Acceso usuarios
Tamara Feinstein
At the height of a bloody civil war (1980-2000), Peruvian military and police forces massacred 250 prisoners while putting down a series of Shining Path coordinated prison riots in June 1986. This article examines how distinct Peruvian actors strategically shaped competing memories of the 1986 Lima prison massacres to help recast wartime political identities. The democratically elected party in power (APRA-American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), the democratic opposition front of the United Left, and the insurgent Shining Path, each took conflictive stances over how to represent the fallen and the guilty in the wake of the massacres. Drawing on oral histories, archival documents, and commemorative events, this article argues that the dynamic interaction between clashing representations of the 1986 massacres significantly shaped the reformulation of each group’s position on the war and the increasingly antagonistic relations with one another.
