From the Visual Book: Yuyanapaq, Para Recordar
I have recently been engrossed in Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Report, which was published in 2003. The report is an exhaustive, frank, and sometimes horrifying confession-of-sorts about the country’s civil war from 1980 to 2000. The paragraphs below are my translation of the final section of the report’s preface. (No translation appears to be available on the web.) The writing here is not only lyrically beautiful but also serves to remind me that the notion of democracy—even a democracy as imperfect as our own in the U.S.—is truly a privilege and not a right. As Lerner writes, “A democracy that is exercised stubbornly each day loses the loyalty of its citizens and falls without tears.”
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In a country like ours, combating oblivion is a powerful form of doing justice. We are convinced that the rescue of the truth about the past—even a truth so hard, so difficult to bear as the one we were entrusted with discovering—is a way of coming closer to that ideal of democracy that we Peruvians proclaim with such vehemence and practice with such inconsistency.
At the time of the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Committee] was established, Peru undertakes, once again, an enthusiastic attempt to recover lost democracy. And yet, so that this enthusiasm has a foundation and a horizon, we must remember that democracy was not lost on its own. Democracy was abandoned little by little by those who did not know how to defend it. A democracy that is exercised stubbornly each day loses the loyalty of its citizens and falls without tears. In the moral vacuum in which dictatorships thrive, good reason is lost and concepts invert themselves, depriving the citizen of any ethical orientation: exceptional emergency becomes normal permanency, massive abuse becomes “excess,” the innocent are taken to jail; death, in the end, is confused with peace.
Peru is on track, once more, to build a democracy. This is thanks to the courage of those who dared not to believe the official truth of a dictatorial regime; those who called a dictatorship, dictatorship; who called corruption, corruption; who called a crime, crime. Such acts of moral strength in the voices of millions of ordinary citizens demonstrate to us the efficacy of the truth. We should undertake a similar effort now. If truth served to lay bare the ephemeral nature of autocracy, truth is called now to show its power to purify our Republic.
This purification is an indispensable to achieve a society reconciled with itself, with truth, with the rights of each and every one of its members. A society at peace with its possibilities.
This report speaks of shame and of dishonor; however, on these pages also are spoken acts of courage, acts of generosity, signs that demonstrate to us that to be human is most essentially to be magnanimous. Here can be found those who did not relinquish the authority and the responsibility entrusted to them by their neighbors; here can be found those who defied abandonment to defend their families using nothing more than tools of the land; here can be found there are those who put their fate next to those who suffered unjust imprisonment; here can be found those who assumed their duty to defend their country without betraying the law; here can be found those who fought the uprooting of communities in order to defend life. Here they can be found in the heart of our memories.
We present this report in honor of those who stood up to protect us. We also present it as a mandate of the missing and the forgotten throughout whole nation. The story here speaks of us, of what we were and of what we stopped being. This story speaks of the work we have ahead of us. This story begins today.
Salomón Lerner Febres
Presidente
Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación