Between 1980 and 2000, many Peruvian families lost their loved ones in the internal armed conflict. Approximately 15,000 people were disappeared during those years, and their remains have yet to be recovered. In response to this situation, EPAF works with victims and survivors to document the truth about what happened. This works include:
- Elaborating local narratives of the violence. This allows community members to share memories of the past and reassert the truth about what happened.
- Creating cooperative networks between the victims’ families that allow them to build bonds of solidarity and work together to define a common agenda.
- Establishing biological and social profiles of the disappeared. This information is recorded in an Ante mortem Database which is extremely important for future forensic investigations.
Family member shows the ID of a disappeared relative.
With the support of the Open Society Institute (OSI), EPAF initiated a historical memory project in the Pampas-Qaracha region of Ayacucho in January of 2010. Through this project, EPAF has worked closely with 200 community members in the villages of Hualla, Colcabamba, Morcolla, Huamanquiquia and Raccaya to document cases of forced disappearances and massacres that took place during the internal armed conflict.
Ojectives:
Through the project, communities affected by political violence:
Reclaim their voice and reconstruct the history of the violence in their own words as they experienced it. This process of memory allows the family members to emerge from obscurity and reclaim their local history and identity, which have been distorted by decades of armed conflict and violence.
Retrieve the remains of their disappeared love ones. Recovering their loved ones allows the family members to grieve for their dead and reconcile themselves with the violent past. Through this process, they gain an important sense of closure on the past that allows them to look forward and begin building their future.
Assert their rights as equal citizens in Peruvian society. This allows the family members to move from mere survivors of mass violence to actively engaged citizens that have the capacity to organize, create an agenda for their communities, and petition the government for redress of their grievances.
Photos: Jonathan Moller
