Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork spanning almost a decade, Richard Kernaghan's book tells the story of the aftermath of the cocaine boom in the Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru. The objective is to consider the ways in which violent acts are turned into narratives and how these stories have the power to separate out historical eras and forge new legal orders.
In the mid-1970s the Upper Huallaga Valley became the centre of the Peruvian cocaine trade. Huge numbers of dispossessed people from all over the country migrated to the region to try their luck in the tropical colonisation zone. The settlers found jobs growing coca leaf and processing cocaine paste, and in activities related to the service of the burgeoning drug economy. Kernaghan's informants recount fantastic tales of the boom years when ‘money was easy to come by’ and the Huallaga was ‘the place to go’. The Shining Path, a Maoist splinter group of the Peruvian Communist Party, began its armed insurrection in 1980. Attracted by the cocaine economy, it was not long before the guerrillas descended on the Huallaga Valley. Initially the guerrillas appealed to both the drug traffickers and the peasants because this provided them with protection from the militarised police force, which was carrying out counter-narcotics and crop eradication operations in the region. The Shining Path took control of the area and established a parallel state apparatus, exacting taxes from the local population, imparting justice and imposing its puritanical rule through extreme violence and intimidation tactics. The Peruvian state's response to the threat of the Shining Path was to send in the armed forces. According to Kernaghan, the soldiers who were responsible for imposing state authority colluded with the drug traffickers and were often as brutally violent as their opponents. In the early 1990s the price of coca began to fall as drug traffickers shifted their production to safer areas such as the departments of Madre de Dios and Apurimac. Then, in 1992, Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Today the Shining Path is a fragmented shadow of its former self.
It is in this context of the ‘post-boom’ that Kernaghan found himself in the Huallaga Valley carrying out fieldwork in the mid-1990s. He describes a sluggish and forsaken place; rusting signs for long-closed-down nightclubs, derelict concrete buildings and fading Shining Path graffiti acted as reminders of the area's previous dynamism. Kernaghan's informants widely perceived themselves to be on a threshold, tottering somewhere between the past era of excess and a future of radically reduced possibilities. This ‘hard crease’ in time, which divides the two epochs, is also marked by two legal regimes, the former belonging to the Shining Path and the latter to the Peruvian state. This ‘crease’ is not complete, however; while the reckless abandon and good times might have passed, some things have stayed the same. At night along the main highway and across the river in the rural expanse, the region remains a ‘no man's land’ controlled by a shifting patchwork of guerrilla groups, drug traffickers and bandits.
Kernaghan's task is to capture the memories of the boom, which he tells us weigh heavily upon the residents of the Huallaga Valley. To do this he looks at how the past is narrated through newspaper clippings, oral testimony, radio programmes and civic events. The stories that are told are not direct representations of what happened; rather, Kernaghan explains that historical memory is formed collaboratively as people try to impose a retroactive sense of order onto events. Thus the narratives tell Kernaghan as much about the contemporary political and social milieu as about what actually transpired, and he stitches these stories together into a dense interlocking collage of events spanning two decades.
Central to Kernaghan's analysis is the way in which violent acts shape an emerging ‘historical sense’. His focus on violence stems from the fact that during the boom years the Huallaga Valley was essentially lawless, and was marked by enduring conflict between the guerrillas, the military and groups competing for control of the drug trade. Each group was intent on imposing its own brand of order onto the tropical landscape. This was done through the strategic deployment of lethal force, which Kernaghan contends has a lawmaking potential. The book is littered with vignettes about bodies chopped up with chainsaws and put in black nylon sacks, people bound and tossed from helicopters, and bodies dumped on the highway. Inevitably these violent episodes become the basis for future stories. What Kernaghan is interested in is the way that such events leave their mark on the form and content of the stories and thus shape perceptions of political time and space.
What is intriguing about this book is that despite the violence it describes, the author is careful not to take sides. Rather, Kernaghan provides a sympathetic account of almost all involved. There is a notable absence of the voices of coca growers and members of the Shining Path, but of course, access to these people would have been very difficult at the time that Kernaghan conducted his research. The Huallaga valley remains an unstable area and as a result has been neglected by anthropologists. Kernaghan's book therefore represents an important contribution to the regional literature.
Kernaghan is not afraid to take the ethnography seriously. In this highly personalised, reflexive work, the reader is given the opportunity to see the events as the fieldworker experienced them. What is more, Kernaghan allows his informants to speak directly to the reader. Overall the book provides an engaging and vivid account of the boom years and the subsequent depressed social and economic landscape. The book will be of great use to those scholars seeking to understand the background to the emerging politicised coca growers' movement in Peru. It will also be of interest to students of the Shining Path and the modern Peruvian state.
