‘Terruqueo’ and Historical Negationism: The Singular, Radical and Exemplary Revisionism of the Peruvian Far-Right Wing

In this essay I reflect on ‘terruqueo’ in the context of the mnemonic dispute that the populist radical right is conducting in Latin America. I develop an explanation of the Peruvian phenomenon known as ‘terruqueo’ (a socio-cultural invalidation device) and relate it to the historical revisionism being promoted by the rising populist radical right in the current Latin American scenario. I argue that ‘terruqueo’ can be understood from a local and regional perspective: the specific phenomenon is inscribed as a singular, radical and representative example of a more general discursive practice. On the one hand, I establish a genealogy of ‘terruqueo’ and its obstructing and delegitimizing exercise. I explain how the socio-cultural hegemony consolidated (and bequeathed) by Fujimorism and its memory of salvation establishes, through ‘terruqueo’, an instrument of coloniality that reactivates in the present a tenacious stigmatizing discourse that dehumanizes and ‘deperuvianizes’ certain subjects subalternized by —and therefore uncomfortable for— the dominant social order. On the other hand, I examine the rise of the radical populist right in Latin America from their instrumentalization of the recent past. I describe how these movements contest political hegemony at the level of culture through the effective imposition of their mnemonic narrative: a reactionary transnational memory —illiberal memory— which, influenced by the Latin American anti-communist tradition and the changing global paradigm of terrorism, whitewashes and relativizes events of the past in order to (re)shape the historical memory of their countries. In this way, from a historical and conceptual exploration supported by several examples, I show how this denialist practice of the Peruvian radical right is a national phenomenon that dialogues and is part of the global strategy that the Latin American populist radical right has been developing: a reinterpretation of the national processes of memory in favor of their conservative, revisionist and stigmatizing political agendas.