“That's the negative moment of the dialectic …”

On a Friday morning in the middle of fall 2019, I stood outside a colonial building not too far from Arequipa's main cathedral, waiting for Señor Aurelio,1 a member of a civic association dedicated to monitoring corruption. Señor Aurelio, who was in his early 70s, had been part of Peru's grassroots movements for more than five decades. He was well respected by the people in his circles, and this meant that he was often asked to facilitate the association's meetings or to accompany local community leaders (dirigentes)2 when meeting with public authorities. On that morning, he had invited me to join him for an informal gathering of farmers and activists who were going to discuss two major infrastructural projects affecting the water quality in the Tambo River. Though I was not feeling very well, I was thankful for the invitation and could not miss the event because of its pertinence to my research. In 2016, I began doing fieldwork with market workers in the city of Arequipa and their providers in the Tambo Valley, a small-scale farming community. Faced with the unprecedented expansion of extractive projects on agricultural land in my home region of Arequipa, my work focused on the foodways and farming practices that give life form at the margins of Peru's neoliberal state. However, despite my gratitude for Señor Aurelio's invitation, I was too distracted to be an engaged participant at the event. At the beginning of the week, my apartment had been broken into while I was visiting a relative, and dealing with the robbery left me feeling somewhat disoriented. Instead of keeping up with the lively exchange and taking notes, I asked to record the conversation and simply drifted away. I could not really focus until a few hours later, when Señor Aurelio and I got lunch at our usual place near Mayta Capac Plaza. The owner and only waiter of the restaurant, Don Melesio, greeted us warmly, and the two men chatted for a few minutes at the door, addressing each other as paisano, before we got a table by the kitchen. Don Melesio brought us corn beer (chicha) and boiled hominy corn (mote) and listed the dishes he and his wife had prepared for the day. As we waited for our meal, Señor Aurelio remarked that I seemed absentminded all morning. He asked what was on my mind, and I shared my story. On Wednesday morning, Miguel, the landlady's son, called to give me the news. I was working at a food stand in one of the city's open-air markets. We visited the house that afternoon. The front door, which was made of metal, hung ajar over the pavement, wide open, just a warped metal plate. Someone had struck the deadbolt until it gave out. The next-door neighbor told us that the robbery happened just hours after I left on Monday evening. She called the police, but no one came. The apartment was on the second floor of a house north of the city, a 15-minute walk from the homes of two market workers, whom I accompanied on their daily routine. In December, when I moved in, a seamstress and a municipal worker lived on the first floor, but a month later, they moved to take care of a sick relative, and I became the only tenant in the building. Somewhat worried, I spoke with Miguel and his mother about the risk of a potential robbery. I reminded them that I traveled out of the city for roughly two weeks a month, and pointed out that with the other tenants gone, the building would stay entirely empty for that time. Miguel agreed to search for another tenant, adding that he would make sure to keep an eye on my things while I was gone, since he came to the house once a day to feed the animals in the yard. As weeks passed, I wondered whether I should move out temporarily, until eventually the issue receded into the background of everyday life. Upstairs, the sight of so many familiar things scattered by unseen hands pulled me out of myself, as if looking at a still life. There were shirts and socks fanned out all over the concrete with the shards of a few bowls, which had been knocked off the table in the patio. In the bedroom, the blanket was stripped off the mattress, clumped and thrown against the wall. The nightstand lay on its side, a pack of ballpoint pens spilling out the front, my e-reader and projector gone. What disquieted me the most, however, was the drawer had been taken from my dresser—a drawer containing photographs of my friends in North America, intimate letters, an ex-lover's shirt, and my passport. That evening, Miguel came with me to the police station. I felt ambivalent about filing a report but ultimately had no choice if I wanted to get a new passport at the embassy. After waiting for an hour and a half in the lobby, we were shown to a side office with a policeman sitting behind a metal desk that looked like a small tank with a melamine tabletop. He said that if the robbery took place on Monday, he did not expect to find any “usable fingerprints” (huellas aprovechables). Instead of beginning an investigation, he suggested that I simply file a claim for lost documents (denuncia por perdida de documentos), now written to imply that my passport was taken on a bus. I kept turning over these scenes in my head, arriving again and again at questions I could not answer: Why did Miguel take a whole day to call? Was the police's absence only a matter of their disregard for the neighborhood, or did it entail a more precise degree of complicity with the people who broke into my apartment? What did they think they might find in my drawer? And what happened to the things I lost? That's the negative moment of the dialectic. I've always lost things during break-ins [allanamientos]. Always. So—since then, I take care and try to reconstruct all the—everything I've written, all the things I've lost … As a student at the San Antonio de Abad University in Cusco, Señor Aurelio joined Vanguardia Revolucionaria, a “New Left” Marxist movement that sought to challenge Peru's oligarchic history of statecraft by participating in the struggles of workers’ unions and peasant organizations. His early experiences of political life overlapped with the rise of the left-wing military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, which came to power in 1968. At a time when 72.9 percent of agricultural land belonged to 0.2 percent of landowners, perhaps one of the most important legacies of the self-denominated Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas (1968–1980) was its ambitious project of agrarian reform. The controversial policies of land redistribution and social mobilization enacted under Velasco Alvarado's rule were life-changing for rural communities (who until then had been living in semifeudal conditions) and for national elites (who lost 45 percent of their landholdings) (Cant, 2021).3 Given that Vanguardia Revolucionaria supported the demands of peasant and worker groups for a more radical program of reform, its relationship with Alvarado's government remained adversarial. So, all my poems which I wrote in that time are lost. And I tried to remember, well, to reconstruct them. … And then, every time there is a break-in, I try to remember what got lost, right? … The other thing is, I try to remember poems I've written and correct them. Or try to make poems from memory, right? … I make a list of what things were lost and try to reconstruct them, right? I got to do this halfway, in some cases, or [in others] new things appeared in the poems, new things, right? New writings. After the break-ins, Señor Aurelio made lists of the things he lost (thought he lost), trying to remember (or reconstruct) what had disappeared in the negative moment of the dialectic. Sometimes, he said, these exercises got him “halfway” there, to the limits of his finite attempts at approaching a collection of unreachable lost objects, and sometimes, tarrying with loss gave way to new things. (Is that half of infinity—I wondered, trying to imagine the contents of the drawer with more precision—or half of uncertainty?) Señor Aurelio also wanted me to know that for many of the activists defending agriculture in the Tambo Valley, the break-in at my apartment could carry a double valence. Though the event was most likely a petty robbery, the theft of my drawer could make it look like an act of intimidation for doing research that borders too closely on a major mining conflict. Let me elaborate. Over the past 30 years, Peru has undergone several waves of economic and institutional restructuring, which have built on a project of statecraft assembled during a civil war (1980–2000) under the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000). Today, institutional frameworks and authoritarian techniques of governance carried over from this period undergird the expansion of extractive development in Peru (Drinot, 2014; Li, 2015). For many rural communities, these changes mean new experiences of environmental damage and militarized conflict. In such a fraught landscape, I chose to approach the ethico-material attachments that give life form at the margins of the state by giving ethnographic attention to the ways in which activities like growing, making, and sharing food mattered for the people who participated in my research. In addition to contending with environmental damage, small-scale agriculture in the Tambo Valley also unfolds amid an increasingly violent conflict over the construction of a 1.4-billion-dollar extractive venture. In 2007, the Southern Peru Copper Corporation began vying for a license to construct two open-pit mines on the slopes rising above the north bank of the Tambo River. At this time in my research, the conflict surrounding the Tía María Project has given rise to two separate militarized occupations of the valley, in 2011 and 2015. These events lasted for months at a time and were marked by police brutality and violations of due process (Dunlap, 2019). As the Ministry of Energy and Mines approached the deadline to issue a decision on the mine's second environmental impact assessment, valley residents anticipated another wave of protests and possibly a third militarized occupation. Señor Aurelio wanted me to know that in the ruthless landscape of Peru's political life—one characterized by break-ins, beatings, misinformation campaigns, and occasionally even murders—talk of an unusual robbery could “put fear” (meter miedo) into people, whether it was meant to or not. Then he turned to another loss of his own, the death of his younger brother, Benito, who was also part of Vanguardia Revolucionaria. The time of Morales Bermúdez was very complicated because the man began to persecute, well, to persecute my family, my bro—my brothers, my friends, and more people began to turn up dead [aparecer muertos]. … In Velasco's time, there were also deaths, but … Morales Bermúdez took a decision to put fear [meter miedo] into people systematically. … I get the news, for example, that a compañero who was very active in Paucartambo died. They said, he had gone to a meeting in one of the nearby townships and he was coming back on foot … and then, he never made it home. Well, his wife gets out the word that he hadn't come home. They go out looking for him, and they don't find him. And this generates fright in that area. That group [of Vanguardia Revolucionaria] … began to work more sporadically because he was the person in charge. My younger brother was more adventurous, more decisive, we can say. I don't know what word to use. Plus, the person who died was a close friend of his. So, I knew that he was not going to obey. So, we said goodbye, singing, I remember. He sang many songs because he had a good voice. … And, well, he left. So, even though there was an order not to—not to let himself be seen [que no … se aparezca]—he left, and—and tried to enter my house in Cusco. That's where they were waiting for him. They captured him. They took him. They took him to Lima. Benito and his compañeros were detained in Lima until the end of April. Then, on the night of their release, they were followed by a car after leaving the police station and run over before arriving at their destination. Benito was taken to a different hospital than the other two men. They survived, but he was left unattended and died from a traumatic brain injury. “They let him die,” Señor Aurelio said, “they never treated him.” Lately, when I listen to the recording of our conversation, I notice that he shifts between the time of what is and the time of what has been—that's the negative moment of the dialectic. I've always lost things during break-ins. Always. So—since then, I take care and try to reconstruct all the … all the things I've lost. In this back-and-forth movement, a narration of past events gives our present encounter form, bringing us both to contend with the weight of a shared history. Señor Aurelio responds to my bewilderment by describing his own efforts at grappling with rupture over decades of similar losses. On the surface, by referring to such scenes of loss as the negative moment of the dialectic, Señor Aurelio implies that the act of remembering both retains and alters the presence of the people and things that disappear from our lives, thus constituting a kind of overcoming. Here, I cannot help but understand the Marxist inflection of his language as more than an idiosyncrasy and less than dogma. While the insight he is trying to impart is clearly drawn from Hegel, it is also connected to a community of speakers—one that foundationally includes the militants in Peru's “New Left” movements. In using these words to bridge my experience with his own, though he is speaking to me, it feels as if he is using diction and tone that addresses them. This gesture reveals the texture of Señor Aurelio's attachment to people he has lost—a community that was partially exterminated during Operation Condor. At the same time, it exposes his desire for this revelation, which is to say, for some kind of acknowledgment. Thus, in this case, my friend's bequest is also a request, although this connection only becomes clear at the end of his narration. How does listening, then, oblige me not only to him but also to the people in his story? The violence enacted by Morales Bermúdez's regime has been investigated by the International Centre for the Promotion of Human Rights in Argentina (Real Baltazar, 2015). In 2017, Morales Bermúdez was tried and sentenced by a criminal court in Italy for the murder of more than 20 dual citizens on Peruvian soil. The decision was ratified in 2019, and all appeals were terminally denied in February 2022. However, attempts to investigate both matters in Peru itself have been repeatedly frustrated. This gaping absence is part of the background on which Señor Aurelio's narrative is not so much a secret as a story that has been told and retold and has remained largely unheard. Though I cannot bear witness to the persecution of Señor Aurelio's family or friends, I can, however, bear witness to the way their lives and deaths are remembered. Here, my understanding of what it means for Señor Aurelio to reconstruct a truthful vision of the past has also been enriched by Michael Lambek's (1996) reflections on memory as an ethical practice. For Lambek, to talk about memory as a practice, rather than a possession or a forensic fact, is to confront our desires and responsibilities to make, care for, or turn away from specific ways of being in time with others (both living and dead). In these endeavors, the craft and performance of signs gives us a necessary means for rendering our constitutive relation to otherwise inaccessible temporalities (Lambek, 1996, 246). We can sometimes think of this as fiction (Gandolfo, 2009, 218). As I close, let me take a detour through Señor Aurelio's reflections on the way fictions can make the past available to the present. We haven't talked so much about whether we're true paisanos or not. … It's a sort of fiction, a point of encounter that we have between us. … It's a way of being family [parientes] that we have. We feel like family [parientes] with this way of relating to each other: paisano. Though Señor Aurelio did not explain why he and Don Melesio called each other paisano, the address implies that they recognize each other as coming from elsewhere and as sharing (at the very least) an experience of displacement during the same period of war. The word paisano allows Señor Aurelio and Don Melesio to address each other as if they came from the same place (when they in fact do not). As a fiction, this address transfigures separate experiences of displacement to improvise “a point of encounter,” where two people can feel like family in their relation to a broken past that to into the present. as Señor Aurelio put it in a conversation, remember the past is not only to reconstruct but to construct again in the of our present This is was I or I don't We to an He was very and very than me, and he sang … far I might find myself, never be to my friend I was was as if I were to voice. at this encounter with a who could not his brother, I became as as a a an to the of the past from the of the (Lambek, 1996, I would like to Aurelio for sharing his life experience and so with me, and the of the and María for their and kind I would also like to and

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