Lucanamarca

by Carlos Cárdenas and Héctor Gálvez
Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2009
DVD, 69 mins., $US 398 (Institutional).
Distributor's website: http://www.icarusfilms.com.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney

legart@ozemail.com.au

The bundles of matter, wrapped in filthy rags, are removed from plastic bags. As they are laid out on a high table and with great care and reverence unraveled, bones are separated from stockings, shoes, and clothing. The bones are gradually assembled in the sequence of a human skeleton along the length of the table. There are many tables.
The work of the forensic anthropologist has become grist for the television mill in recent years in several of its genre forms, crime dramas, documentary, news and current affairs. Is the morbid fascination with mortality, as documented with the sad images of shrunken remains and the shocking images of mutilated corpses, an expression of memento mori , or a need for confirming evidence of the outcomes of intolerance? Katyn Forest, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia are the more recent manifestations of human savagery, the whole dismal record oozing as a lake of blood from the debris piling up before us.

The rarefied cold air of a 3500 metre high plateau in the Andes of Peru is not the site to be associated with yet more senseless modern slaughter, if only because of its remoteness from the world's news flow and its own national capital. Lucanamarca is a small mountain village where in 1983 a group of armed men and woman arrived and proceeded to replace the peasant oligarchy with a revolutionary council appointed by their leader, an academic by the name of Abimael Guzman. Those who resisted were lucky to escape with their lives whilst others went along with the Shining Path's promises of liberation from decades of poverty and exploitation. The incursion of the educated revolutionaries, however, exacerbated rivalries within the community that enabled the authorities to begin to successfully counter what was becoming a national movement of opposition. As an example to the country's peasantry of the price of any cooperation with the government, Guzman and his group became responsible for the massacre of 69 men, women, and children from the Lucanamarca community.

Outrages continued for another decade before Guzman and other leaders were caught and incarcerated by the military. A decade later in 2003, the civilian courts retried him and other Shining Path prisoners during the period of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The process led to the long overdue dispatch of investigators and forensic anthropologists - accompanied by the filmmakers - to Lacanamarca to gather evidence for the trial.

The exhumation of the victims of the massacre from the middle of a barren part of the mountains and their removal 'for analysis' to Lima, is followed by the subsequent re-interment of the remains. Peru's President, delivered to the site by chopper, leads the large public ceremonies, making promises of community funding - unkept we are told - whilst passing through. The final scenes of Guzman and his group receiving life sentences form a tedious but essential background for the core of the film.

In the foreground are the men and women from the village who relate, lucidly and with sophistication, the events that befell them in 1983 and subsequently. From these interviews emerge the tensions between family members and neighbours, the strains of life in the mountains, and the comings and goings of strangers from the city, the groups of educated people: the forensic anthropologists, the investigators, the note-takers and the documentary filmmakers, who encounter the same divisions as had emerged when the revolutionary group arrived, 20 years previously.

Few villagers had remained in the village following the massacre, scattering to the capital and surrounding settlements, burning still with the hatred for aggressors, proselytizers, rivals, and wrongdoers, detailed and passionate in the way that people from an essentially oral culture are able to express. The filmmakers in this document set individuals sufficiently at ease for the vividness of the words to flow. This is in contrast to their witness evidence at the trial in the city of the defiant revolutionaries, where their dignity and confidence is undermined by the awkwardness and patronage of the Court and its process.

The reconfirmation of the life sentences, the assembled villagers are told by more functionaries from the city in the closing scene, is the application of justice to make possible the healing of old wounds. As viewers of the document we are left to consider this appeal to our sense of compassion. Whether we as secondary witnesses to more evidence of senseless slaughter are able to reconcile our act of viewing with our own sense of helplessness in the continuing procession of murder that festers wherever and whenever ideologues acquire power.

We are reminded in this film of the necessity but also the responsibilities of radical actions and the consequences of deflecting these to demagogic if not deluded leadership.