Show of cruelty

Staring out with his good eye -- the one that wasn’t hacked with a machete -- the forlorn-looking man in the photograph draws you into an elegant colonnaded courtyard. A shallow black pool reflects his unsettling image, one of several oversized photographs in this outdoor enclosure resembling a ravaged Pompeian villa.

On opposite walls are equally unsparing images: an Indian woman grieving over a cadaver; a grim-faced young couple being herded off by soldiers; a young mother breast-feeding her baby while wandering listlessly through what looks like a primitive refugee camp. In other nearby galleries, browsers come face to face with pictures of bloated corpses and screaming children. In a connecting sala, an antique altarpiece veiled in white fabric invites visitors to meditate on the savagely graphic images they’ve just encountered.

If not for the artful way they’re displayed, the 245 photographs in the exhibition “Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar” might be almost unbearable to look at. A documentation of the fratricidal 20-year war waged between Peru’s government forces and two radical communist guerrilla groups, Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), the exhibition was compiled as a visual addendum to an unprecedented 5,000-page report on the conflict issued last summer by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The exhibition’s title means “to remember” in Spanish and in the Quechua Indian language of the Andes mountains, and that’s exactly what the show’s curators hope Peruvians will do, particularly those who were too young to have lived through the turbulent years of 1980 to 2000, when about 70,000 people were killed or went missing in one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern Latin American history. “There are generations that never have seen these things, that don’t think these things are possible,” says Denise Ocuyama, one of the exhibition’s coordinators.

Since opening last August, “Para Recordar” has been hailed not only as a political milestone but also as an eloquent aesthetic achievement. More than 100,000 people have passed through its home, the Casa Riva Aguero, a once-opulent mansion that sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and formerly belonged to a kinsman of Peru’s first president. Even inside its walls you can smell the bracing salt air, a welcome tonic to the surrounding aura of death.

Donated by the Catholic University of Lima, the Casa Riva Aguero had been empty for years and was practically in ruins. University president Salomon Lerner, who also served as the Truth Commission’s chairman, suggested the house for the exhibition site, and about $150,000 was spent on partially restoring it.

But in a radical creative stroke, the architect who supervised the makeover recommended that the house be left in its current semi-unreconstructed state. Today, the casa’s stark white walls, peeling wooden Doric columns and worn marble floors make it an understated metaphor for the unfinished project of Peruvian justice and democracy.

In the galleries documenting the strife that occurred in the bleak Andean highlands region, the floors have been left as unresurfaced dirt, and the galleries’ adobe walls resemble those found in rural peasant dwellings. In one long sala exhibiting a drastically enlarged photo of a blasted municipal council office, a crumbling gallery wall stands open to the sky. On their way out of the exhibition, visitors pass by a lone photo of Abimael Guzman, the middling sociology professor-turned-fulminating Shining Path leader, as he appeared in his prison uniform following his capture in 1992.

And while the exhibition is a house of horrors on one level, it also functions as a sacred space that pays homage to the war’s victims and those who risked their lives to record its brutal legacy. “The photographs have an impact in the sadness, in the suffering,” says Marie Maldonado, an elementary school teacher, visiting the show with her students one recent morning. “It’s important for it not to happen again. It’s good to know it so it won’t be repeated.”

Originally, the exhibition was supposed to run for only a couple of months. But it quickly proved so popular that it already has been extended twice and is now scheduled to remain in the Casa Riva Aguero through December. Meanwhile, officials are scrambling to find the show a permanent home, possibly in the National Library.

Though the curators aimed for evenhandedness and have avoided editorializing about either the guerrillas’ destructiveness or the government’s repressive countermeasures, the exhibition has generated plenty of controversy within Peru. Nancy Chappell, 39, the exhibition’s co-curator along with photographer Mayu Mohanna, says that some people initially had questioned the need for the show, including even some photographers who lent their images. “One photographer said, ‘Why do you want to do this? It’s very sad,’ ” she recalls. “For me, it was a little frustrating.”

Because the war ultimately touched many different strata of Peruvian society, the exhibition’s 27 salas have been organized thematically as well as regionally. One deals with widows; another depicting the suffering of orphans includes some children’s harrowing audiotaped recollections of the violence. Sometimes the show humanizes its subjects in unexpected ways: A sala dedicated to images of war prisoners includes a group shot of MRTA inmates celebrating one member’s birthday in prison. “It’s very well put together,” says Lisa Fitzgerald, 25, a photographer from Brisbane, Australia, pausing to watch a video narrating the history of the conflagration. “I can’t read much Spanish, but I can still get a lot from the visuals.”

Chappell, who also is a photographer for the Lima daily newspaper El Comercio, says that the Peruvian media didn’t fully confront the phenomenon of the war, even when Shining Path’s bombing attacks reached Lima in the early 1990s. The photos and video that appear in the exhibition are thus far more explicit than what most people here have ever seen before.

Even so, one perspective is largely missing from the exhibition: that of the Shining Path fighters, who invited only a handful of journalists to tag along and record their activities. Among the show’s most chilling sections is a gallery containing images taken by a group of eight journalists moments before they were killed by a peasant militia on Jan. 26, 1983, in rural Uchuraccay. A subsequent investigation headed by novelist Mario Vargas Llosa concluded that the peasants may have believed the journalists were Shining Path guerrillas and mistaken their cameras for firearms.

The Peruvian military was equally wary of journalists witnessing the heavy-handed tactics it was using to quell the rebellion and so kept reporters at bay, Chappell says.

The show’s popularity with foreign visitors and the coverage it has received internationally appears to have taken many Peruvians by surprise. Javier Ciurlizza Contreras, 37, who served as the Truth Commission’s executive secretary and now heads the Institute of Democracy and Human Rights here, says that many Peruvians, particularly those in the capital of Lima, were largely unaware of the atrocities being committed in the Andean sierra, or else chose not to pay attention. They didn’t realize the whole world was watching. “It was like the news from another world, from another planet,” Ciurlizza says. “This wasn’t Peru, these were those ‘salvajes indigenas’ [Indian savages]. So the violence didn’t affect everyone at the same level.”

Even today, the peculiar nature of the war remains hard for many here to grasp. Shining Path was unusual among contemporary Latin American guerrilla movements, Ciurlizza says, in the number of deaths it produced, in its ideological virulence and in the fact that it arose during a period when Peru, though burdened with serious social and economic inequities, was in certain important ways a functioning democracy. “We had freedom of speech, freedom of elections,” he says. “And we had 70,000 people killed. That’s very, very strange.”

Chappell says she hopes the exhibition will give Peruvians, especially in Lima and other urban areas, a clearer sense of what really happened in the rural sierra during those nightmare years.

But asked whether such events could recur, her response is bleak.

“Sendero arose in a country that was sick,” she says, “and I’m afraid, lamentably, that it hasn’t gotten better.”