Julio Ortega’s 1986 novella Adios, Ayacucho inaugurated a significant genre in contemporary Peruvian narrative: literature addressing (directly or indirectly) the internal conflict. Ortega’s short novel is an ironic account of a Peruvian peasant leader Alfonso Cánepa killed and mutilated by Peruvian police forces who embarks on a journey to Lima to recuperate the rest of his body in order to receive proper burial. Ortega was inspired to write the novella after viewing a photograph in a newspaper of the brutalized body of peasant leader Jesús Oropeza, similarly killed by Peruvian police forces. This image inspired Ortega’s story, but his interaction with the photograph of Oropeza also reflects the interactions that characters in Adios, Ayacucho have with Cánepa and his brutalized body. Characters that represent the state, Lima elites and academics and other facets of Peruvian society interpret him as an image. To some he is disguised in a costume, to others he is deformed. Rarely does someone recognize fully that he is dead. Ortega presents the image of this body to Peru (specifically to coastal elites) and those who see the image are forced to make a judgement about what they are seeing.

Ortega was the first of many writers to use photographic themes to explore the violence, terror and corruption of the internal conflict. Alonso Cueto’s La hora azul centers on a successful lawyer who encounters several photographs of his father with a kidnapped woman from Ayacucho in his military quarters. The photographs reveal a past that the protagonist must then encounter and process. In Abril Rojo by Santiago Roncagliolo and La viajera del viento by Cueto feature protagonists obsessed with communicating with photographic shrines of their deceased mothers. The watchful eye of each mother surveys the ups and downs of the narrative in each respective novel. In Grandes Miradas by Cueto, the “vladivideos” scandal centers the novels themes of watching and being watched. La sangre de la aurora by Claudia Salazar Jiménez and Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro by Iván Thays both feature photojournalists traveling to the Andes from Lima. While each of these examples varies in some degree, they all share what fascinated Ortega as he wrote Adios, Ayacucho; all of these works about the internal conflict in some degree treat the events and the violence of conflict from a photographic distance. It is not an accident that all of these authors are coastal elites writing about a crisis whose primary actors were involved outside of Lima. Lima (and the rest of Perú outside a few zones in the Andes) experienced the harshest and most horrific crimes of the period through photographs, videos and media coverage. Lima, with some notable exceptions, was mostly free of the types of violence that ravaged provinces like Ayacucho.

Of course, this is only one of many possibilities for the prevalence of the photographic and video/photographic themes in the narrative of the internal conflict. In future blog posts I may delve deeper into the reliance on testimonials in ensuring verisimilitude in literary texts and its connection to the reliance on the indexical quality of the photograph. I may also speak of the connections these themes have in photographic archives and exhibitions such as TAFOS or Yuyanapaq.