Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes by Isaias Rojas-Perez (review)

In this thoughtful and cogently argued book, Isaias Rojas-Perez examines the forensic exhumation of mass graves in search of the bodies of victims of the 20-year conflict in Peru. In the 1980s and 1990s, an estimated 69,000 Peruvians died, the victims were predominantly rural Quechua speakers.¹ Based on intensive research as an anthropologist and informed by his work as a human rights activist during the height of the violence, Rojas-Perez centers his analysis on Quechua-speaking mothers of the missing as they gather at the forensic exhumation of mass graves in the southern central Andes.

The argument at the heart of Mourning Remains is that exhumations are sites at which state power is exercised through the management of dead bodies in an attempt to shape post-conflict society. Conceptually, the book is divided into two parts. The first three chapters serve as a historical and theoretical foundation in which Rojas-Perez examines the emergence of exhumation in Peru, considers normative mourning practices in Quechua-speaking communities, and discusses the technical and psychological challenges forensic teams face in finding and identifying bodies. The second part of the book is comprised of five closely woven chapters that work together to offer an ethnographic account of the Quechua-speaking mothers of the disappeared as they observe and participate in excavations searching for their missing children.

Theoretically, Rojas-Perez is concerned with issues of sovereignty, biopolitics, and governmentality in the wake of political violence. He is in close conversation with other work exploring the state’s exercise of lethal power and governance of the dead like Achille Mbembe’s (2003) influential theorization of necropolitics and Finn Stepputat’s (2014) edited volume, Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies, to which Rojas-Perez was a contributor.

In Mourning Remains, Rojas-Perez develops the conversation around sovereignty by introducing the concept of the “necro-governmentality of post-conflict.” Whereas necropolitics concerns the sovereign power to kill and let die, “necro-governmentality” addresses how the state’s treatment of the dead structures social responses to political violence. Rojas-Perez theorizes sovereignty as oscillating between “the power that kills and the power that cares” (14). Exhumations are an expression of this shifting power, serving both as a reminder of the violence that the state can inflict and as a project of repair carried out in the name of human rights.

Rojas-Perez posits that whereas in other Latin American countries like Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala, exhumations narrowly address the violence of military dictatorships, in Peru, they have a broader moral agenda. The first chapter of the book, “Death in Transition: Reclaiming the (Unknown Dead in Postconflict Peru,” addresses this subject, arguing that exhumations in Peru act to frame all casualties of the conflict as victims, regardless of political affiliation or circumstances of death. Informed by depoliticizing discourses of humanitarianism and invoking tropes of universal victimhood, the state presents exhumation as a means of healing a multitude of political and social rifts, especially between urban Spanish-speaking and rural Quechua-speaking populations.

However, as the ethnographic research of Mourning Remains evinces, the Quechua-speaking mothers of the missing do not unquestioningly accept the state’s agenda. The mothers are not passive actors waiting to receive the bodies of their missing children, but rather creative political participants who find ways to enact their own projects of justice and memory.

In his description of the mothers’ search for their missing children, Rojas-Perez turns his ethnographic attention to the important and under-theorized theme of the failure of forensic exhumation to find and identify bodies. As of 2015, after a decade of effort in Peru, only 20 percent of the estimated 18,000 bodies of the missing had been discovered, and of these, only half had been identified and returned to families. Internationally, rates of identification are similarly low due to the difficulty...