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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 chapter examines the theatrical interventions by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Peru’s premier popular theater collective, at the CVR’s public hearings in Huanta and Huamanga. From an established repertoire on Peruvian cultural heterogeneity, ethnic and gendered violence, and the war, Yuyachkani presented two plays whose protagonists are dead (one indigenous male, one mythic female) and called upon more (indigenous) dead when creating new pieces to accompany the endeavor, suggesting that after years of sustained—real and symbolic—violence, only the dead can embody the national situation, serve as the nation’s memory, and bridge individual and collective trauma. Challenging the therapeutic efforts of the CVR, dead bodies of marginalized subjects, and their ghosts, serve to explore collective and individual trauma, and mediate between the people and the state.

This book has addressed the paradox of rights: the tension between the need for human rights law to document and prosecute violations and the inability of the human rights framework to address the full scope of harm. Since the roots of transitional justice grow out of international human rights law, this same paradox is manifested in transitional justice mechanisms, such as the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Committee (PTRC). The story of Rosa Cuchillo and her endless search for her daughter, who disappeared during the armed conflict, highlights the endurance of love, the importance of legal avenues to register human rights violations, and the central role played by human rights advocates. This conclusion discusses the structural, procedural, and methodological implications of the book's analysis of Peruvian feminist and human rights movements, the PTRC, and DEMUS's Manta project in terms of future transitional justice endeavors both within and outside of Peru.