The Yuyarisun Contests in Ayacucho

On a crisp, sunny day in June 2013, around the main square in Huamanga, capital city of Huamanga province in the department of Ayacucho, there are signs posted touting Ayacucho as safe for tourists; several times a week garbage trucks pass to collect refuse. They carry loudspeakers with a message from the mayor—in Spanish and Quechua—announcing the good works being done for the progress of the region. Buildings are scrubbed of graffiti. The kantuta trees are in full bloom amidst carefully manicured flowerbeds. There is an overwhelming sense of urgency to prove, at ten years from the release of the Final Report, that Ayacucho has moved on.

Indeed, during this particular visit to Ayacucho, I heard several complaints of the waning attention to memory projects over the past decade. Some attribute this shift to lack of interest, a return to the days when olvido (forgetting) was de rigueur. But most point to limited funds that tend to be directed towards more ‘useful’ projects—those that would support the dominant image that Peru is progressing, that we have a ‘new’ Peru. But regarding the fact that memory projects have lost their importance over the decade following the CVR, at least one intellectual, Ramón Pajuelo, makes the astute observation that:

These ‘different memories,’ often provoked or initiated by CVR-related enterprises, frequently go against the grain of official discourses on the Shining Path era and the post-conflict future of Peru. These responses defy easy interpretations of events and cookie-cutter resolutions based on ‘universal’ human rights values, while interrupting and belying dominant visions of a ‘new Peru’ moving forward in a unified manner, having faced and overcome the recent past.