Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 24, No. 1, February 2010, 161–177

Depiction or erasure? Violence and trauma in contemporary Peruvian

film
Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum*

Department of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

Most of the 70,000 people who died or disappeared during the 1980–2000 civil war in
Peru were Indigenous Quechua speakers. It is still proscribed to talk about the violent
conflict in this Latin American country on the Pacific, where the high levels of poverty
that may have triggered the war continue to affect 40% of the population. In this paper,
I discuss the effort of three Peruvian films to respond to the trauma of misery, racism,
forced migration, and dirty war experienced by both civilians and soldiers. I analyse
how the films Gregorio (Grupo Chaski, 1984), The Lion’s Den (Francisco Lombardi,
1988), and Days of Santiago (Josué Méndez, 2004) depict or erase the persons and
bodies of the Andean individuals who have suffered violence.

In Seven interpretive essays on Peruvian reality ([1928] 1974), Peruvian intellectual José
Carlos Mariátegui asserts that the ‘problems’ of the Indigenous people in Peru are
economic, rooted in the land tenure system of the Peruvian economy (based on the latifundio
or large landowner system implanted by medieval Spain during colonization). According to
Mariátegui, Indigenous people would not escape feudal servitude until they gained control
over agricultural lands (50 – 104). Lacking the political power to achieve land reform, in the
1950s thousands of displaced and landless Indigenous people from the Andes mountain
ranges migrated to the coast and settled in slums in the desert outskirts of Lima (Nugent
1992, 31). As Núria Vilanova indicates, ‘mass migration is one the most dramatic changes in
contemporary Peruvian history, turning the traditionally agrarian people of Peru into urban
dwellers struggling for survival in the city’ (1999, 15).1 Coastal people considered
themselves ‘whiter’2 and more ‘modern’ than people from the Andes highlands (Martı́nez
2008, 1). They rejected the Indigenous highlanders who found it extremely difficult to
access housing, education, and work on the coast (Soto et al. 1987, 12).
In 1969, the leftist military regime of Juan Velasco (1968 – 1975) instituted a Land
Reform Law and recognized the Quechua Indigenous language as the second official
language of Peru, along with Spanish. Though interrupted by a 1975 right-wing military
coup, Velasco’s regime generated pressing demands in large sectors of Peruvian society
that were beginning to recognize their legal rights as citizens. These sectors would also
constitute the core of movements such as Shining Path (Manrique Gálvez 2002, 55).
Democratic elections were announced in 1980, but armed political groups such as the
Shining Path Communist Party of Peru (‘Sendero Luminoso’ in Spanish)3 and Tupac
Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) had already resorted to armed struggle against

*Email: pagan@post.harvard.edu

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310903419575
http://www.informaworld.com
162 I. Pagán-Teitelbaum

the Peruvian state. Francisca da Gama explains that the rise of armed revolutionary groups
responded to concrete historical developments in Peru, such as ‘political upheaval,
government corruption, a weak left, and racism towards the Indigenous population – who
continued to live in poverty and be excluded from political decision-making’ (2007, 1).
Peruvian historian Nelson Manrique Gálvez adds that the devastating violence of the
armed conflict in Peru was generated by a ‘profoundly excluding and segregationist State,
which inherited and adopted a racist and anti-indigenous colonial discourse, that saw
Peruvian society as divided in castes, and that considered Whites intrinsically superior,
and Indians inferior, for biological reasons’ (2002, 57).4 For Manrique Gálvez, the armed
insurrection was a reaction against historical racial discrimination and conservative
ideology that blamed the ‘Indians’ for all of Peru’s misfortunes as a nation, and proposed a
radical ‘solution’: the extermination of the aboriginal population (339). In this sense – as
in South African apartheid (Lincoln 2008, 27) – the ‘whiter’ Euro-descendent Peruvian
minority in power constructed the majority Indigenous population from the Andes and the
Amazon as what Robert Jay Lifton calls the ‘designated victims’: Indigenous people were
denied the right to live in their own country and were designated as a group that deserved
to be exploited (or eliminated) for the economic and psychological survival of the
Peruvian nation (Caruth 1995b, 139). Renowned Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa
(a presidential candidate in 1990) provides a relevant example of anti-Indigenous discourse
in Peru when he declares that a ‘free and decent’ modern society can only be achieved in a
state in which the ‘native population is scarce or nonexistent’. With this objective in mind,
Vargas Llosa urges the ‘Indians to pay this high price’, that is, ‘to renounce their culture –
their language, their beliefs, their traditions, and customs – and adopt those of their old
masters’ (1992, 811).
Indeed, most of the Peruvians who were killed or disappeared during the war were
Indigenous Quechua-speakers. Since the ethnic composition of the lower ranks of the
Peruvian armed forces is mainly of Indigenous descent, Indigenous Peruvians paid the
‘high price’ of the violence on both sides of the civil war (Manrique Gálvez 2002, 341).5
A national state of emergency was declared in 1981, but the population of Lima largely
ignored the war being waged in the mountains for a decade, until a bomb was placed in an
affluent district of the capital in 1992. In November 2000, after two decades of war, an
interim government organized new elections and created a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), which collected 17,000 testimonies from 2001 to 2003. The Peruvian
TRC was based mainly on the South African model (1995), with public hearings broadcast
on national television, but was also based on prior Latin American models from Argentina
(1983), Chile (1990), El Salvador (1992), and Guatemala (1994) (Burneo 2001, 1). The
Final Report of the TRC determined that the internal war in Peru led to more than 70,000
deaths and that Peruvian state forces were responsible for the deaths of at least half of the
victims (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación 2004, 9). The report also describes the
feeling of exclusion and indifference experienced by the people and the communities that
were the main victims of the internal armed conflict. Many Andeans felt that in the important
centres of political and economic power of Peru, people thought that what had happened in
Andean towns, houses and families was happening in another country. (20)
E. Ann Kaplan points out that it makes a big difference if a catastrophe is perceived as
natural, accidental or produced by humans:
Natural disasters are beyond human control, and accidents happen. But to understand that
fellow humans have deliberately brought about one’s overwhelming suffering adds to the
traumatic effects . . . Transmitted from generation to generation, the wound remains open
even if split-off from daily consciousness. (2008, 46 – 7)
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 163

To this day, it is still proscribed to talk about the war in Peru, so the social wound or
‘collective trauma’ (Erikson 1995, 187) of a brutal internal war that damaged social bonds
and destroyed trust in individuals, society, and the Peruvian state has not been healed. In a
kind of ‘sanitized language’ that enables the state to assimilate violent deeds into a
coherent narrative in order to delay their traumatic effects (Lincoln 2008, 29), the war is
denied and is officially referred to as the ‘internal armed conflict’, ‘the violence’, or the
time of ‘terrorism’. An official document of the Peruvian army about its history in the
twentieth century makes only brief reference (two sentences) to the ‘struggle against
subversion’ after 1982 in which the soldiers who died are recognized as ‘Heroes of Peace’
(Ejército del Perú 2009). In similar documents, the Peruvian air force and the Peruvian
police force state that they fought against terrorism and narcotrafficking (Fuerza Aérea del
Perú 2008; Policı́a Nacional del Perú 2009),6 while the Peruvian navy only mentions its
participation in two international conflicts with Ecuador in 1981 and 1995 (Marina de
Guerra del Perú 2009). In effect, as in the crimes of apartheid, ‘“nobody” committed them’
(Lincoln 2008, 31) and the war does not appear to have happened in the official history of
the Peruvian armed forces. Government officials and many intellectuals regularly refer to
non-state political militants as ‘terrorists’. As in the era of South African apartheid, when
political opponents were represented as ‘criminals’ and the state apparatus as the upholder
of ‘law and order’, in Peru political opponents were posited as terrorists or ‘“inhuman”
enemies of the “legitimate” state’ (31).
Even though the wounds of the war must have left personal, collective, and historical
scars and residues, little attention has been paid to what Dominick LaCapra terms
mourning as a ‘social process or ritual’ (2001, 143, 151). Peru seems to lack the sentiment
of national tragedy that engulfs civil society in countries of the Southern Cone such as
Chile or Argentina, following the consequences of the violent state repression of the
1970s. This is possibly due to the common perception that the Indigenous victims in Peru
are as not as deserving of the same human rights as the dominant ‘whiter’ minority sectors
(Manrique Gálvez 2002, 340). As Kaplan puts it:
The issue of ‘national’ trauma (and whether such a concept is viable) is complicated: national
leaders usually deal with an historical past in which suffering was deliberately imposed on
ethnic minorities in political rather than emotional terms. They may be fully aware of what
was done, but seek to repress public knowledge so as not to arouse outcry and attribution of
blame, to say nothing . . . of demands for financial compensation for suffering. (2008, 47)
In February 2009, for example, President Alan Garcı́a’s government was criticized for
initially rejecting a $2 million donation from Germany to build a museum for victims of
Peru’s civil conflict. Peruvian Defence Minister Antero Flores then stated that ‘a museum
to remember victims of the conflict would be of no use to anybody’ (Collyns 2009a).
A month later, President Garcı́a – previously President during the most violent years of
the war in 1985 – 1990 – accepted the German donation, but named Vargas Llosa head of
the committee to design the ‘memory museum’ (Collyns 2009b). BBC News’s Lima
correspondent, Dan Collyns, points out that
Mr Garcia’s initial refusal to accept the donation brought into focus his own record on human
rights dating back to his first presidency in the late 1980s – one of the worst periods in Peru’s
civil war between state forces and the Shining Path rebels. A government-appointed truth and
reconciliation commission found that he was politically but not criminally responsible for
several massacres carried out by the military during that period. (2009b)
The persisting structures of domination and violence also contribute to constant ‘insidious
trauma’. As Laura S. Brown (1995) argues, post-traumatic symptoms can be considered
not only ‘intergenerational’ (as in the case of the children of survivors of the Nazi
164 I. Pagán-Teitelbaum

Holocaust) but also as an ‘insidious trauma’ that can ‘spread laterally throughout an
oppressed social group as well, when membership in that group means a constant lifetime
risk of exposure to certain trauma’ (107 – 8).
As the causes and the victims of the civil war continue to be denied, the suffering due
to a traumatic history is ‘exacerbated by ongoing power relations’ (Kaplan 2008, 46).
LaCapra reminds us that
any truly viable reconciliation on a collective level depends not only on such processes as
empathy and mourning but also on concrete economic, social, and political reforms in a larger
context in which mourning itself has a broader, indeed a political, meaning. (2001, 215)
In Peru, the high levels of poverty and racism that triggered the war still affect a large part
of the population. According to national statistics for 2007, nearly 40% of all Peruvians
still live in absolute poverty, and most of the poor are Indigenous people (Instituto
Nacional de Estadı́stica e Informática 2007, 3). In the national Peruvian media, Indigenous
people tend to be erased, caricatured or exoticized. As I have written elsewhere, even
though the majority of the Peruvian population is of Indigenous descent, they do not have
access to the dominant means of communication (2008, 6). Peruvian television
programming is usually produced in Lima, and the owners of television channels ‘are all
white’ (Quiroz 2007, 1). This contributes to the reproduction of Eurocentric patterns in
which success, beauty, and desire appear associated with blond hair, light-coloured skin,
and a tall stature (as in the discredited advertising campaigns for Gloria milk in Peru).7 As
Kaplan and Ban Wang express it, the ‘cultural memory’ that could bear witness to the
traumatic experience of war is
subjected to relentless erasure by the transnational media driven by the logic of commodity
and consumption. The transnational media, with their soap operas, talk shows, disaster stories,
glamorous geography, and historical dramas are erasing traumatic memories of oppression,
violence, and injustice in both metropolitan centers and developing countries. (2008, 11)
The question then arises about the possibility of films to break through the ‘collective
blindness’ (Nieto Degregori 2004, 20) and force an audience to ‘face the horror’ (Salazar
Bondy [1964] 2002, 32) in order to remember, gain critical distance, come to terms with,
and in a sense help ‘work through’ (LaCapra 2001, 143) a traumatic past. As Joshua Hirsch
states, trauma is ‘utterly bound up with the realm of representation’ (2008, 98). For Cathy
Caruth, art is a privileged place for giving voice to trauma (LaCapra 2001, 190). Janet
Walker explores the ability of films to ‘externalize, publicize, and historicize traumatic
material that would otherwise remain at the level of internal, individual psychology’
(2005, xix). Walker defines ‘trauma cinema’ as a group of films that ‘deal with a world-
shattering event or events, whether public or personal’ through a ‘trauma aesthetic’ which
entails a ‘nonrealist mode characterized by disturbance and fragmentation of the films’
narrative and stylistic regimes’ as well as ‘innovative strategies for representing reality
obliquely, by looking to mental processes for inspiration, and by incorporating self-
reflexive devices to call attention to the friability of the scaffolding for audiovisual
historiography’ (19). Can a film transform a viewer into some kind of ‘witness’?8 Could a
film, as in the case of the enabling of a ‘true witness’ (Lincoln 2008, 30), allude to the
falsity of the narratives that justified violent actions, so that individuals in a society could
belatedly experience the traumatic effects of national crimes and thereby be enabled to
identify on some level with the victims? In subsequent sections I discuss three Peruvian
films that are unusual in that they seriously attempt to portray some of the traumatic
historical realities of Peru.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 165

Andean migrants in Gregorio (1984)

In 1982, the Grupo Chaski film collective was formed by: Peruvians Marı́a Barea,
Fernando Barreto, and Fernando Espinoza; Alejandro Legaspi, from Uruguay; and Stefan
Kaspar, from Switzerland. ‘Chaski’ is Quechua for ‘messenger’ or ‘courier’ (especially
during the Inca era), and ‘Grupo’ is Spanish for ‘group’ or ‘collective’. The name of the
group, in Quechua and Spanish, symbolizes its commitment to communicating important
messages to all members of the Peruvian nation. The Chaski collective stated its intention
of altering commercial cinematographic practices and making films with and for
marginalized communities. The members of the group were conscious of power dynamics
in Latin America, and intended to create a space of inclusion for all Peruvians in their films
(McClennen 2008, 1).
In their first feature film Gregorio (1984), created with the support of Velasco’s Film
Law, Chaski directors established a bridge between rural and urban cinema.9 Following
the tradition of the Cuzco Cinema Club that produced the first film in Quechua, Kukuli
[Dove] in 1960, Chaski dared to start their film Gregorio in a ‘dominated language’, the
Indigenous language Quechua (Mazzotti 2002, 37– 58). According to Marı́a Elena Garcı́a,
Quechua had survived as the language of the colonized peoples of the Andes, a condition
that placed it ‘unequivocally below Spanish’. Furthermore, Quechua was subordinate to
Spanish because Spanish had been the language of the new rulers and because Quechua
was an oral language (Garcı́a 2004, 349).
The film Gregorio begins in the Peruvian mountain ranges of the Andes, and shows
how a poor Quechua-speaking family is forced to migrate to the coastal desert city of
Lima. The words spoken in Quechua at the beginning of the film would be heard and
understood by the Andean-descendent population, while non-Quechua-speakers had to
trust the given translation and read the subtitles in Spanish.
At the beginning of the film, the idealized image of the majestic Andes as a peaceful
region of snowy mountain peaks is questioned by consecutive stylized cuts, which are
marked by sinister hammering sound effects. With each hammering strike, the beautiful
images of nature are replaced by different images of hard physical work, which repeatedly
allude to the historical exploitation of Indigenous communities in the Andes. The
condition of Indigenous landlessness of Gregorio’s family is then discussed in Quechua,
with Spanish subtitles. Gregorio’s father (Manuel Acosta Ojeda) is warned of the dangers
of abandoning the struggle for land and migrating to the city to end up as a ‘dish-washer’
and ‘return crying’. Nevertheless, in the film the lack of access to agricultural land pushes
the father to make the long truck journey to the capital, in search of better living
conditions. In the 1980s, two-thirds of the Lima population was composed of first- and
second-generation migrants. Even though the modern city promised progress and
citizenship to all Peruvians, migrants arriving in Lima were not well received. Urban
dwellers expected ‘civilization to arrive to the countryside’ and did not want ‘peasants to
come looking for it’ in the city (Soto et al. 1987, 8– 12).
When Gregorio (Marino León de la Torre) and his family arrive in Lima, the father
forces them to speak Spanish. The film shows how Quechua-speaking campesinos
(peasants) are pressured into abandoning their language, because if they speak Quechua in
the capital, as Gregorio’s father admonishes, ‘no one will understand you’. We hear
Gregorio’s thoughts as he muses (in Spanish) over the loss of his language: ‘Here in Lima
nobody speaks Quechua.’ As Eric Santner points out, the loss of the native language
‘stands in, metonymically, for the loss of a formerly intact rural culture as a whole’ (1990,
97). Gregorio first loses his Andean community and environment, then his language, and
166 I. Pagán-Teitelbaum

then his father, who dies soon after moving to Lima because of unsafe work conditions,
exploitation, and lack of proper housing and access to healthcare when he becomes sick.
This death forces his son Gregorio to work as a shoe-shine boy on the streets to help his
widowed mother support her three children.
Chaski’s film strives to denaturalize urban poverty from the perspective of Gregorio
and other working street boys in Lima, who are represented by non-actors and actually talk
about their own traumatic experiences of hunger, injustice, and violence in a testimonial
style before the camera. The giant close-ups of the boys’ delicate, sad faces serve to make
visible these unwanted street children, making it impossible to ignore them, forget them,
or ‘split them off from daily consciousness’ (Kaplan 2008, 46). Their testimonies break the
realist flow of the film in order to speak directly to the public. We hear about how the boys
miss their families, and learn about their efforts to survive on the harsh streets of Lima and
in the dangerous, uncomfortable desert slums. Gregorio complains that everything in his
straw shack gets constantly full of sand when the wind blows; the community he has
settled in with his family lacks all basic services; he cannot attend school; and he fears
being assaulted on his way home. The boys’ testimonies correct the myth of the city as a
place of progress for all.10 On the contrary, the film demonstrates that privileges are
reserved for certain groups and that, despite exploitative hard work, migrant families are
unable to escape misery. Given the boys’ difficult conditions, their occasional acts of theft
are diminished next to society’s greater crime of discarding migrant families and their
children, who are denied access to citizen rights. In a parallel manner, the film could also
suggest that the peasant rejection of the status quo originated from ‘real’ injustices, as
represented in the lives and testimonies of the young children.
Even though Gregorio was filmed in 1984, during the deadliest year of the war (by
which time more than 5500 Andean campesinos had been massacred),11 the massive rural
exodus to the capital caused by people fleeing from violence is not mentioned in the film
(CVR 2004, 25). In Gregorio, the war is only briefly and discreetly referenced by the
inclusion of graffiti in the background, as Gregorio walks alone, defeated by city street life
at the end of the film. The graffiti on the wall reads ‘Down with the state of emergency’
and is signed by ‘Red Homeland Revolutionary Movement’ (MR Patria Roja). Even
though the film is otherwise silent about the war, the included graffiti signals that the
Chaski filmmakers were aware of the war. While the Chaski collective does not make a
film directly about the violent war, it does strive to make visible the indirect violence of the
poverty and marginalization that was suffered by Andean farmers and migrants, and that
caused the uprising. The film’s focus on structural violence could be aimed at provoking a
reflection about existing causes of the peasant uprising, even after the efforts to establish
‘democracy’ in Peru. The film thus provides an alternative narrative that discredits the
official state discourse that accused insurgent peasants of being terrorists, evil
communists, or drug traffickers without recognizing their demands. The thirst for such
an alternative narrative might be one of the reasons for the great box-office success of the
Gregorio in Lima and in rural regions of Peru, where the film was shown by means of a
mobile cinema (Barrow 2005, 44 –57).12
At the same time as Chaski’s film makes visible the traumas of Andean migrant
families, some of their casting choices may erase the bodies of the migrants and distance
spectators from identifying with actual Andean people outside of the movie screen. As I
assert in my essay ‘Glamour in the Andes: The representation of indigenous migrant
women in Peruvian cinema’ (2008, 1), the choice of the ‘whiter’ Euro-descendent
Peruvian actress Vetzy Pérez-Palma for the role of Gregorio’s Indigenous mother, Juana,
denies Andean women self-representation and replicates dominant Eurocentric codes of
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 167

beauty. In a similar way, I would add that it is possible that the choice of a ‘cute’, healthy,
light-skinned, fine-featured young boy, Marino León de la Torre, as the film’s protagonist
might be an effort to approximate the leading role to exotic and Eurocentric notions of
beauty.13 As Rita Barnard states in her essay ‘Contesting beauty’, beauty is ‘always
political’ and ‘standards of beauty function as a peculiarly dense transfer point for
relations of power’ (2000, 345). Therefore, it is possible to question how the casting
choices relate to the ‘symbolic politics of visibility’ (356), especially when considering
that the choice of the beautiful Lima actress Pérez-Palma was approved by the Peruvians
and yet disapproved of by the non-Peruvians in the Chaski Group (Legaspi 2008, pers.
comm.; Kaspar 2008, pers. comms). The implications of racist casting choices are an
extremely sensitive issue in an ‘intensely racist’ society that denies its racism in official
and everyday discourse (Manrique Gálvez 2002, 60). Racism in Peru is unusually
complicated because in most cases the discriminating subject cannot easily separate him or
herself from the object of discrimination. As Manrique Gálvez points out, Peruvians with
evident indigenous phenotypical features who insult other Peruvians by using the epithet
‘Indian’ in a pejorative way can only do so by denying a part of their own – Indian – identity,
which means discriminating, hating, and spurning constitutive elements of their own self.
Racism, in this case, constitutes a superlative form of alienation, because it implies the
impossibility of recognizing one’s own face, as reflected by the mirror. (334)
In choosing individuals ‘whose deportment, appearance, and style’ embody the values and
goals of a nation or group (Stoeltje et al., qtd in Barnard 2000, 348), the filmmakers
confirm the dominant media requirement that the heroes or heroines on a screen must have
a certain light-coloured complexion. This covert ideology then continues to be transmitted
to spectators in a country that completely lacks positive representations of Indigenous or
Afro-descendent Peruvians in the mainstream media, and in which non-Euro-descendants
lack the power to control their own images (Pagán-Teitelbaum 2008, 5). As Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam maintain, when the images of marginalized people operate as part of a
‘continuum of prejudicial social policy and actual violence against disempowered people’
they can place the bodies of those people in danger (2004, 183 –4). In the context of a
country at war against its marginalized and insurgent Indigenous population, casting
choices in a film narrative about Indigenous migrants become even more relevant. As
LaCapra argues, ‘there is an inverse relation between the degree to which a topic is still
intensely invested with emotion and value, and the strictures placed on art’ (2001, 187 –8).
A film about Indigenous peasants made during a traumatic war in which thousands of
Indigenous peasants are being killed has an ethical responsibility with regards to the
representation of that community. The casting choices in Gregorio may therefore
‘formally counteract’ the film’s potential to explore a traumatic historical narrative, and
may – like Santner’s ‘narrative fetishism’ – consciously or unconsciously ‘expunge the
traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place’ (qtd in
Hirsch 2008, 106). This ‘casting fetishism’ that eliminates Indigenous or Indigenous-
looking faces from the leading roles of films that purport to be about the elimination of
Indigenous rights or lives is a pattern that is, unfortunately, repeated in the two other films
that I discuss in this article.

State crimes in The Lion’s Den (1988)

Four years later and still under the Film Law, the 1988 film The Lion’s Den [La boca del
lobo] by renowned Peruvian filmmaker Francisco Lombardi opens by giving a textual
account of ‘dirty war’ conditions during the period 1978– 1983. The opening titles on the
168 I. Pagán-Teitelbaum

screen mention 10,000 dead, and claim that the film is based on ‘real events’ that occurred
in 1983. Lombardi’s film makes reference to a massacre in an Andean village and to other
violent acts by armed state forces, such as rape, torture, violent interrogations in Spanish of
individuals who did not speak Spanish but only Quechua, and the theft and killing of
livestock. According to the Peruvian Human Rights Commission, on 13 November 1983,
Peruvian police violently invaded a family celebration in the Soccos district of Huamanga,
Ayacucho, detaining 36 individuals, including children and old people, raping the women,
and lining up everyone to be killed by machine-guns, as portrayed realistically in the film
(CVR 2002).14
The Lion’s Den was made in secrecy, out of fear of censorship by the government of
Alan Garcı́a (President of Peru, 1985 –1990 and 2006 –present).15 Garcı́a was perceived to
have an ‘ambiguous relationship’ with the military, according to Augusto Cabada, one of
the screenplay writers of Lombardi’s film (Valdez Morgan 2006, 2). After undertaking
research in Ayacucho in 1987, the filming took place in the town of Estique, in
the mountains of Tacna, far from conflict zones, for two months. To preserve secrecy, the
extras acting in the film, who were from the town of Estique, were not told the plot of
the film. The secrecy supposedly allowed some collaboration of the army and air forces,
which might not have participated had they been aware of the filmmakers’ intentions (2).
Together with Chaski’s Gregorio, Lombardi’s The Lion’s Den is one of the most
screened Peruvian films (Valdez Morgan 2006, 3). It screened to ‘packed audiences once it
was released’, and received media acclaim (Gama 2007, 2). Jorge Valdez Morgan remarks
that it is unusual and surprising that the film escaped censorship from President Garcı́a’s
government and the military, despite its première occurring during the war, and during the
period of extreme hyperinflation (2006, 2). I contend that Lombardi’s film was not
censored because it strategically represents military war crimes as the responsibility of
certain lawless and insane individuals such as the unruly Lieutenant Iván Roca (Gustavo
Bueno), and not as official state war policy.
In the film, Lt Roca demands the massacre of the Quechua-speaking campesinos
amidst a failed army career, bouts of alcoholism, and suicidal acts such as risking his life
playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun. Gama points out that ‘Even his own men refer
to him as crazy so that his behaviour is rationalized according to a psychological defect’
(2007, 2). This negative military image is neutralized by the positive image of the
idealistic soldier, the hero-protagonist Vitı́n Luna (played by the Euro-descendent middle-
class actor Toño Vega) who refuses to take part in the murder of innocent civilians and
finally deserts the army. According to Lombardi’s film, ‘there is a law, one not correctly
implemented. The military presence is not the problem, but rather, how the military
behaves towards the community’ (Gama 2007, 2). Even though the film claims to be about
the traumatic war in which thousands of Indigenous people were being killed, the focus is
actually diverted to a simplistic Hollywood-type binary opposition between good and evil,
which centres on two characters, Luna [moon] and Roca [rock], played by Euro-
descendent actors. As Jean Franco suggests, there is an ‘inevitable dislocation between
stated intent and narrative logic’ when films that intend to represent contemporary
problems of Indigenous societies give in to ‘the demands of narrative structures that
belong to the continuing saga of the white man’s search for identity’ (1999, 183).
Despite taking place in the supposed Andean community of Chuspi, The Lion’s Den
manages to make the Indigenous community anonymous. Andean people who had
generally been excluded from Peru’s mainstream cinematic tradition are again ‘bound
by conditions in which intellectual life continues to serve urban cultured elites and set
the rules by which the Andean subject can be represented on screen’ (Gama 2007, 2).
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 169

In the film, the Andean community of Chuspi is viewed as exotic, foreign, and
mysteriously ‘quiet’, from the point of view of the ‘good’ soldier Luna, who is from Lima,
and with whom spectators are encouraged to empathize. Valdez Morgan comments that
the Andean peasant community in The Lion’s Den is almost as absent as Shining Path, not
for lack of knowledge, but because the film takes on the perspective of the state armed
forces: ‘In this way, Quechua-speakers are presented as strange, quiet, distrustful, non-
cooperative, and difficult to understand’ (2006, 4). The Andean region is portrayed as
strange foreign territory, and Andean characters are presented as a collective, with rarely
any individual voices or stories. Lombardi’s film never portrays any conversations
amongst Chuspi inhabitants, for example. Spectators are not given access to the campesino
point of view with regards to the war, the invasive state military presence, or the actions
attributed to Shining Path. Indigenous civilians in the film usually speak briefly (and in
Spanish), and only when they are forced to interact with members of the armed forces.
Moreover, the film mystifies the state’s political opponents by associating Shining
Path’s actions with irrational and supernatural forces. In a 2004 interview, Lombardi states
that he had the sensation that the Shining Path struggle was seen from the cities as
something ‘foreign’ that was happening ‘far away’ (qtd in Valdez Morgan 2006, 2). In his
film, militants are never seen or even named, leaving only traces of spectacular violence –
dead bodies with red painted signs on them, red flags, and red graffiti – as proof of their
haunting invisible presence. As historian Steve Stern has observed, the subject of Shining
Path is often framed as an exotic and surprising ‘enigma’, as ‘a freakish evil force outside
the main contours of Peruvian social and political history – more an invention of evil
masterminds and an expression, perhaps, of the peculiarity of a particular regional milieu
than a logical culmination or by product of Peruvian history’ (1998, 1 –2). The soldiers
from Lima are the only characters developed with depth, individuality, and a certain
degree of complexity. The film emphasizes the feelings of intense fear and disgust felt by
the soldiers as they perceive the traces of violence left behind by the invisible militants.
Soldiers feel constantly threatened by an impalpable danger that could attack invisibly at
any given moment. The violent Shining Path acts are not contextualized and seem to have
occurred for no reason: they are inconceivable and impossible to understand. The soldiers’
violence, on the other hand, is ‘conceivable’ under the evident conditions of danger, fear,
and stress. All of the soldiers’ actions are contextualized so that the causes, if not
acceptable, at least become understandable. Even though the film may intend to show and
criticize the excessively violent conditions of the state’s so-called dirty war, it consciously
or unconsciously reproduces the oppressive state narrative in which Andean people appear
as a source – and not as victims – of violence (Giroux 2002, 197). Since the film does not
analyse the causes of the war, it thereby continues to make invisible the problems of
exclusion of the majority of Peruvians from national politics and citizenship. As Peruvian
film critic Ricardo Bedoya has pointed out, The Lion’s Den fails to centrally address the
massacre. By focusing on the emotional and psychological turmoil of Luna and Lt Roca,
Lombardi manages to depoliticize the film and present a variation of the adventure
narrative, a group of paranoid soldiers confronting an invisible enemy in an alien
environment (Bedoya, qtd in Gama 2007, 2).
In terms of the politics of visibility and the lead casting choices, a ‘whiter’ actor, Toño
Vega, was unrealistically chosen to represent the ‘good’ soldier Luna, who resists
participation in corrupt and violent state actions, challenges Lt Roca, and risks his career in
order to be loyal to his principles. José Tejada, an actor with more Andean features, was
chosen to be the ‘bad’ soldier Gallardo, who rapes a local Indigenous shopkeeper and lies
about a supposed attack by villagers who were actually having a wedding celebration;
170 I. Pagán-Teitelbaum

Gallardo’s lie ultimately leads to the massacre and disappearance of all the villagers. Just
as in Gregorio where the heroic Indigenous mother is played by a ‘whiter’ actress, in The
Lion’s Den heroic conduct is related to ethnic whiteness. Meanwhile, non-European
descendants in Lombardi’s film appear connected to immoral and irrational violence (as in
the actions alluding to Shining Path) or to the impotent victims of the war. To paraphrase
Adam Lowenstein (2008, 147), the overwhelming facts of the destructive state response to
the war, the ‘controversial political issues of war responsibility’, the reality of victim
discrimination and censorship by the Peruvian authorities demand ‘that representation
answer to the traumatic significance of the event’. In limiting the remembering of the
traumatic massacre to the point of view of state forces, Lombardi’s film fails to dismantle
the official state narrative that justifies the genocide of Indigenous people during the war.
It is unclear whether the film would relay the ‘burden of witnessing genocide’ to the
public, lending a degree of awareness and empathy to the audience (Hirsch, qtd in Walker
2005, 132). In spite of constituting an effort to reconstruct catastrophic memory,
The Lion’s Den would not qualify as trauma cinema (as defined by Walker) because of
its realist mode of representation, its conventional narrative structure, and its lack of
self-reflexivity.

The erased veteran in Days of Santiago (2004)

The 2004 film Days of Santiago (Dı́as de Santiago in Spanish) by emerging filmmaker
Josué Méndez is an unusual film, created immediately after the so-called ‘years of
violence’ (Bedoya, in Making of 2005). Méndez’s first feature film considers how
Peruvian war veterans who fought in the 1995 Peru – Ecuador border conflict suffer post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For LaCapra, trauma indicates ‘a shattering break or
cesura in experience which has belated effects’ (2001, 186). Caruth states that PTSD is
generally described as a delayed response to ‘an overwhelming event or events’ which
may or may not traumatize everyone in the same way: the disorder consists in the
‘structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at
the time, but only belatedly’ (1995a, 4). Walker cites the diagnostic criteria for PTSD (as
defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV) according
to which ‘traumatic events are “persistently experienced” as “recurrent and intrusive
distressing recollections of the event” including dreams, flashback episodes, hallucina-
tions, illusions, and the “feeling of detachment or estrangement from others”’ (2008, 128).
As Hirsch indicates, in post-traumatic memory, linear chronology collapses (as opposed to
narrative memory) and time becomes ‘fragmented and uncontrollable. The past becomes
either too remote or too immediate. It remains inaccessibly in the past (amnesia), or
presents itself uninvited, seizing consciousness (hypermnesia)’ (Hirsch 2008, 103).
In Days of Santiago, the protagonist Santiago is constantly perturbed by the lasting
effects of the war. In a remarkable displacement, Méndez substitutes the most recent and
traumatic Peruvian conflict (the two-decade internal war in which the state confronted
Shining Path and other political groups) with a brief border conflict known in Peru as the
Cenepa conflict, which lasted a couple of months in 1995, in the Cenepa River region of
the Amazonian Peru – Ecuador border. Even though Santiago is supposed to have fought in
the Cenepa conflict, the Peruvian audience would recognize that Santiago actually
represents a veteran who fought in the internal war because he mentions the fear of fighting
against the ‘terrucos’. ‘Terruco’ is a derogatory term used in the military to refer to
anyone deemed to be associated with Shining Path, that derives from the word ‘terrorist’,
but also sounds like ‘tierra’ or land in Spanish, with the added negative suffix ‘-uco’.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 171

The displacement could be seen as a cultural sign of a traumatized nation that has still not
come to terms with its past, or as a strategy to avoid censorship by the powerful military
that prefers not to officially acknowledge its violent participation in the internal war.
Days of Santiago carefully examines the lack of opportunities for soldiers’ reinsertion
into a ‘peaceful’ society, and denounces the violence of the invisibility and anonymity
with which war heroes (who supposedly fought for their homeland) return to civil society
in Peru. When Santiago returns to Lima, the difficulties of returning to civilian life reveal
that even though he risked his life for the safety and well-being of his nation, his nation
does not care about him. Santiago cannot find employment, his pension is insufficient to
sustain his family, he cannot obtain credit to buy a refrigerator even though he proudly
shows his military documents to prove that he is a veteran with a pension, and he does not
have access to educational benefits. In a similar situation, some of Santiago’s unemployed
veteran colleagues get caught trying to rob a bank, while a veteran friend who is disabled
hangs himself. Santiago grows increasingly unstable, sleeping in full military gear,
performing ritualistic military practices on the beach, and violently overreacting to human
proximity. Kai Erikson explains that
Traumatized people often scan the surrounding world anxiously for signs of danger, breaking
into explosive rages and reacting with a start to ordinary sights and sounds, but at the same
time, all that nervous activity takes place against a numbed gray background of depression,
feelings of helplessness, and a general closing off of the spirit, as the mind tries to insulate
itself from further harm. Above all, trauma involves a continual reliving of some wounding
experience in daydreams and nightmares, flashbacks and hallucinations, and in compulsive
seeking out of similar circumstances. (1995, 184)
In the film, Santiago constantly scans the streets of Lima for danger. He prepares safety
strategies and never uses the same route twice, even when he starts working part-time as a
taxi driver. He explodes in rage when he perceives people to be acting ‘wrongly’. These
rages are sometimes expressed through actual fights with his family, but also through
‘imaginary’ scenes that Santiago acts out realistically, before it is revealed to the public
that he is actually immobilized by his rage, and that everything seen on the screen
represents images that occurred only in Santiago’s mind. This entrance into Santiago’s
psyche is magnified by the contrasting use of black and white effects within the colour
film. The ‘numbed gray background’ of depression and helplessness is exteriorized as a
disturbance in the colours that Santiago (and the film viewers) can see. In this way the film
makes visible some of the PTSD symptoms suffered by veterans.
The film focuses on what LaCapra calls ‘the problem of perpetrator trauma’ (2001,
120). As in the context of the Vietnam veterans, the Peruvian war circumstances enabled
soldiers
to perform actions that would otherwise be abhorrent to them. The result is a ‘psychic
numbing’ that acts as a delay mechanism, displacing the traumatic effects of war crimes and
allowing soldiers to continue performing apparently without psychic damage. It is only once
these veterans return to ‘normal’ society and are confronted with the ‘traditional world of
justice’ that they belatedly recognize the horror of what they have done and thus undergo
traumatic responses. For these men, the restoration of ‘normality’ constitutes a trauma, since it
reveals the hollowness of the narratives that have sustained them thus far. (Lincoln 2008, 29)
Santiago’s return to society serves to dismantle narratives kept alive during the war to
justify violence. Peru does not seem to have become a safer or better place for Santiago
after sacrificing his youth fighting against ‘terrorism’ in the compulsory military. Upon his
return to Lima, Santiago’s veteran status is meaningless and nobody seems to be aware of
the recent war. Santiago feels estranged when, instead of being received as a hero, he joins
172 I. Pagán-Teitelbaum

the ranks of millions of oppressed Peruvians (many of whom had tried to fight for social
change, which he possibly contributed to suppressing).
Méndez based Days of Santiago on extensive interviews with a real veteran who was a
friend of the family, named only as ‘Santiago’. The fiction film was based on the
experiences of the veteran, who worked closely with the director, explaining his
psychology and how he would have reacted to events, as well as helping to give military
training to the actors. As portrayed in the Making of included in the DVD Days of
Santiago, the real-life veteran is a thin, short, limping young man with Andean features.
Méndez underlines that during the filmmaking, Santiago acted out many of the veteran
film scenes with great realism and enthusiasm. However – and here we return to the
politics of visibility – the director selected a Euro-descendent middle-class actor from
Lima, Pietro Sibille, to represent the veteran in the film. Sibille trained for the leading role
in a gym. He acquired the physical fortitude of a great Hollywood-style soldier, in contrast
with the actual veteran’s smaller, less able body. This portrayal denies the reality of the
loss of physical (not only mental) well-being in veterans extracted (often by force) from
poor sectors of the Peruvian population. Any reference to Santiago’s hurt body is erased in
the film. The contrast between Sibille’s strong able body and the actual Santiago’s limping
body is evident in the Making of documentary, when the actor and the veteran walk side by
side on the beach. Days of Santiago includes an Andean-descendent veteran in the
filmmaking process, yet excludes images of anyone resembling him or his community
from the film. During the film, the public is encouraged to identify with the strong ‘whiter’
soldier’s struggles. But because Andean faces and bodies are missing from the film, the
empathy generated towards the plight of the returned veteran in the film will not easily
transfer into empathy towards darker-skinned, lower-class Andean veterans encountered
in Lima.

Conclusion
A handful of Peruvian films aim to critically depict the traumas of violence and racism
towards lower-class Andean descendants in Peru, who continue to be treated as foreign or
even threatening to the nation, in spite of constituting a majority that has historically done
most of the work to enrich, feed, and construct the country. Most of these films are unable
to completely escape the violent patterns of representation of Peruvian cinema. By erasing
the persons and bodies of the poor, and re-creating their image using richer and ‘whiter’
actors, the films I analyse tend to contradict their stated intent, purposefully or not. The
ethical and ethnic repercussions of a ‘casting fetishism’ that eliminates Indigenous-
looking faces from the screen in films that are supposedly about historical Indigenous
trauma are serious, especially considering that for almost five centuries the official
discourse has excluded this population while justifying their exploitation or annihilation.
This violence has taken place in the name of progress and prosperity reserved for a non-
Indigenous minority that is still dominant. The fact that the filmmakers, Chaski Group,
Lombardi, and Méndez, belong to the non-Indigenous minority gives them power to
portray historical Peruvian traumas, and also an artistic responsibility that is contingent on
the traumatic memories of both victims and perpetrators. If discourses have contributed to
the production of national traumas, films can contribute culturally to the creation of new
discourses that assist in working through traumas that have been continually denied or
erased. Films can help restore healing processes in society, and perhaps ‘open up a space
for transformation of the viewer’, by promoting ‘inter-cultural compassion and
understanding’ (Kaplan and Wang 2008, 10). In order to promote inter-cultural empathy,
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 173

though, filmmakers need to surpass a limited point of view and be aware that their casting
choices may be influenced by their ethnic and class prejudices. Otherwise, as in the films I
examine, their filmic work will contribute to the erasure of the traumatic memories of the
Indigenous groups that have been the main sufferers of trauma in Peru.

Acknowledgements
Initial research and travel to the “Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective
Suffering International Conference” at Perth, Western Australia (2 – 4 December 2008) was funded
by a Uellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania (2007– 2009).

Notes
1. Between 1940 and 1980, Peru’s urban population grew from 2.4 million (35% of the population)
to 11.6 million: 65% of the Peruvian population became urban (Soto et al. 1987, 7 – 8).
2. I use the term ‘whiter’ instead of ‘white’ to allude to the complex ethnic hierarchies in Peru, in
which lighter-skinned Peruvians of Euro-descendent or mixed Euro, Andean and/or Afro-
descendent heritage are considered ‘white’ or ‘whiter’ than others, and therefore ‘racially’
superior (even though these Peruvians might not be considered ‘white’ in a European context).
3. According to Francisca da Gama, ‘Sendero was based on Maoist ideology and a reclaiming of
Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. By appropriating the work of Mariátegui, Sendero
could emphasize its localized application of Maoism and create its own “indigenous” Marxism.
It launched its People’s War in 1980 just when organized international communism was in
retreat.’ The exclusion of the Indigenous population in Peru ‘allowed Sendero to operate
amongst the rural indigenous peasantry’ (Gama 2007, 1).
4. All translations from Spanish are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
5. Even though racism is not ‘legal’, the minimum height and ‘physical presence’ required to enter
the air force and the navy exclude Indigenous or mixed-descent Peruvians from those forces,
permitting their participation only in the lower ranks of the army (Manrique Gálvez 2002, 341).
Peruvian military service was compulsory since the 1823 Constitution and until 2000.
Compulsory military service and the illegal leva or forced recruitment was applied only to
lower-class and rural communities (Abad 1999, 38).
6. The National Police Force of Peru alludes to its ‘involvement in socio-economic problems
heightened by the phenomenon of narco-terrorism and its chilling and bloody sequels’; it also
asserts that in the 1980s and 1990s the police confronted ‘serious alterations to the Internal
Order’ and that the police contributed to ‘the defeat of terrorist organizations: MRTA, Shining
Path, as well as dismantling international drug trafficking organizations’ (Policı́a Nacional del
Perú 2009).
7. Gloria [Glory] evaporated milk publicity has won anti-prizes in Peru for its racist advertising
schemes that exhibit rich white families and urge Peruvian children to grow taller by drinking
the canned milk (Garcı́a 2005; Flores 2008). This expensive product is typically marketed and
sold to lower-class families, which mix the concentrated drink with boiled water. For more
information on the history of the Gloria milk industry in Peru, see the documentary Peru:
Neither Milk nor Glory directed by Grupo Chaski (1986). Most Peruvians (70 –90%) are lactose
intolerant (Maurer 2007).
8. See Dori Laub (1995) on the three levels of witnessing (witness of an experience, witness of a
testimony, and witness of the process of witnessing) (61).
9. In 1972, the Velasco regime enacted the Law for the Promotion of the Film Industry in order to
promote an ‘authentic national cinema’ that would reflect the Peruvian reality and transmit a
revolutionary message (Bedoya 1992, 188– 9). At the end of the 1970s, films centred first on the
problems of peasants in rural Peru, and then on urban problems because most professional
filmmakers were in and of the capital city (Lombardi 1989, 61; Huayhuaca 1989, 82). Velasco’s
Film Law gave a boost to Peru’s film industry by encouraging local productions, requiring
compulsory screening of Peruvian cinema, and offering tax incentives for local producers.
President Alberto Fujimori (1990 – 2000, currently in prison for human rights violations and
corruption) eliminated the Film Law in 1992 together with other state cultural policies.
‘Systematically adopting neo-liberal economic and social policies, Fujimori’s government saw
174 I. Pagán-Teitelbaum

culture in general, and film in particular, as one more commodity that needed to compete within
local and global market forces without state participation’ (Martı́nez 2008, 11).
10. See Sebastián Salazar, Lima la horrible [Lima the horrible] (1964), for a deconstruction of the
myth of Lima as a modern city with democratic opportunities.
11. Five thousand five hundred Peruvian campesinos were killed between 1983 and 1984 (Manrique
Gálvez 2002, 20).
12. The film’s distribution under the Film Law allowed a prolonged exhibition in Peruvian theatres
with artificially low ticket prices, which allowed access to a great part of the Peruvian population
(Barrow 2005, 44 – 57).
13. Chaski director Fernando Espinoza has explained that in choosing an actor for the role of
Gregorio, the film collective searched for ‘a boy who had an experience of no more that one or
two years in the capital, so that he was still tied to his own culture, who was bilingual, and who
could incorporate his own migrant experience in the film process’ (1989, 230).
14. Other human rights violations of this period include: the Accomarca massacre (August 1985),
where 47 peasants were gunned to death by the Peruvian armed forces; the Cayara massacre
(May 1988) in which 30 were killed and dozens disappeared; and the summary execution of
more than 200 inmates and political prisoners during prison riots in Lurigancho, San Juan
Bautista (El Frontón) and Santa Bárbara in 1986 (‘Alan Garcı́a’ 2008).
15. President Alan Garcı́a’s first term in office (1985 – 1990) was marked by hyperinflation of
2,000,000% that profoundly destabilized the Peruvian economy; poverty increased by 13% (to
55%); and an estimated 1600 forced disappearances took place (‘Alan Garcı́a’ 2008). Garcı́a’s
current presidency has a 70% disapproval rating (Bamrud 2008).

Notes on contributor
Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum, from Puerto Rico, currently teaches courses on global citizenship and film
at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. During a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007– 2009) she
conducted research on violence in Caribbean literature and film, in the Department of Romance
Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Her PhD dissertation, entitled ‘The disposable city:
The hidden side of urban violence in narrative and film of two Latin American cities’ (Harvard
University, 2006), analyses how literary and filmic texts from Brazil and Peru represent violence,
exclusion, and citizenship.

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