Tamara Feinstein's insightful political history of the Peruvian Left is a very important contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century Peru. Her book represents a new generational and more distanced approach to studying the tragic story of leftist political movements in the last decades of the twentieth century. The research for this book is impressive. Her analysis comes from a careful consideration of a wide variety of primary sources, including dozens of interviews, private archives, newspapers, and other sources from the organizations and movements she studied. This is highly original research, and she makes a compelling case.
She argues that the fractures evident in leftist political alliances during the 1980s have their origins in the original divide between Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui. And she traces the history of these long-standing differences from the 1950s through the 1990s. However, the emergence of the Shining Path and its brutal attack on the “legal Left” beginning in the 1980s put unprecedented pressure on the alliance between radical and more moderate leftist actors. This development caused those fractures to explode. The Shining Path effectively destroyed the Left by deepening the divisions over the issue of the use of violence and armed struggle. Public animosity and revulsion toward the Shining Path also stigmatized all leftist politics for a time. This made alliances between leftists and other groups (civil society) more difficult. Lastly, the Shining Path murdered a big part of the leftist political leadership—leaders from both political parties and from social movements.
Chapter 7 examines several different “memory frameworks” in post-conflict Peru (2000–10). This is the most interesting part of the book. Feinstein compares and analyzes the official truth commission, an extraordinarily important monument (“Ojos que Llora”), the national history museum, and several war-related anniversary events and commemorations. She argues that the divisions within leftist politics are replicated in divisions over collective memory and memorialization of the war. She also discusses at length the contestation of memory by the right and the followers of Fujimori. Given the focus of the book, and the fact that this right-wing contestation is far more straightforward and expected, this part of the analysis is inherently less interesting than her analysis of the contestation of memory by the Left in the decade immediately following the end of the war.
Feinstein's conclusions consider the ways in which Peru is similar and dissimilar to other cases in Latin America, which includes a relatively extensive comparison between Colombia and Peru. Although Feinstein couches this as a “fruitful venue for future research” (237), she actually provides more than a “cursory” comparison over several pages. I think many of her observations are very interesting, but I do think the comparison lacks a depth of consideration for the complexity of Colombia's conflict, and as such it seems a little out of place in this otherwise brilliant and insightful historical analysis. She also discusses Greg Grandin's argument about the importance of the dynamic between insurgent and counter-insurgent violence and the role of civil society and the human rights movement within that framework. The role of the human rights movement in the history of the Left is mostly discussed in the chapter about memory projects. However, she also discusses the role of the human rights paradigm in chapter 3 as well. I do not think she ever really grapples with the dilemma for the human rights regime when a nonstate actor (the Shining Path) is guilty of perpetrating widespread abuses against a civilian population. Although the human rights regime has adapted somewhat to this problem over time, the “state-based” approach of the human rights movement is integrated into the structure of human rights law. Moreover, even today—within a human rights framework—the responsibility (and thus the culpability) of the state is always going to be different from the culpability of nonstate violent actors.
I wish Feinstein had gone deeper into her analysis of the interplay between social movements, particularly the human rights movement and leftist politics in the 1980s and 1990s. The rise of “New Social Movements” in the context of “transitions to democracy” after the Cold War and the connections between these global trends and the fracturing of the political Left in Peru could be an important addendum to the book's analysis. Nevertheless, the analysis as it stands is very thorough and convincing. This book should become a standard for twentieth-century Peruvian political history. It is an extremely important contribution to this literature. It is also an important addition to the history of leftist politics in Latin America.
