Accusatory Whispers and Simulated Victimhood

Accusatory Whispers: Micro-Politics of Irreconciliation in the Peruvian Andes, by Dorothée Delacroix, Bulletin of Latin American Research 44 no. 4, 2025.

This article offers an ethnographic analysis of post-conflict coexistence in rural Andean communities in Peru following the internal armed conflict (mainly in 1980–2000), focusing on how violence, responsibility, and resentment persist despite official narratives of reconciliation. It is based on prolonged fieldwork, during which Delacroix became a focus for some of the accusations. The author is very careful what she says, but the overall situation is clear. In this village (and maybe elsewhere), people engaged in brutality during the war are now managing to pass as victims. Others collude so as to keep up appearances of group victim status, and from fear. NGO’s are manipulated by these people, and have access only to a public transcript discourse from other peasants which is directed towards the powerful. Below the surface, thing are more disturbed than they seem.