution, cease to exist?” At the time, I was fairly convinced that the answer to this
question was “No, they would not disappear.” I believed that, as their very title sug-
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gested, their justification for existence was based on more than just providing security. It seemed to me that in addition to the task of civil defence, the government had
envisaged a role for them in the unfolding process of socioeconomic development and
national reconstruction—a process that I reasonably assumed would continue even
after pacification has been achieved. It seemed that this was also the wish of the local
people themselves, many of whom have told me they would like to see the CADs continue into the future, but free of military control. In addition, I was fairly convinced
that, as with the original rondas campesinas of Peru’s northern departments, the
CADs of the emergency zone would also develop into alternative policing and dispute-resolution bodies to what was still generally perceived as a corrupt police force.
This, in fact, was already happening in many parts of the emergency zone during the
second half of the 1990s. We have already seen in the last chapter, for instance, that
in addition to their defence activities, CADs in Ayacuchan districts like Tambo were
also becoming more involved in such things as sorting out domestic conflicts, dispensing fines to villagers who neglect their communal duties and chores, even organising and supervising faenas comunales.
Ayacucho was a hive of grassroots activities when I left the field in 1997. I was
therefore stunned upon my returned in April 2000 by the extent of the changes that
had taken place. It was while visiting the local INEI office on Jirón Callao that I once
again ran into Captain—now Major—César Vásquez, military chief of the CADs of
Ayacucho and Huancavelica. From him I learned that the state of emergency was officially ended on 1 January 2000 (except for a small area around the Huallaga Valley),
and that consequently the CADs had officially been automatically dissolved, as the
relevant legislation stipulated must occur at such time.10 Surely, I thought to myself,
they are probably continuing in an unofficial capacity, so active and immersed were
they in the political life of their communities just short years earlier.
A bigger surprise awaited me in Tambo, where from Comando Zorro I was
stunned to learn that a general decline in the peasant militia movement had occurred
throughout the department. In Tambo district, the CADs had, in fact, already ceased
to function ever since the end of 1998, when he retired and the Patrulla Especial was
subsequently disbanded. Throughout the rest of my short stay in Ayacucho that year,
I observed for myself the clear signs everywhere I went in the countryside of the general decline of the peasant militias in the department. Most significant, though, was
the fact that the decline had already set in even months before the government took
the step of officially dissolving them, along with the emergency zone. At Uchurraccay,
I met a polite, young comando who, although he still took it upon himself to check
the identification of any visitors who comes to the community, was in fact only one
of three young men who continued to patrol on a voluntary basis once a month. “It’s
been like this for the past half year, and we no longer assemble the villagers regularly, as we used to,” he told me.11 It was the same story in Quinua, previously a regional centre of coordination for the CADs. There former militia members told me that it
had been many months since they last went on patrol, or called a CAD assembly. As
amazing as it seemed, however, this organisational deterioration was not unique in
time and space to the CADs of the former emergency zone. In 1997, Orin Starn
observed a similar thing happening in the Chota Valley, among the original rondas
campesinas of Cajamarca (1999:263-275).
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Was this the end of the story of Peru’s peasant militias? If so, how could the dedication and enthusiasm for it, which I had witnessed just two and a half years earlier,
have dissolved so thoroughly and so rapidly? Major Vásquez, for one, seemed reluctant to close the book on the peasant defence committees. “True, the Comités de
Autodefensa no longer officially exist. But in their place we’re going to create Comités
de Reconstrucción y Desarrollo,” he told me, with all the eagerness of a true zealot.
“But we need funding. Perhaps you can put in a good word for us at the Dutch and
Canadian embassies?” Given that I knew that Dutch and Canadian diplomats back in
Lima regarded the CADs as simply army-controlled “paramilitaries,” I should have
told him not to hold his breath.
Yet, I also doubt that most peasants would share his enthusiasm for a new
civilian-military project such as the one he envisioned, since inevitably it would once
again subordinate them to the demands and to the authoritarian direction of the military. Perhaps the story of the “rondero ID cards” best illustrates why a renewal of
close working relations with the military would, for most of Ayacucho’s peasants,
most likely be wholly undesirable. When I asked him about the cards, Vásquez sadly
replied, “We had to terminate the project when the state of emergency was ended.”
What he didn’t tell me, which I learned later from the Tambinos, was that most of the
people in Tambo (and probably elsewhere in Frente Huamanga for that matter) never
received their ID card, nor were they ever reimbursed the S/.5 nuevos soles that each
of them had been obliged to pay for it in advance. Peasants were therefore understandably horrified when I told them Vásquez had told me that the military hoped to
begin a new carné-issuing campaign again very soon—this time to issue peasants with
“Comités de Desarrollo” identity cards, and again at their own cost! If this was a taste
of what they could expect from organising Comités de Reconstrucción y Desarrollo
under the tutelage of the army, then it was hardly surprising that the peasants I spoke
to in Tambo showed little enthusiasm for embarking on such an endeavour.
Whereas the comités de autodefensa began a steady decline in the final years of the
‘90s, the clubes de madres, by contrast, continued to expand, becoming one of the
most important and certainly the largest women’s movement to emerge in Ayacucho
(perhaps even in Peru) in the past two decades. A comparison of these two organisations thus provides valuable insight into the logic and dynamics of “informal politics”
in Ayacucho. This, in turn, might help us to gain a better understanding of the reasons behind the decline of the comités de autodefensa, and an indication of what the
future may hold for the clubes de madres.
Like the peasant militias, clubes de madres are the products of civil war. For
although men comprise the vast majority of those killed by political violence in Peru,
women were also among the war’s most vulnerable targets. As Isabel Coral reminds
us,
They were victims of physical abuse and psychological torture, they
were obligated to witness alongside their children the executions of
loved ones, and they were raped.... Profoundly affected and sensitized, the women became the principal protagonists in the defence of
human rights. They were spurred not only by the painful process of
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burying the dead, seeking the disappeared, and trying to free prisoners, but also by the desire to preserve the physical integrity and lives
of those who remained with the women (1998:355-356).
For peasant women, rising political violence and a deepening economic crisis also
threatened the integrity of their families. At the same time, however, women’s social
roles and responsibilities were also being transformed and expanded in relation to the
changing circumstances. The loss of their menfolk through displacement or to political violence forced women to assume “greater responsibility for leading and preserving their families in a highly destructive context....” (ibid.:356). However, because
they were often unable to shoulder the added responsibilities on their own, many
women banded together with kin and neighbours to share the tasks of food preparation and childcare. In order to sustain their families, these women relied on their own
initiative and creativity to obtain external assistance and new ways to generate
income. “They implemented food services, workshops to produce commodities, and
communal gardens” (ibid.:357). In rural areas, widows and women whose husbands
had gone away assumed the role of heads of their households, and with it much of
the responsibility for the family’s productive activity as well as the right to take part
in decision-making assemblies. Far from acting as the weaker sex, women toiled
alongside the men at communal work projects; and women grieving over the loss of
their husbands, children, and other family members came together to share information and to console each other.
It was against the backdrop of political violence and socioeconomic turmoil that
the clubes de madres gained importance in the 1980s and 1990s. Their two main concerns were, firstly, to defend human rights, and secondly, to “struggle for economic
survival” (ibid.:359). In 1988, the Federación Provincial de Clubes de Madres de
Huamanga was founded for the purpose of linking and coordinating all the existing
local mothers’ clubs in the department. From the original 270 mothers’ clubs that
attended that inaugural event, the organisation would grow to 1,200 affiliated mothers’ clubs, representing 80,000 members by 1995 (ibid.:359). The vast majority of
members were poor, illiterate peasant and shantytown women. Shining Path and the
military, which regarded them as harmless and apolitical, initially tolerated the clubes
de madres. As a result, they were able to consolidate their organisation in peace, such
that when Shining Path finally attempted to infiltrate and gain control of the federation in 1988, it found itself effectively blocked out by the organisation’s members
(Coral 1998:360).
Over the years, Ayacuchan women have had to struggle against not only political
violence and economic crisis, but also against machismo within their own families and
communities. For one thing, the division of labour between men and women in
household production has come to lose some (or perhaps most) of its pre-war complementariness. As one of the members of the District Committee of Tambo’s mothers’ clubs told me, men have used the theme of political violence to justify their own
idleness during the day, with reasons such as that they are sleeping or resting in preparation for ronda duties later in the evening; or that they can do nothing but sit around
because the guerrilla threat prevents them from working in the countryside.12
Meanwhile, women were still expected by their husbands to perform the traditional
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tasks of cooking, laundering, cleaning, and childcare in the home—even engaging in
petty commercial activities in order to make ends meet. I was also told by women that
most men still expected their wives to hand over to him all the money she makes selling produce at the market. “If he discovers that she is secretly keeping a part for herself, he beats her,” another member of the mothers’ club told me.13 Domestic violence
is common, and often exacerbated by an explosive mix of psychological trauma, alcohol, and access to firearms.
Apart from their own physical labour, creativity, and willpower, the clubes de
madres control few other internal resources. Yet by pooling together their ideas, skills,
and scarce resources, they have been able to initiate fundamental survival activities,
such as the creation of communal kitchens (comedores populares), or of communal
gardens for growing produce that can then be sold to generate income for other subsistence projects. Furthermore, mothers’ club leaders have proven themselves
extremely adept and successful at weaving webs of beneficial contacts with State institutions and non-governmental organisations, thus securing access to a broad spectrum
of donors and programmes concerning poverty alleviation, food, health, and education. The State agency PRONAA, for instance, provided well-organised mothers’
clubs with donations of food for their communal kitchens. In conjunction with
municipal mayors, mothers’ clubs were also the ones that managed the Fujimori government’s Vaso de Leche programme.14 (The district alcalde received special funds
from the central government with which to obtain the milk power, which he then had
to pass on to the president of each community’s mothers’ club.) Furthermore, with
help from NGOs, mothers’ clubs have obtained information and training concerning
micro-development and family health projects, like credit and income generation,
childcare and nutrition. Clearly, their accomplishments in finding ways to feed their
families and to preserve the integrity of their households against adverse odds have
been impressive; and in this sense it may even be argued that in armed conflict situations around the world, it is organised women such as these that “form the last vestiges of civil society” (RAWOO 2000:9).
In recent years, with the assistance of NGOs, clubes de madres in Tambo district
have organised education seminars on issues such as domestic violence, family planning and contraception, and women’s rights, in which men are encouraged to participate and learn. “It sometimes feels like a daunting struggle, but little by little we are
helping to change men’s attitudes,” a district committee member once told me.15
Throughout their history, peasant militias have always been male-dominated organisations whose governing committees comprised exclusively of men. Even so, we have
also seen that women have made major contributions to the civil defence effort. For
years, they performed a vital (if often uncelebrated) supporting role in maintaining
the comités de autodefensa, by cooking for the active members, provisioning them,
mending and washing their clothes, caring for the ill and the wounded, burying the
dead—all this in addition to their own daily chores. In some zones, women at certain
moments have even shouldered the same responsibilities as the men, sometimes having to patrol alongside them, or to guard the community while the men are away.
Even so, the characteristic tasks associated with the comités de autodefensa and the
clubes de madres nonetheless have also served to reinforce stereotyped gender roles
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for both men and women: namely, that men are physically stronger and therefore did
the patrolling and the fighting, while women performed the household tasks and
looked after the children.
In many rural areas of Ayacucho over the past twenty years, the pressures brought
by war have served to disrupt the balance of power between the sexes, sometimes to
the disadvantage of women. In this regard, the civil defence institution clearly created and underscored power inequalities between the sexes. Women were excluded
from civil defence committee meetings and therefore had virtually no voice in village
defence matters, thought they were nevertheless expected to abide to decisions made,
such as the common sale of private livestock in order to raise communal funds to purchase firearms. And in so far as the defence committees came to dominate the political affairs of their communities during the war years, women often became marginalized and, in a sense, socially invisible when it came to discussing and deciding community issues. But instead of trying to make direct inroads into the male-dominated
political sphere of their communities, women created their own autonomous space of
discussion and action in the form of mothers’ clubs. In so doing, they were able to
respond to the most pressing socioeconomic needs of their families and communities
“without having to rely on the (male-orientated) village authorities” (Flagg et al.
1998:13).
Like the CADs, the clubes de madres are directed by committees (juntas) from the
local all the way up to the departmental level. “Each committee is composed of seven
posts elected every two years: President, Vice-president, Treasurer, Secretary and
three vocals, which in turn co-ordinates with the district, provincial and ultimately
departmental committee FEDECMA (Federación de Clubes de Madres)” (Flagg et al.
1998:38). Unlike the village defence committees, however, which historically owe
their existence either to local initiative or to the active assistance or coercion of the
military or of other defence committees, the clubes de madres were entirely and
autonomously created by women, without any influence or interference from the
army or any other external agent. Even though they depend heavily (though also not
entirely) on outside financial and economic support in order to operate, and though
in the past the army has sometimes exploited their propaganda value by compelling
them to participate in pro-government peasant rallies, mothers’ clubs have nevertheless managed to maintain a greater degree of political and organisational autonomy
from the state and the military than the comités de autodefensa. There are, for
instance, no regulatory laws that govern them, or that explicitly subordinate them to
the authority of the state, unlike in the case of the CADs. This has helped to paint an
attractive picture of the clubes de madres in the eyes of foreign funding agencies and
the local NGOs they sponsor, who have consequently come to regard mothers’ clubs
as true grassroots organisations through which to provide aid to local communities.
How, then, does the future look for the clubes de madres? Obviously, they have
been playing an important intermediary role between their local communities and
external aid organisations already for quite some time. They are clearly well suited to
the tasks that lie ahead in what will certainly be a protracted process of post-war
development. Given their institutional strengths—like their positive “grassroots”
image, their extensive networks with non-governmental humanitarian assistance
organisations, and their autonomy from state authority and control—and provided
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that they maintain clear and relevant objectives and do not become embroiled in divisive partisan politics, we can reasonably expect that they will continue as an important grassroots-level institution of reconstruction and development for some time to
come.
The example of the CADs and the mothers’ clubs clearly illustrate that self-protection
and economic survival were the overriding logic behind “informal politics” in
Ayacucho, and most probably in the rest of the emergency zone. Yet, changes in
political-economic circumstances as well as in social configurations have impelled
transformations in the dynamics of informal politics. The disintegration of the village
defence organisations, in stark contrast to the continuation of the mothers’ clubs, is
simply one of the realities of life in a post-war context. By 2000, it was obvious that
the climate of fear that had gripped districts like Tambo for so long had dissipated at
last, and that most peasants were finally convinced that the countryside was pacified
and truly safe to return to. With the threat of guerrilla attack no longer imminent,
rural people could once again dedicate themselves entirely to the livelihood activities
that for years they have had to neglect.
There certainly have been compelling economic reasons why the peasants should
choose to discontinue their militia activities. The peasant militias have been both a
blessing and a burden: a blessing for obvious reasons of security, and a burden for the
financial and economic pressures they have created. We have seen that as guerrilla
attacks on peasant communities intensified from the second half of the 1980s
onwards, everyday life became increasingly orientated around the exigencies of communal defence, to the detriment of agricultural and other livelihood activities.
Villagers have to sustain their own ronderos by provisioning them when they set off
on lengthy patrols and military operations. Additionally, ever since the start of the
1990s, communities were not only forced by necessity to hire “professional” militiamen (i.e. the rentados), but also to pool their resources together in order to purchase
high-powered rifles (i.e. Mausers)—exorbitantly expensive and antiquated, but considered essential nonetheless. Moreover, let us not forget that every rondero killed in
action usually leaves a widow and orphaned children behind, often with no one to
provide for them. For almost fifteen years, then, local peasants communities have
been subjected to the financial and economic tensions and pressures produced by the
requirements of civil defence, against which they have had to try to balance their own
subsistence demands. It is in this regard that mothers, being the ones who in wars are
always left to worry about the well-being of their children and the everyday survival
of their families, have been among the most outspoken critics of the burdens that
CADs have brought. Teodora Ayne, president of the Federación de Clubes de Madres
de Ayacucho, once explained the dilemma thus:
I believe that the rondas campesinas keep Sendero away; since we are
already organised we can defend ourselves, they cannot enter. But the
rondas also produce more poverty, for there are many orphans,
women whose husbands have been killed or have been disappeared by
one side or the other [Sendero or the military]. These women cannot
go out into the countryside to work because in the morning they must
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form up, in the afternoon they must form up; so for this reason they
are unable to go to their chacras to work; this is what produces more
poverty, more need and hunger” (1993:54).
The conclusion to which the evidence strongly points is that the CADs had already
declined and disintegrated even before they were officially abolished because in the
context of a post-war society, they were proving to be both redundant and an unnecessarily prolonged economic burden on their communities. As we have seen in the
previous chapter, their inability to take the lead or to make fundamental contributions
to the process of development has rendered them virtually irrelevant in this new environment. Indeed, it appears that CADs of Frente Huamanga went into decline despite
the fact that in order to secure governmental and non-governmental support for
development projects, it was increasingly becoming necessary for districts and individual communities to present an image of themselves as coherently and strongly
organised. This contradictory situation—which the comparison between CADs and
mothers’ clubs aptly illustrates—merely strengthens the argument that their decline
was the direct result of being perceived by the local population as increasingly extraneous, inappropriate vehicles with which to pursue developmental priorities. They
were created for a purpose—self-defence—and that purpose has now been achieved.
People thus turned their attention and their energies to other forms of organisation
and to other strategies more in keeping with their changing objectives and interests.
Let us not forget that in spite of all the academic talk of their expanding functions
in recent years, the raison d’être of the CADs had always remained one of counterinsurgency. It is true that while political violence was prevalent, CAD commanders
came to assume an important leadership role in local governance, so long as everyday
life continued to centre around the task of defence. We have seen that amidst escalating political violence and population displacement, particularly during the period
between 1985 and 1995, militia leaders were frequently the only authority figures
that remained within resistant communities, the bureaucratic state officials having
either fled, been murdered, or renounced their office. In such a situation, it was of
course to be expected that militia commanders should become the dominant authority in their communities, in addition to assuming some of the functions of the absent
civil authorities, like the conflict-resolution role of the juez de paz (justice of the
peace). Civil authorities at that time, if any remained at all, were, in the words of
Comando Zorro, “un rondero nomás,” just another rondero16 But this has changed in
recent years, with the steady advance and consolidation of pacification. Amongst the
thousands of displaced persons returning to their rural villages or district capitals of
origin during the 1990s were many state officials, ready to reassume their posts of
authority. Militia commanders have therefore had to relinquish to their rightful functionaries the responsibilities they earlier had provisionally taken over. Hence, the
importance that militia commanders assumed in the political life of their communities during the period of civil war subsequently diminished with advancing pacification, and with the gradual return of civil authorities. Moreover, the ending of the
state of emergency meant that former militia commanders no longer had the official
authority to order their fellow villagers to do anything, not even to participate in
communal work projects, if it was against their will. Any moral pressure or sanctions
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to induce villagers to engage in cooperative ventures for the good of the entire community would thereafter have to come from the community as a whole, or its legitimate civilian authorities.
7.3
The end of an institution?
As we have already discussed in the previous chapter, in the transition from a situation of war to one of reconstruction and development, it was the ability to network
with NGOs and government aid agencies that becomes not only the overriding objective, but also the criterion by which a local authority’s efficacy and social relevance
were judged by the local population. In this regard, militia commandos and defence
committees found themselves at a disadvantage as compared with district mayors or
local mother’s clubs. District mayors (and to a lesser degree governors and lieutenantgovernors) had generally proven to be more adept than militia commanders at securing external resources and developmental assistance, and it was therefore natural that
they became increasingly more important than CAD leaders in running the political
affairs of districts.
It is likely that this shift in local power was partly because the majority of militia
leaders were resistetes, with not a great amount of education, with limited networking skills beyond their districts and limited experience beyond the sphere of civil
defence. Consequently, they were often less confident and less experienced in communicating and negotiating with external governmental and non-governmental agencies than the new generation of civilian bureaucratic officials, who typically were
young retornantes, fluent in Castellano, with higher levels of literacy and education,
and substantial urban experience and know-how. For instance, Ruben Rojas, 37 years
old (in 1997) and Tambo’s retornante district mayor from 1995 to 1998, has lived in
Lima, Ayacucho, and Trujillo, and was running a small business in addition to studying part time at UNSCH to become a lawyer. He often travelled to Lima to negotiate
with representatives of European aid donors. In contrast, the majority of CAD commanders I met in Ayacucho were men who did not possess more than primary education, whose primary skill was subsistence farming, and had never even travelled
outside the department.
However, the relegation of the CADs to the sidelines in the unfolding chapter of
post-war development has not stopped certain more talented or educated CAD commanders from pursuing a political vocation, and thus a continuation of their political
and social ascendancy. Susano Mendoza Pareja, as we have already mentioned,
became a congressional candidate in the elections of 2000. When last I saw Comando
Zorro, he had hung up his militiaman’s rifle and was instead setting his sights on
becoming Governor of Tambo district. Clearly, the experience of leadership in the
militias has raised the self-confidence and stirred the personal aspirations of some
individuals with otherwise underprivileged backgrounds, like Comando Zorro. Their
participation in community defence, in leadership roles, has thus opened doors of
opportunity that they might otherwise never have had. The rank and file CAD members, on the other hand, have generally gone back to their peasant way of life. For reasons already explained, the vast majority of peasants have little time for, and show lit-
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tle interest in, doing what they now perceived to be village defence’s unnecessary and
time-consuming routine tasks, like patrolling. In this new chapter of Peruvian history, patrolling and other security-related tasks are no longer the overriding priority.
The decline and apparent disappearance of the peasant militias in departments
like Ayacucho is but another step in Peruvian society’s return to civil society after so
many years of obstructive political violence and living under a state of emergency, and
a decade of anti-democratic dictatorship. With the ending of the state of emergency
and the dissolution of the CADs as a legal entity, the army’s ability to exercise authority over the civilian population or to interfere directly in its daily social and political
affairs appears also to have been substantially weakened, and this can only serve to
invigorate the resurgence of civil society in the countryside.
Are the self-defence committees gone forever? Does their decline and eventual
disappearance in regions such as Ayacucho suggest a story of failure? I should not
think so. Although it has been common for Westerners to view the Andean peasantry
as a repository of timeless traditions, the reality is that peasant institutions are hardly set in stone. As we have seen in our discussion of cultural transformations and continuities in chapter 6, Peru’s south-central Andean peasants are, in fact, much more
flexible and pragmatic than we often give them credit for. As I contemplate the
decline of the Comités de Autodefensa y Desarrollo in Ayacucho and Huancavelica in
the closing years of the twentieth century, I arrive at the conclusion that their physical existence was perhaps not as important as the organisational experience and lessons they had embodied, and the self-confidence they had engendered among a peasantry whose members had succeeded in transforming themselves from victims to
heroes. For as long as the CADs continue to exist in living memory, the possibility will
always exist for their reactivation. As Comando Zorro reminded me at our final meeting in May 2000, “If in the future we are once again threatened, we will reorganise
to defend ourselves.”
Notes
1
Author’s interview with Gabriél Carrasco, Coordinador Regional Huamanga, Transparencia, on 16
2
Author’s conversation with Eusebio, longtime resident of Ccarhuapampa, on 22 April 2000.
May 2000.
Gabriél Carrasco, Coordinador Regional Huamanga, Transparencia also noted these sorts of
rumours.
3
Author’s interview with Gabriél Carrasco, Coordinador Regional Huamanga, Transparencia, on 16
4
Author’s interview with Walter Ramirez Echacaya (Comando Zorro), Presidente and Comando
5
Based on author’s own observations and subsequent discussion with Felix, a local police sergeant,
May 2000.
General of Tambo district’s Comité Central de Autodefensa y Desarrollo, on 31 May 2000.
on 19 May 2000.
6
Jason Webb, Reuters dispatch received by NewsEdge Insight on 28 May, 2000.
7
Fernando Olivera, leader of the Frente Independiente Moralizador party, of which Fujimori’s exwife Susana Higuchi was a congressional member, made the videotape public.
8
Richard Lloyd Parry, “Fujimori turn Japanese to evade Peruvian justice,” The Independent, 13
December 2000, received by NewsEdge Insight on 20 December 2000.
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9
This theory of “informal politics” would appear to fit very well with Norman Long’s “actor-oriented” approach, which we briefly discussed in Chapter 1.
10 Information provided to author by Captain (now Major) César G. Vásquez Guevara, on 24 April
2000. Article 3 of D.S. No.077 describes CADs as organisations “transitory in character,” to be dissolved automatically upon the revocation of the state of emergency automatically. Fujimori had
publicly announced on 27 December 1999 his intention to run for a second re-election. Hence,
there is little doubt that ending the state of emergency zone was intended as pre-election propaganda, a symbolic statement meant to underscore that he has restored internal security in the country, as he had promised he would. Why he chose this moment to lift the state of emergency was
because it was in his political interest to do so, just as it had served his political ends to maintain it
for this long.
11 Author’s conversation with Uchuraccay’s Comando Gavilán, on 27 April 2000.
12 Author’s interview with the President, Secretary, and Treasurer of Tambo’s Comité Distrital de
Clubes de Madres, on 16 October 1997.
13 Author’s interview with the President, Secretary, and Treasurer of Tambo’s Comité Distrital de
Clubes de Madres, on 16 October 1997.
14 The Vaso de Leche programme was initiated Lima’s Marxist mayor Alfonso Barrantes (IU) in 1984
but, as with other similar grassroots initiatives, was taken over by the Fujimori government in the
1990s and incorporated into its own general programme of executive-administered social development.
15 Author’s interview with the President, Secretary, and Treasurer of Tambo’s Comité Distrital de
Clubes de Madres, on 16 October 1997.
16 Author’s interview with Walter Ramirez Echacaya (Comando Zorro), Presidente and Comando
General of Tambo district’s Comité Central de Autodefensa y Desarrollo, on 31 May 2000.
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