Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (review)

What is it like for ordinary people to live through revolutionary violence and the state's repression of that violence? This stunning book offers amazing and troubling insight into the lives of peasants in highland Peru who endured the revolutionary and increasingly violent Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement and the onslaught of soldiers seeking to ferret out and destroy it. Although much of the violent confrontation dates from the early 1980s, the book traces the changes in these highland communities from the late 1970s until 2000. Anthropologist Kimberly Theidon describes vividly, through powerful stories and quotes, what happened to the people caught in the conflict. Many lost husbands, children, animals, livelihoods, lands, and ultimately, the sense of caring and community. She describes the difficult lives of widows, of mothers mourning for their murdered children, of women raped, and of Sendero sympathizers who were reluctantly allowed to return to their home communities if they repented, but who remained outsiders. Her rich ethnographic account also describes resilience in the face of suffering, moments of joy and caring, and efforts to rebuild and to forget. This is not simply a story of human suffering, but also one of endurance and recovery.

Kimberly Theidon spent many years doing ethnographic field research in several highland Peruvian communities during the 1990s and 2000s. She recounts stories and encounters from villages that were largely opposed to Sendero Luminoso as well as those that supported the movement. The book discusses these two kinds of communities: those in the North and those in the South. Those in the North were largely opposed to Sendero and saw its fighters as threatening outsiders. In some communities, leaders sought security from Sendero militants through the state military. They petitioned the government to send soldiers and set up a local base to protect them. Yet the soldiers engaged in rape and abuse of local populations.

Those in the South were more often sympathetic to Sendero at first, and some joined the movement. Poor peasants were attracted by the movement's ideology of equality and collective labor for the good of all. Senderistas were often people from peasant backgrounds educated in local universities where they heard about the potential of revolutionary change to disrupt entrenched inequalities. During the early period of the movement Senderistas worked to help poor peasants and to build facilities to improve village life. Over time, however, the movement became more violent, less concerned with the well-being of peasants, and more interested in establishing control over them. Horrific massacres and attacks produced hostility among highland villages and led many to turn against the Sendero movement. As Sendero forces fought against the state, they appropriated local food resources. As the movement turned more violent and destructive, many peasants became disillusioned and tried to leave but faced violent reprisals.

Theidon tells many stories of villagers fleeing to the caves in the mountains, eating salt and water, carrying children with them and struggling to find food and warmth, and returning to find homes burned to the ground, animals killed, and food stores stolen. Many fled to Lima or highland cities, producing a large displaced and impoverished population. The people Theidon talked to described the period before the violence as relatively good, with food, housing, and some communal justice. Yet, there were always deep inequalities and injustices, grievances which the Sendero movement articulated and sought to ameliorate. Even before the violence, poverty and inequality were widespread in the highlands, fueling the revolutionary movement to come.

One of the products of this history is the continuing relations between killers and their victims in the same villages and neighborhoods. People who organized massacres lived near or in the communities where the massacres occurred. Neighboring villages remember deaths caused by their neighbors. As they seek to collaborate in the post-conflict era to benefit from state and NGO rebuilding programs, they must overcome deep distrust and anger. They are, as the title...