From Cholo to Terrorist: Ethnicity as illness in Peruvian society

From Cholo to Terrorist 1 From Cholo to Terrorist: Ethnicity as Illness in Peruvian Society. By Carlos Roberto Ruano Student Papers in the Social Organization of Knowledge Doctoral Seminar. Winter Session, 1996 Instructor: Dr. Dorothy Smith. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto C.R.Ruano pg. 2 1993 had been one of the worst years in the 13 year‐old civil war in Peru. The level of military confrontation between the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path rebels and the government was at its peak. In the capital city of Lima, with some eight million inhabitants, practically no day went by without a series of large explosions going off throughout the city. People ran for cover at the slightest sign of suspicious movement in the streets. As many areas of the city were left without power due to rebel sabotage, everything looked quite chaotic. Being a port city surrounded by one of the driest coastal deserts in the world, Lima's already chronic water shortages became catastrophic. The economic plan set in place by President Fujimori's government in 1990 wrought untold devastation as the drive to control hyperinflation overtook even the most elemental socioeconomic considerations. Tens of thousands of public servants were laid off without compensation of any sort as privatization became one of two central policies of the government, the other one being counterinsurgency. Suddenly, the country found itself with a standard of living from the 1950's and a population of the 1990's. These conditions facilitated the virtual takeover of large segments of industry and commerce by drug kingpins and old‐money oligarchs who behaved as if the country was a giant plantation where their ruling power was never questioned. Not as critical but equally sad was to realize that the remarkably dangerous driving practices of Limeños were made even worse by the lack of traffic lights or policing of any sort. Certainly, many of these deficiencies were there long before the civil war started and will remain there long after the last shots are fired. From Cholo to Terrorist 3 At the time of my arrival in Lima, however, the general climate was one of resigned tension as most people had to find mechanisms to cope with increasing levels of armed violence. Standard North American journalistic practices call for the identification of relevant issues and the parties in dispute around them. Demons and demonizers are by no means de rigueur though they can certainly be useful when it comes to the framing of a story or news item. As foreign journalists, my colleagues and I were quickly introduced to the human face of the war. Not surprisingly, these human faces lost all their relevance under certain crucial circumstances and through specific practices. These lines are intended to show one of those instances where I had the opportunity to observe and ‐to a certain extent‐ participate in the transformation of people whose lives had been destroyed by the war into mentally ill terrorists. The Specimen It was fairly mild on that morning of October, as the convoy of cars and vans without windows that carried journalists, diplomats and others cut through a traffic jam on its way to the Ministry of the Interior. Everyone knew that, after the capture of several key members of Shining Path ‐including its principal leader‐, we would be shown some of the bounty captured by the Intelligence Services. My thoughts wandered as the driver of our van tried ‐unsuccessfully‐ to negotiate yet another enormous pothole on the street. Will they show us the weapons they captured? Or maybe a press conference with Shining Path's C.R.Ruano pg. 4 captured leaders? Inside the grey, 15 stories building and past two gigantic steel doors that guard its main entrance, a surprise was waiting to happen. After being led through a long, lightless corridor we arrived at a large auditorium with some 500 seats. Some self‐congratulatory statements followed which were made by several clearly plainclothes policemen; all of them invariably wore the same type of suit and very dark sunglasses. The main event started. A group of about twenty‐five people all wearing the old, zebra‐like stripped prison uniform was presented to us. Many of them cringed before the glare of TV lights, as this was probably the first time in their lives that they had been confronted by dozens of cameras. Most of them were between 15 and 40 years old. Some of them cried. They were clearly ashamed of being there. I calculated that there were almost as many men as women in the group. I told myself that this was such a close match to the demographics of Lima's poorest sections that it looked almost like a random sample for some sort of study. This flashing reflection was interrupted by the loud voices of a couple of people in the group as they shouted in support of their organization. A voice read out loud the names of members of the group describing them as "TERRORRISTAS CAPTURADOS' [captured terrorists]. In some instances, we were told the rank of the individual her/his nom de guerre, some events in which she/he had participated and the time and place of capture. In most cases, however, all we heard was a name. Most people in the auditorium were astonished at the sheer numbers of captured rebels. Literally hundreds of people paraded before the audience during some three hours non‐stop zebra‐ dressed prisoner spectacle. From Cholo to Terrorist 5 Once the showing of prisoners was over, we were allowed to speak with some of the captured individuals. I talked to three or four individuals, all of whom spoke fluent Spanish and had Mestizo [mixed blood] features. The majority of those captured, however, did seem to be of Native South American ancestry, spoke Spanish with difficulty and were very shy before cameras or microphones. I tried to approach some of them. They were relieved that I was not trying to stick a microphone or camera up their noses. Just as we were starting to make some courteous comments to one another, a suit and dark sunglasses type pushed them away toward other groups of prisoners. They were quickly led away from the auditorium. I reconstruct the dialogue between the sunglasses‐masked type and me: ‐I wish to speak with those prisoners. ‐You can't. ‐You mind explaining why? ‐They are captured terrorists ‐So are the others, right? ‐But these are CHOLOS [pronounced choa' las]. Cholos are crazy. One never knows what's in their minds. Although I did not believe what he told me, I had deadlines to meet and little time to think about different kinds of prisoners. Besides, the big shots had all checked out as bona fide Senderistas. Another journalist was rather blunt about it; "Man, these guys have to have something unscrewed somewhere to be doing all this bombing". So, the afternoon news feed looked like this: Hundreds of captured Shining Path guerrillas were shown to the press today at the Ministry of the Interior Headquarters in Lima, Peru. C.R.Ruano pg. 6 How was this transformation possible? What was in D. Smith's words "the lived actuality" of these frightened persons that made it possible to transform them into speechless terrorists? For starters, much of Lima's slums are populated by poor and/or displaced peasants from the Andean highlands where, unable to own the land they work, they are forced to leave for the city in increasingly large numbers. A full third of all Peruvians live in Lima. Moreover, the vast majority of highland peasants are also native Peruvians whose first language is Aymara or Quechua. Here is the catch: since colonial times, Lima has always been stratified along race lines. Such divisions are based exclusively on external physical characteristics of the individuals on a sliding scale, from so‐ called pure European at one end towards African at the other. The state‐ sanctioned version of Peruvian history declares that the great Spaniard Conquistadors vanquished Native South Americans in the 16th century. The Europeans subdued the old Native civilizations and there are no descendants from those civilizations alive today. Time and time again many Peruvians of different political currencies corrected me when I used the term Native South American in regards to highland peasants. "Those are not Indians" I would be told‐ "those are Cholos". In the elaborate puzzle of racial categories that populate the Peruvian ideological landscape, people who look like Natives cannot be Natives because they do not exist anymore. Today's Natives, with their souls beaten ‐though not broken‐ by five centuries of colonialism do not fit the bill of great rivals of the Spaniards that the dominant ideology portrays. The Natives died a long time ago. Today's descendants of the Inca civilization cannot be the maid, the shoe‐shiner or the children‐beggars on the streets. Admitting that they From Cholo to Terrorist 7 have a historical link with Pre‐colonial times is dangerous. Thus is the non‐ historical Cholo born. When I asked about the origins of the Cholo my Peruvian friends would impatiently roll up their eyes and say "Los Cholos vienen de la Sierra, son serranos pues." "Cholos come from the mountain, they are mountain people." The word itself does not seem to be present before the 19th century as fishing, large scale mining and fertilizer factories begun replacing the plantation economy as the main source of export revenue. At this time, Native Communal lands were forcefully confiscated, thereby creating a large pool of landless peasants who would eventually migrate to urban areas, particularly Lima. Through the Institutional Framers [Army, Catholic Church, government, proprietary classes, mass media and the educational system], the Cholos' lived actuality is encoded as mental illness: their shyness in using Spanish becomes a sign of brutishness. Their humble demeanour and gentle manners shows their sub‐human attachment to a Master like dogs or cats do. Their different conception of time and space demonstrates the inherent instability of their thinking. In other words, culturally different behaviour is turned into pathology: The Cholo's ethnicity becomes equal with mental illness. Hence the statement: "Cholos are crazy. One never knows what's in their minds ". As the mist of bygone times recedes, the magnitude of the injustice done to these people becomes brutally clear. It is not simply the cruel fact that their accounts were of no interest to us. It is also the fact that we chose not to listen to what they could have told us because I and all the people in that auditorium had decided that whatever they could tell was not worth listening to. C.R.Ruano pg. 8 My reading of their experiences was essentially that which the institutional framers wanted me to have. In the ensuing escalation of State‐sponsored terrorism, the government was able to justify numerous atrocities committed against civilians and non‐ violent opposition organizations by using the Cholos‐are‐subhuman argument. As the Archbishop of Lima put it: "These terrorists have no human rights. They are deranged people and should be controlled." To paraphrase The German Ideology, the rationale goes like this: All those against the government are Cholos. Cholos are crazy sub‐humans who must be "controlled". Therefore, those against the government have no rights and must be controlled. In defence of my own decency I must say that although I did not possess the analytic tools presented in D. Smith's model at the time, it did not take me long to realize that there was something wrong in my reading of these events. Soon enough I began to discover the political agenda behind the "captured prisoners" presentation. And sure enough, I was able to see the advantages to the army in presenting large numbers of captured Cholos. After all, Cholos being at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale were, in the army's opinion, the only sort of individual who could be manipulated to become an agent of international conspiracies against Peru, etc. My initial hunch about random sampling was confirmed: the army had systematically raided the poorest sections of Lima, searching every house and detaining anybody without appropriate identity documents. Such searches have never taken place in the upper class sections of the city. Further investigations showed that those captured by the military had no choice but to parade before From Cholo to Terrorist 9 the cameras and admit their "guilt". Should they not cooperate, they could be jailed indefinitely or perhaps, more succinctly, be disposed of by paramilitary death squads. Most of these "terrorists" were in fact internal refugees who were fleeing the war in other parts of the country only to find themselves accused of all kinds of crimes. These events illustrate rather powerfully the human cost of failing to see ruling practices at work. There was no particular mechanism that made me ignore certain facts at the expense of others. Rather, it is the framing of issues, the good versus evil simplistic dichotomy that forces people's accounts into categories of events. The life story of the individual becomes irrelevant to the understanding or explanation of the event. In the aftermath of that October morning, thousands of people were shown as captured terrorists. The wave of government repression gained momentum as jails, garrisons and clandestine cemeteries were filled to capacity. Every night, alongside an assortment of government propaganda, the local media showed the standard Cholo group captured while doing this or that. I had the privilege of meeting some of these men, women and children whose harrowing accounts of their experiences with the Peruvian Security Services may one day be documented. For now, however, they wish to have the peace accorded to those who are amongst us but whose names remain unknown. I respect their wish. C.R.Ruano pg. 10 Further Reading: Smith, D. [1990]. The conceptual practices of power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ruano, C.R. [1994]. Snatching the souls of invisible folk: counterinsurgency and the newest educational reforms in Peru. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Atlanta, Georgia.