Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist by Manuel Llamojha Mitma, Jaymie Patricia Heilman

Reviewed by: Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist by Manuel Llamojha Mitma, Jaymie Patricia Heilman William O. Deaver Jr. Llamojha Mitma, Manuel and Jaymie Patricia Heilman. Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. This work gives a broad overview of Peru’s indigenous struggles for agrarian reform, land rights, education, and Manuel Llamojha Mitma’s efforts to end discrimination while detailing his activism from childhood until his death in 2016 at the age of ninety-five. Heilman, an associate professor of history and classics at the University of Alberta, interviewed Llamojha Mitma and his family. Heilman conducted extensive research into Llamojha’s role as a founding member of the Pro-Concepción Chacamarca Indian Community Committee, which sought “official recognition of Concepción as an ‘indigenous community,’ a legal status that guaranteed community land rights and the right to elect a village council . . . [its] most valuable tool in a fight against hacienda encroachment, as officially recognized indigenous community land was inalienable, that [End Page 124] is, it could not legally be bought, sold, or appropriated” (36). For much of Llamojha’s life, hacendados [wealthy landowners] controlled the land through sharecropping in rural areas while committing social, economic, and legal injustices to enrich themselves. To combat this, Llamojha was autodidactic and learned to read and write Spanish, Quechua, and Latin. Heilman posits this study as a “testimonial biography...of...his struggles against indigenous oppression, territorial dispossession, and sociopolitical exclusion, all problems that he . . . dedicated his life to fighting on behalf of Peru’s indigenous peasants (campesinos)” (1). Each chapter of the book details decades of Llamojha’s activities and involvement with different leftist groups in Peru such as Alianza Popular de la Revolución Americana (APRA, which later became conservative), the Peruvian Communist Party (with its offshoots into Soviet and Maoist ideologies), the National Liberation Front (FLN), as well as his invitations to visit Cuba, the Soviet Union, and China to learn more about their socio-political revolutions. Llamojha was repeatedly jailed, had to suffer self-imposed exile within Peru, and even faked his own death to escape persecution. Heilman points out that he never affiliated with a specific party doctrine, but rather concentrated his activism on “struggle with the masses” (124). Each time period of Llamojha’s activities coincides with different political regimes throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the corresponding responses from the government and the reaction of the masses at Llamojha’s instigation. The study will be fascinating to students of Latin American history, politics, and sociology as the indigenous struggle for state recognition underscores a feudal system devoid of justice without education, the sole recourse as a means to combat institutionalized abuses of power. Heilman emphasizes that Llamojha rejects the Spanish spelling of his name as well as that of the places mentioned. Instead, he opts for the Quechua spellings to privilege the indigenous rather than relegate it to the category of the subaltern. She allows him to give his story in his own words, but recognizes that at the time of the interview, his memory was failing (he was in his nineties). Furthermore, she also admits that perhaps his refusal to admit party affiliation may be due to the unpopularity of confessing adherence to radical parties such as the Shining Path, even though Llamojha had met with its leader, Abimael Gúzman and his wife, on multiple occasions. Heilman permits the reader to reach his or her own conclusions with regard to Llamojha’s declarations about his involvement in the more radical organizations that were responsible for the [End Page 125] bulk of the 60,000 plus deaths during the Shining Path insurgency against the Peruvian government. She depicts him in a positive light, which is somewhat subjective, but does leave room for interpretation about his actual party affiliation. The book is well-written and illustrated with photographs, excerpts from Llamojha’s writings, and maps of the area of his activity. Of particular interest are the detailed maps that he made to prove indigenous property rights, despite not being a surveyor, as well as the seals he...

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