Santiago de Lucanamarca, a remote farming community in the Peruvian Andes, is shaken by the presence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They have come to open the tombs of the 69 people who died in the massacre of April 3, 1983. Twenty years later there is a chance to close old wounds, but distrust can also be felt in the streets of the town. Aren’t we all Peruvians? asks one of the people affected. The history of Lucanamarca shows us how elusive justice can be.
Director’s note
This is a story about memory. Some think memory is a way to go back and dwell in the past, but we think memory is a way to move ahead and look into the future.
Twenty years of political violence left more than 69 thousand Peruvians dead or disappeared in the hands of terrorist organizations or agents of the State.
Three out of every four victims were peasants whose mother language was “quechua”: a large sector of the population, historically ignored, and even despised, by the State and urban society. This documentary is an attempt to seize and comprehend part of our country’s past and present, and may this plea to remember serve as a spell to assure that certain things won’t happen again.
We haven’t tried to make a story about heroes and villains. More than answers, this documentary tries to pose questions that challenge us as society and as a country.
Dr. Salomón Lerner’s note (Ex President Truth and Reconciliation Commission)
The massacre of Lucanamarca is one of the many emblematic cases of dreadful violence that were revealed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru to show the horror left by the internal conflict in Peru. The complexity of the facts is now reflected in people´s memories maintained alive as a means of giving sense to the violent past and preventing it from happening again.
The significance of this documentary lies in its usefulness to preserve this memory through the testimonies of the survivors and the relatives of the dead ones. Twenty-five years have passed and their vision continues to be as complex as the facts preceding that fateful day. The magnitude of irrationality reached during the Peruvian internal armed conflict is shown in this visual story. We hope that this new vision will allow us to move forward confronting our recent past through an earnest remembrance, which is a necessary condition for reconciliation.
