Memory of salvation, extreme right and terruqueo in post-conflict Peruvian society. The attempted censorship of the documentary Hugo Blanco, Río Profundo (2019)

This article studies the ways in which a confrontation on the meaning of the sociopolitical past was developed in Peru. It resorts to a debate generated around the documentary Hugo Blanco, Río Profundo (2019) and the set of written statements issued by different Peruvian groups in favor and against it. The texts were analyzed using linguistic-discursive tools provided by critical discourse analysis (specifically, transitivity, lexical selection and modality). Two arguments are developed. On one hand, we analyze interpretative resources used by the civil-military, radical and conservative right wing to delegitimize -by linking them with Shining Path and MRTA’s terrorist actions- what the documentary narrates: the indigenous struggles for the takeover of lands led by Hugo Blanco in the 1960s. On the other hand, we study discursive mechanisms adopted by the artistic-cultural sectors to counteract and denounce the censorship request against the documentary (which is defended based on the historical veracity -the ethical duty- that it testifies and the unquestionable freedom of artistic expression that the documentary possesses). These findings allow us to offer a characterization of the “salvation memory” and the use made of it by the Peruvian far-right: it is authoritarian, victimizing, cynical and stigmatizing. Likewise, the response offered by the artistic-cultural sector is characterized as one that is located in the ethical turn: a defense of the duty to study the past. Thus, an important discursive dispute about the social past and the Peruvian cultural memory is revealed.