Music, Politics, and Violence

8. Complementary Discourses of Truth and Memory: The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Canción Social Ayacuchana

197 chapter eight Complementary Discourses of Truth and Memory The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Canción Social Ayacuchana jonathan ritter On December 21, 1982, in the city of Ayacucho, Peru, two Shining Path guerrillas entered the regional office of the National Institute of Culture (inc) and shot and killed its director, Walter Wong. As was typical of many Shining Path assassinations, no communiqué or other public statement was issued by the guerrillas to justify the killing, leaving the public to ponder the exact reasons behind his murder. Beyond a bureaucratic association with the state, and perhaps more obliquely, his promotion of “folklore” that stood in opposition to the Maoist party’s Cultural Revolution–inspired dictums on such matters, Wong did not appear to have committed any specific infractions against the Shining Path.1 Rather, his was simply the latest in a string of “selective assassinations”—the third in the city of Ayacucho that week alone—meant to “decapitate” the government at the local level and leave a power vacuum that would be filled by the guerrillas. For the administration of President Fernando Belaúnde, the assassination of Wong marked a significant turning point in the government’s response to the insurgency. After two and a half years of increasingly brazen and effective attacks on local authorities and infrastructure, the killing of this minor official of cultural affairs was the final straw, prompting the reluctant Belaúnde to at last place the Ayacucho region under military control .2 Within weeks, deaths, disappearances and other human rights violations skyrocketed, as both the military and the guerrillas ratcheted up their musical memorializations of violent pasts / 198 campaigns of violence and terror. The death toll increased tenfold in the following year, and Ayacucho was soon immersed in a bloody and protracted conflict that would persist for more than a decade, claiming nearly 70,000 lives and uprooting much of the local population.3 In the midst of the explosion of violence in 1983, one of Wong’s colleagues , a fellow cultural activist, veteran folk musician, and later director of that same regional office of the inc, Carlos Falconí, penned a song simply titled “Ofrenda” (“The Offering”) that also marked an important milestone in the war. Written in Quechua and composed in the regional, guitarbased style of the mestizo wayno,4 the song quickly gained a wide audience through local performances by Falconí, as well as recordings in the following year by two prominent artists within the national folk music circuit, Nelly Munguía and Manuelcha Prado. In contrast to the typically romantic, forlorn, or nostalgic lyrics to mestizo waynos from the region, the opening lyrics to “Ofrenda” painted a bleak scene of death, devastation, and wanton abuse: Huamanga plazapi In the plaza of Huamanga5 bumbacha tuqyachkan bombs are exploding Huamanga kallipi In the streets of Huamanga balalla parachkan it is raining bullets Karsil wasichapi In the little jail inusinti llakichkan the innocent are weeping Huamangallay barriu the barrios of Huamanga yawarta waqachkan are weeping blood Huamanga llaqtaypi In my town of Huamanga sinchi sinchi llaki there is tremendous suffering Huamanga llaqtapi In the town of Huamanga hatun hatun llaki there is a great sadness Muru pacha runa The soldiers wirayakullachkan are getting fat Kantinakunapi In the cantinas warmita rantichkan they are buying women “Ofrenda” was the first in a body of new songs in urban and rural folkloric styles, collectively referred to today as canciones testimoniales (“testimonial songs”) or as the canción social ayacuchana (“Ayacuchan social song”), that were written explicitly in response to the events of Peru’s internal war.6 By the end of the 1980s, this testimonial repertoire comprised literally hundreds of such songs, all bearing witness to the traumatic experiences of the war and creating, through live performances and recordings, a needed and often singular social space for political protest, social commentary, and col- Peruvian Truth Commission and Canción Social Ayacuchana / 199 lective remembrance of those lost in the violence. It was, and remains to this day, one of the most dramatic and powerful artistic movements in modern Peruvian history. The canción social repertoire is not alone today, however, on the public stage of representing the violent past in Peru. Exactly twenty years after “Ofrenda” was written, and more than a decade after the capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman that signaled the beginning of the end...