Social Science Research Council

Jamás tan cerca arremetió lo lejos: memoria y violencia política en el Perú

edited by Carlos Iván Degregori

Lima, Peru: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos Ediciones, 2003.

This volume is another product of the Council’s program on Collective Memory of Repression, organized by the Latin America and Caribbean Program. Roughly translated, the title is “Never Had the Faraway Hit So Close to Home: Memory and Political Violence in Peru.”

In Peru, as well as in other parts of the world that suffer the consequences of periods of political violence, the debates around what took place in the past are a crucial factor in the process of democratic construction and, on a more fundamental level, in the process of (re)construction of individual and collective identities. The essays that make up the present volume explore some of those ‘memory battles’ about places, people and civil society institutions that acquired an emblematic character during Peru’s recent years of political violence: the tragic death of eight journalists in the peasant community of Uchuraccay in Ayacucho; the murder of nine students of the University of Education ‘La Cantuta’ in Lima; the struggle of the Ashaninka people in the Peruvian Amazon, an indigenous group decimated by the Maoist Shining Path group and the Armed Forces; and the search for justice by the National Association of Families of the Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP). For information on how to acquire this volume and others from a series on Collective Memory of Repression published by Siglo XXI Editores in cooperation with the Council, please contact levitt@ssrc.org.