What fascinated me in this week’s material about the uprisings and conflict within Peru were the comparisons that I found I was able to draw between it and The Slaughterhouse that similarly illustrated the discord within Argentina.  Although conflicts within both regions share similarities and have their own distinct differences, what stood out to me the most was the emphasis on ritualistic killings and the justification of them through the notion of ‘cleansing’ the society.  What I found most curious about the way in which people were killed was that though religion was not really at the forefront of the conflict, it was often used within a symbolic context during burials.  For example, the convention of mutilating the eyes and tongue as well as breaking the ankles of the corpse so that the victim theoretically could not recognize, denounce, or retaliate against their killers has many religious and/or supernatural undertones which I found unusual.  Even the symbolic nature of burying the bodies outside of community limits to highlight that these individuals were classified as ‘strangers’ or ‘outsiders’ is interesting as it demonstrates the amount of value that many Latin Americans placed on symbolic representations.

I found that this week’s material aptly encompasses many of the ideas that we’ve already previously discussed throughout this course.  The start of the chapter cautions against putting figures on a pedestal, advising that while “this may allow us to tell stories with definitive heroes and villains, to satisfy our desire for moral clarity. What we risk is gaining that clarity at the expense of understanding the past for all its ambiguity… If we view these events simply as horrible crimes committed by evil men, we capture only a small part of this history” (284).  This idea of ambiguity can be applied to the material of virtually every week thus far – I think that this notion is valuable because often when we learn about the darker corners of history there is a temptation to put various people into neatly categorized boxes of good and evil when it is often a lot more complicated than that.  Some other lines that I really liked from the reading are “this is the problem with paranoia; when you cannot identify the enemy by the uniform they wear, you see the enemy everywhere” (284) and “the actual existence of the threat mattered less than the belief that the threat was real” (288).  I liked these quotations because for me they gave a deeper understanding of why people behaved the way that they did and gave a degree of humanization to many of these unknown individuals that I have been reading about. 

My question for discussion this week is how the convention of ritualistic killings began – the textbook does not really discuss its origins so I am curious as to whether anyone knows specifically how it came about/became as widespread as it was.

Thank you for reading!