The battle of memories

“Battles for memory” [batallas por la memoria] is the title of a collection of essays about memory politics in post transitional Peru. And “battling for memory” was what thousands of activists seemed to be doing during the years, months and weeks leading up to today’s presidential run-off between leftist nationalist Ollanta Humala and his opponent Keiko Fujimori. She is the daughter of ex president Alberto Fujimori, who is currently serving a 25-year-sentence for human rights abuses and corruption; he led a military uprising against the late Fujimori regime and has been linked to Hugo Chavez.



In countless marches, flash mobs, blog posts, facebook groups and discussions on the walls of personal facebook profiles, activists and "ordinary citizens" searched personal and collective memories of the past for answers to what to many seemed to be, in the words of public intellectual no. 1 Mario Vargas Llosa, a “choice between terminal cancer and AIDS”. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s proverbial slogan – “a country that forgets its history is condemned to repeat it” – was a thousand times reincarnated in activist’s desperate appeals to “make memory”: the defiant claim that “I do remember!”, the advice to take a – fictional – drug called “memorex”, issued to those who planned to vote for Keiko Fujimori, laments about collective amnesia and a flood of personal testimonies of suffering (both written and video) characterized in particular civic campaigning against Keiko Fujimori. So much, indeed, that the memory of crimes committed during her father’s government in the 1990s came to be one of the central arguments against her candidature. For Fujimori's opponents the case is clear: "about Humala, we have doubts - but of Fujimori we have proof".

During a protest against Keiko Fujimori's candidature, a bride is holding a sign that says "No to Keiko Fujimori! Because I remember" (photo by Edward Armas, http://tinyurl.com/6gelk7q)

Keiko Fujimori’s campaign drew on memories of the past as well, pointing to the defeat of terrorism and the increasing prosperity of formerly poor people. However, most salient was her attempt to liken her opponent to contemporary leftist governments, in particular Hugo Chávez authoritarian regime in Venezuela. By pointing to the economic achievements of hard working Peruvians and painting a scenario of economic breakdown in the case of Humala’s presidency, her campaign seemed to be linked to the past in a much lesser degree, and in a stronger degree to current processes in neighbouring countries. At first glance, one could get to the conclusion that this was a fight between those who remember, and those who don’t.

But does this mean that memories did not matter to Fujimori's supporters? Does it mean that they “did not remember”? I think to assume this would be a big mistake. Memories did matter, and as I could draw in particular from debates between disagreeing friends on the walls of my own Peruvian friends on facebook, I suggest that in the end it were personal, rather than collective memories that mattered the most. In fact, I should say that what we could witness during the past months, leading up to the elections, was not so much a “battle for memory” as a “battle of memories,” in plural.

The problem of historical memory was not just a central issue in civic debates surrounding the elections; the different memories members of different sectors of society have of the war-torn 1980’s and 1990’s also played a significant role in their electoral choices, and they were omnipresent as resources and arguments during the electoral campaigns. The electoral memory politics of Peruvians on either side of the run-off were themselves a symptom of the deep divisions that still mark the country a decade after the end of the Fujimori regime. Rather than between those who remember and those who don’t, the essential divide runs between what is being remembered as the worst part of the two last decades of the 20'th century. These very different memories are a result of the very different ways people were affected by the armed conflict.

Between 1980 and 2000, Peru was shaken by an armed conflict between the state and two armed insurgencies (the maoist Shining Path and the guevarist Revolutionary Movement Túpac Amaru (MRTA)). According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an estimated 69.280 Peruvians were killed or disappeared during the conflict. Most of them belonged to the poorest, rural and indigenous sectors of society.

In part as a result of the armed conflict and in part as a result of financial mismanagement, the second half of the 1980s was also ravaged by a galloping inflation. While the rural (especially the Andean and Amazonian) populations were most strongly beaten by insurgent and counter-insurgent operations during the 1980s, the urban middle classes who lived off monthly or fortnightly salaries were wretched by inflation, but only came to be directly affected by (and interested in) the war when the Shining Path started to attack the urban centres in the early 1990s. A series of spectacular Shining Path attacks in downtown Lima, empty shelves as the insurgency effectively cut off food supply to the urban centres, and frequent blackouts as a result of electrical tower bombings are among the most salient aspects of the collective war memory among urban middle classes.

In 1990, political newcomer and outsider Alberto Fujimori was elected president. Having carried out a “self-coup” against democratic institutions in April 1992, his early dictatorship saw the capture of the leaders of both MRTA and Shining Path – an event that severely weakened the insurgent groups and from which he was able to draw political capital, although it was not a result of his own counter insurgent politics – and an end to hyper inflation. However, this did not mean the end of repression. After the self-coup, the remainder of the decade was marked by corruption and the strongly authoritarian administration of Fujimori and his advisor Vladimiro Montesinos. The Fujimori regime ran death squads, controlled the media and the judiciary, chased their opponents and perpetuated what critics have called a “culture of fear”. The authoritarian grip affected mainly members of the opposition and human rights activists, who constantly ran the risk of being labelled “terrorists” and being jailed, tortured, or even assassinated and disappeared. A legacy of fujimorism that only recently has begun to perpetrate collective memory with great force is the forced sterilization of mainly poor and indigenous women as part of the Fujimori government’s population control policy.

A third and very powerful set of collective memories refers to the events surrounding the transition in the year 2000: when a small TV station aired video tapes showing presidential advisor Vladimiro Montesinos buying almost everybody with a grain of political influence – from media owners to members of the parliamentary opposition to business men – Peruvians watched in awe. The so called Vladivideos came to be one of the central lieux de mémoire of the Peruvian transition. Fujimori – who also held Japanese citizenship – fled to Japan and resigned by fax. After his own capture, Vladimiro Montesinos accused Fujimori’s daughter Keiko of paying for her studies in the United States with money embezzled from public funds.

It is these memories of human rights abuse, corruption and a president who fled the country, taking advantage of his secret second citizenship, that activists referred to when they spoke of "memory". Up until the first round of the presidential elections in April, big parts of the liberal urban middle classes agreed that both Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala were “impossible candidates”. As long as alternatives were available, personal memories of hardship during the 1980s played a minor role for members of the middle classes, compared to the collective memories that referred mainly to other people's suffering (such as disappearances, forced sterilizations and killings) and to society as a whole (such as memories of corruption). In particular neoliberal candidate Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was immensely popular among younger members of the middle classes, provided an alternative to Fujimori that wouldn’t threaten the economic status quo (as some have put it: that wouldn’t threaten your iPod). The strong link between the notion of “memory” and the politics of human rights also contributed to the concentration of memory politics in the campaign against Fujimori’s candidature.

However, this would change with the outcome of the first round, when the choice was between Fujimori and Humala. At this point, for important parts of the urban middle classes who had not been personally affected by Fujimori's authoritarian regime, the (often personal) memories of economic decline and loss of social status became a decisive factor that outweighed the (second hand) memories of human rights abuse. The social structure of victimisation during the 1980s and 1990s - where the urban middle classes where hit hard by inflation during the 1980s but could survive fujimorism relatively unaffected as long as they didn't join the opposition - thus translated directly to the middle classes’ voting decisions 11 years after the transition.

On either side, memories were the real voters.