El indulto como acontecimiento y el asalto al lenguaje de la memoria en Perú

Abstract

This article is about the pardon granted to Alberto Fujimori on December 24, 2017. The analysis assumes the pardon as an exemplary event. That is, a point of inflection in Peruvian politics, which reveals a significant framework and discourse that attempt to make and assault on the language of memory, especially in terms of the idea of reconciliation. Methodology: The study was based on critical and in-depth analysis of a specific case: the pardon granted to Alberto Fujimori on December 24, 2017. We consider this pardon as an exemplary event that marks a different and revealing moment in the struggle for memory of the Peruvian internal armed conflict. Conclusions: To approach Alberto Fujimori’s pardon as an event enables an in-depth examination of the political process and how its significant framework is constituted, as well as the symbolic field of its representation and achievement: its own unfoldment. This allows us to demarcate it and from there, understand how the assoult on the language of memory has proceeded. Originality: The event of the pardon granted to Alberto Fujimori on December 24, 2017 reveals the struggle for impunity, on one hand, and the struggle for justice, on the other. Studies on memory usually focus on aspects of struggle based in victims’ associations or in processes of transitional justice, but rarely on facts that evidently provoke the tensions of memory. This is more likely about underlining the way in which discourses of justifications reveal the effort to establish a definitive meaning as the event, and reflects difference tensions and struggles surrounding, mainly, the sustainability of neoliberalism. Thus, pardon also constituted as a Point of inflection of the political process of the consolidation of democracy, revealing its extreme fragility.

Keywords

• Thesaurus: memory
• Peru
• politics
• Authors: postconflict
• event