A Note on the Current Violence in Peru

I'm deliberately not commenting because I don't feel like I am well-informed enough to have anything to add. Like everyone else, I'm following Inca Kola News on this one.

Just a few points to pull out now:

Fernando Rospigliosi:

The carnage of the last few days has no comparison and will, without doubt, mark the second government of Alan García the way that the prison massacres were a reference point of his first government (...).

Yes, yes, yes.
(from Huanca York Times via IKN)

And:

The tactics being used right now are similar to classic police-state governments: disinform, misinform, deflect, blame a bugbear or two and then rouse the rabble with fiery, polemic rhetoric. García's speech yesterday will be defined as "defiant" by supporters, but it was laden with things such as "600,000 natives have to answer to 28 million Peruvians". In García's world, natives aren't Peruvians.

(IKN)

This has been an issue in Peru for many years, particularly embodied in Mario Vargas Llosa's use of the term 'Peru profundo' ('deep Peru'). The phrase originates from Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre - but his distinction was between the legal state and the state as composed of its people. But for Vargas Llosa, the division is between 'modern' Peru and 'archaic', backward Peru - the indigenous.* Logically from this position, the part of the nation that has been 'left behind' needs to be persuaded, educated, or forced to join the rest. Such a view can only lead to continued racism and contributed to the horrendous price paid by the indigenous population during the 1980s and 1990s. Apparently it's not a view that Garcia has left behind.

* See for example Making Indigenous Citizens or Rereading Cultural Anthropology.