The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency

ONE: To Trace the Tracks: Internal Conflict and Resolution

c h a p t e r o n e To Trace the Tracks Internal Conflict and Resolution T wo indigenous peasants—one from Peru and the other from Bolivia—are talking one day about the similarities and differences between their two countries. At some point in the conversation, the Peruvian turns to the Bolivian and asks, “Why is it that you have a navy when in Bolivia there is no sea?” The Bolivian scratches his head for a moment and replies, “Why is that you have a Ministry of Justice when in Peru there is no justice?” I heard different iterations of this joke throughout my stay in Ayacucho. The punch line invariably caused everyone present to chuckle heartily, then sigh, then fade into awkward silence. The joke hit home for me as a historian, for I had spent countless hours reviewing written records on Ayacuchan indigenous peasants who had invested all their time, money, and energy into seeking justice from a state juridical system that rarely worked in their favor. But the worst of it was that I had consulted many of these records in Lima’s National Archive, which, by some cruel twist of fate, was located in the basement of the Palace of Justice. By the mid-twentieth century, many peasant communities had already turned to grassroots or customary justice to counteract what they perceived as an incompetent state juridical system. Some of these localized systems were more effective than others. Nowhere is this disparity more apparent than in the cases of Chuschi and Huaychao. As we will see, indigenous peasants from both communities held similar views when it came to condemning social trespasses such as abigeato (livestock theft), domestic impropriety (incest, adultery, spousal abuse, and the abandonment of one’s paternal duties), and “free-riding” (neglecting one’s duties toward the collective).1 Indigenous peasants seemed willing to tolerate their neighbors’ occasional slippages with respect to these moral trans- 20 • to trace the tracks gressions provided that they made a concerted effort to correct these behaviors , for these deviants threatened the public order of the community. Where Chuschi’s and Huaychao’s histories diverge is in the extent to which local systems of justice curbed this degenerate behavior. In Chuschi and neighboring Quispillaccta, we find the same individuals committing one or more of these social infractions throughout most of their adult life—some even before that. This was a direct consequence of a breakdown in the local administration of justice in the district. Not only did the customary law of the varayoqs, the indigenous authorities of the traditional civil-religious prestige hierarchy, fail to correct these individuals’ behavior, but so did the penal system of the Peruvian state.2 By contrast, customary justice in Huaychao, which was administered by local authorities, had succeeded in dissuading individuals from habitually subverting local values. Thus, even though these authorities were sometimes at odds with their subalterns, Huaychainos saw their power as legitimate and necessary because of their actual and symbolic role in safeguarding communal mores. Chuschi’s and Huaychao’s local experiences speak to a greater incapacity of the Peruvian state to administer justice in the countryside. This is not to say that the state was absent in the rural highlands. Peasants in the most remote communities had access to at least one channel of the state’s judicial apparatus—be it appointed officials, judges, or policemen. The problem for Quechua-speaking peasants was not one of accessibility but one of reliability. Community, Justice, and the State Peru was not the only Latin American country with an ineffective judicial apparatus during the mid-twentieth century. In El Salvador, judges often deflected their responsibilities onto their untrained staff. Nor was it uncommon for justices of the lower courts to solicit bribes or confiscate valuable evidence such as vehicles for personal use. One reason for this was that Salvadoran judges received miserable salaries and often only worked part time. Equally troublesome was the inability of the Salvadoran system to convict prisoners. Before the 1980s, 90 percent of all Salvadoran prisoners remained unsentenced.3 Faced with similar crises, some Latin Americans, particularly those living in impoverished areas where crime was rampant and justice scarce, turned to extralegal measures to restore a sense of order in their communities. The political violence in 1940s and to trace the tracks • 21 1950s Colombia offers a fitting example. During that period, Colombia’s...