Keeping the memory alive
Throughout the week we had several moving moments commemorating the victims of the conflicts in Guatemala and Peru. Our visit to the monument El Ojo que Llora (“The Eye that Cries”) was one such powerful moment. El Ojo que Llora is a stone sculpture created in 2005 by Dutch artist Lika Mutal in memory of the victims of the armed conflict in Peru. The sculpture represents Pachamama (Mother Earth); in its centre is a small stone shaped like an eye, from which water continuously trickles. The sculpture is surrounded by a labyrinth of 32,000 pebbles, each bearing the name, age, and year of death or disappearance of a victim identified in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. Over the last few years, the rain and sun have taken their toll on the inscriptions, and most of the names have faded away.
The plan is to re-engrave the pebbles with names from the Victims’ Registry once it is completed, to ensure that the victims do not fade from the country’s memory. In the meantime, some families have already begun to re-engrave the names of their loved ones.
Ten names stand out among the faded ones. As part of reparations ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Peruvian state has re-engraved the names of the victims of the massacre of La Cantuta – a group of nine university students and their professor who “disappeared” and were assassinated in 1992, when members of the army burst into their residence. Coincidentally, on the last day of our exchange, some of the remains of the La Cantuta’s victims were finally handed over to their families, sixteen years after the massacre. We commemorated the event with a Mayan candle ceremony, and consoled ourselves with the knowledge that Fujimori, the Peruvian president at the time of the massacre, was on trial for human rights violations, including issuing the order for these murders.
Many victims’ families visit El Ojo que Llora to remember their loved ones, particularly those who were forcibly disappeared and for whom there is no grave to visit. Our visit was such an occasion for Lidia Flores, exchange participant and the president of ANFASEP, a victims’ organization from Ayacucho. As the group gathered around the sculpture to listen to the guide, Mama Lidia walked slowly through the labyrinth of pebbles to the stone that bore her husband’s name. She laid down a rose on the stones to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of his disappearance.
The Peruvian human rights organization APRODEH accompanied us that day. APRODEH uses the monument as a tool to engage Peruvians in building a collective historical memory of what happened during the conflict. When we saw El Ojo que Llora, it had been vandalized, splattered by orange paint with many of the stones crushed. When Fujimori’s supporters learned in September 2007 that he would be extradited to face trial in the Peruvian courts, they desecrated the monument with the colour of his political party. The vandalism was followed by a smear campaign in the media that labeled the site a “monument to terrorists.” It was a stark reminder of the intolerance and persecution that victims’ organizations face from those in society and government who would prefer to forget what happened. It was a reality that echoed the experience of the participants from Guatemala and Colombia.
| Reviewed July 31, 2009 |  |
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