From the early 1980s, the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980–2000) nurtured a subdisciplinary field that became known unofficially as senderología. The horror of political violence led early senderólogos to debate and discuss the historical origins and roots of violence as discourse and practice. Steve Stern's compilation on Sendero Luminoso, Shining and Other Paths, brought together these early perspectives and produced a seminal volume that led to a wave of new studies. More recent scholarship – particularly Jaymie Heilman's Before the Shining Path and Miguel La Serna's The Corner of the Living – have successfully embedded Sendero and the civil conflagration in a long history of political radicalism and rural unrest, in many ways building upon the final report released by the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación in 2003. Lately, the publication of Lurgio Gavilán's Memorias de un soldado desconocido and José Carlos Agüero's Los rendidos has expanded and renewed the ‘post-conflict’ literature, re-centring the conversation on the multi-layered human textures of a politically and socially liminal period. In exploring the conflict at a human scale, this literature not only provides much-needed nuances and complexities but also sheds light upon the explanatory potential of personal(ised) accounts in coming to terms with the endurance of conflict dynamics. Now Peru is Mine consolidates the ‘testimonial biography’ (p. 1) as a dominant genre in the history and anthropology of human conflict.
Jaymie Patricia Heilman joins Ayacucho campesino Manuel Llamojha Mitma in narrating his personal trajectory as a pivotal activist, grassroots leader and social organiser throughout decades of mobilisation, revolution and counterrevolution in the Peruvian Andes. As an essential figure in the politics of the Peruvian campesinado, Llamojha's reputation as senderista had been cemented in a number of political and academic accounts, including Gustavo Gorriti's seminal Sendero and Heilman's Before the Shining Path. Now Peru is Mine thus seemingly constitutes an act of intellectual and academic vindication of the figure of Llamojha and of the larger role of rural grassroots leaders in an age of socio-political turmoil. Llamojha's voice lies embedded within Heilman's contextualising prose, together providing a powerful account of the rural struggles of the twentieth century.
The intersections and juxtapositions of Llamojha's life events and the political chronology of Peru stand out among Now Peru is Mine’s manifold achievements. Through its six chapters, Llamojha's personal course helps us navigate a century of rural history from the bottom up. From the 1920s, the Peruvian state projected and promoted renewed ideals about rural populations, encouraging and managing the formation of comunidades and otherwise generating a deeply structured legal discourse that framed the relationship with indios. Llamojha's rise as a seminal figure of the village of Concepción, Ayacucho, rested on the acquisition of various forms of ‘literacy’ – not only linguistic but also social and political. Paralleling the life of Lurgio Gavilán, Llamojha also explored priesthood and the military as realms of individual and social empowerment. After facing imprisonment due to alleged revolutionary affiliations, Llamojha turned into the quintessential example of an actor in a hidden transcript and an expert in the arts of resistance, becoming a butler in Lima while learning about the ins and outs of hacienda politics as discussed within the intimate sphere of an aristocratic family.
Having acquired different forms of knowledge, Llamojha became a leading local figure in the defence of comunidades and hacienda peons during years of increasing mobilisation and state repression (1948–52). Armed with nothing but a typewriter, perhaps the most underrated ‘weapon’ in the history of rural struggle, Llamojha became the ultimate subversive as he wrote and filed thousands of grievances, claims and other forms of requests in favour of comuneros, skilfully engaging and winning a number of legal battles. This legal form of ‘subversion’ led a Cold War-influenced state to label and prosecute him as a ‘communist’, which brought him back to jail. Escaping imprisonment and remaining as a local activist consumed most of his life while national and local expressions of authoritarian rule sought to prevent further enfranchisements of comunidades.
Llamojha's life also sheds light upon an age of rural reformism. From the early 1960s, agrarian reform became established as the social, economic and political horizon for the future of Latin American nation-states. More importantly, agrarian reform as an ideal transcended the local boundaries of villages and even the national frontiers of each individual country, being discussed on hemispheric if not global terms. Consequently, Llamojha's trajectory also acquired an equally transnational dimension. Reflecting the larger dynamics of the ‘global sixties’, Llamojha galvanised his local struggles by frequenting the epicentres of global unrest: China, Cuba and the Soviet Union. An international reputation resulted in Llamojha's leading the Confederación Campesina del Perú (Peruvian Countryside Confederation, CCP) in the midst of a seemingly triumphant political revival for rural comunidades. However, agrarian reform as promoted by a military regime (1968–80) brought unexpected twists. Militarily enforced organisation of rural structures and production systems into cooperatives, Llamojha realised, differed greatly from the historical claims advanced by grassroots rural politics. The remaking of Peruvian campesinos under the 1969 reform entailed an unforeseeable level of state intervention that led them to disenfranchisement, divisionism and dissent.
The final attack upon Llamojha's political persona came in the form of a manifold and multi-layered experience of political violence. As the distance between state and comunidades increased yet further, local political leadership proved unable to rebuild campesino unity. Sendero Luminoso masterfully profited from socio-political unrest and campesino divisionism, providing a discourse equally salving and revolutionary for challenging overwhelming militarised state power. The dynamics of the internal armed conflict (1980–2000) took a personal toll on Manuel Llamojha, claiming the life of his youngest son Herbert, who became one among thousands of desaparecidos in the Latin American revolutionary and counterrevolutionary wars. Politically and socially marginalised, and submerged in family tragedy, Llamojha sought the shelter of anonymity in Lima, where he attempted to make a living while still being pursued in the aftermath of the conflict. At the dawn of neoliberal Peru, Llamojha incarnated the social suffering of hundreds of thousands of sierra refugees, displaced by political violence in the countryside: a dramatic and still unexplored episode in recent Peruvian history.
Regrettably, Manuel Llamojha did not live to witness the impact of his life's historical account. As Heilman asserts in the afterword, Llamojha embodied a century of state-formation, nation building, revolution, counterrevolution and the aftermath of civil warfare in Latin America. He did not remain immune to the experience of major tragedies on a personal level, and directly suffered the consequences of every struggle he led. With most of his documentary possessions seized and destroyed, aging posed further challenges to the endurance of his legacy. This testimonial biography helps preserve a token of the various exceptional lives obliterated by the perils of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes. Manuel Llamojha Mitma's prominent role in Peruvian history seems unparalleled. As Andrés Luna Vargas – leader of a rival faction inside the CCP – asserted, Llamojha destroyed and demolished every last hacienda (p. 188) in ways that no agrarian reform ever did.
Now Peru is Mine is a major academic, intellectual and editorial success. Every specialist and student of Latin America, the Andes and Peru will enjoy this book. This is an exemplary study of how a single life illustrates the complexities of a century. Many more lives like Llamojha's are still waiting to be revealed.
