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This chapter studies Rosa Cuchillo (1997), by indigenous-mestizo writer, Oscar Colchado Lucio. Narrated by three indigenous characters, the novel portrays both the Shining Path’s and the state’s inability to understand indigenous Andean culture, while modeling an Andean-driven truth and reconciliation process. The novel relies almost exclusively on Andean characters who call upon autochthonous discourse, knowledge, and spirituality to create an Andean historical, political and affective archive that contrasts with that created and disseminated through other, official processes. In recounting the past and imagining the future, Rosa Cuchillo becomes a model of “intercultural communication” and “epistemological decolonization” (Quijano), and by channeling the therapeutic processing of the conflict through Andean modes of interpretation, it suggests one outcome could be a cultural, if not political, Pachacutec—an Andean revolution.

This section examines Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film La teta asustada in contrast with Paloma de papel (2003, Fabrizio Aguilar). While the latter promotes traditional, paternalistic, and objectifying images of rural indigenous culture, Llosa’s film, which focuses on indigenous immigrants in Lima, assumes a horizontal position with respect to indigenous communities. With over 40% of its dialogue in Quechua, La teta asustada, both through its circumstances of production and its treatment of its subject matter, is unique in that re-locates national culture and redefines the national subject, suggesting that the future of Peru lies greatly in an urban indigenous culture sustained by an inevitable heterogeneity of knowledges and practices. Furthermore, the film demands a new ethical stance on the part of the larger audience, obliging the public to take a position less of a far-away empathizer and more of solidarity.

This section critically examines the work of artist-anthropologist Edilberto Jiménez, his drawings and retablos that portray the horrors experienced in the Ayacucho district of Chungui. By centering analysis of the conflict in the Andes and within an Andean cultural framework, these works challenge the terms of the dominant transitional justice process and highlight the victim-survivors’ stakes in post-conflict labors. They rely on and transmit Andean forms of knowledge and knowledge-creation and contain symbols and references not readily understandable to the non-Andean public, while still attempting to communicate with that public. Challenging dominant concepts of citizenship and belonging, reconciliation and healing, center and periphery, Jiménez privileges an Andean world vision, while acknowledging and strategically deploying certain key Western concepts (democracy, justice, and human rights), with an Andean twist.

This chapter considers products of the Rescate por la memoria (Rescuing memory) contests in Ayacucho; these post-CVR interventions by Yuyarisun, a collective of Peruvian and international NGOs, invited entries in poetry, painting, illustrated stories, music, and narratives by local inhabitants. The works give an Andean perspective that is present in victims’ testimonies but largely absent in the CVR’s final analysis and recommendations. These ‘different memories’ frequently go against the grain of official discourses on the Shining Path era and the postconflict future of Peru. They are creative responses that defy easy interpretations of events and cookie-cutter resolutions based on ‘universal’ human rights values, while belying dominant visions of a ‘new Peru’ moving forward in a unified manner, having faced and overcome the recent past.