Limitations and possibilities of victim memory in post-conflict Peru: A reading of Mikael Wiström's documentary Storm in the Andes (2014)

This article analyzes the victim-centered representations of the Peruvian internal armed conflict that Mikael Wiström's documentary Storm in the Andes (2014) proposes. The analysis is developed from the opposing significance that the film articulates for Augusta La Torre (a Shining Path leader) and Claudio Gonzales (a disappeared university student). It reflects on the film's position of reconciliation regarding the search for a neutral victim deserving of compassion, the reconstitution of an alleged Andean world devastated by the war, and emphasis on showing the suffering experienced. This interpretation of the recent past forces a reconciliation (a normalizing forgiveness) that does not allow us to understand the complexities of the current postwar situation; on the contrary, this position sutures them to try to achieve a unification of the social body fragmented by war. The article also examines the possibilities of recognition, those renegotiations and appropriations that happen in the margins of this audiovisual project: a claim, brief but real, that tries to repair oblivion.