ABSTRACT
During the 1980s, the Peruvian state and the Peruvian Communist Party, Sendero Luminoso, conducted an internal conflict that left behind approximately 69,280 victims. Along with other scholars (Dajes, Manríque, Méndez, Silva Santisteban), I consider this conflict to be an explosion of what was beneath the surface of a national project founded on exclusion, rejection, and racism toward the Indigenous population. During the internal armed conflict women in general, and Indigenous women in particular, represented a special target for members of the Peruvian Armed Forces who physically and sexually abused them. Although this situation was present throughout the whole country, with responsibility shared between every group participating in the conflict, 83% of the cases of sexual violence are attributed to representatives of the Peruvian state (Henríquez Ayin, 84). As scholars have noted, the sexual violence by members of the Peruvian Armed Forces was a racialized violence, as white women did not experience this kind of treatment. This assertion is based on the fact that when females suspected of being members of Sendero Luminoso were mistreated, tortured, or raped, they were insulted because of their race. As these insults indicate, although the act of raping was related to their gender, the verbal violations were related to their race and ethnicity. The film Magallanes (2015) by Salvador del Solar not only politically critiques this government-sanctioned intersectional violence, one that parallels the work that anthropologists have already done, but also suggests ways that this violence was resisted. Unlike other films, Magallanes’ main character, an Indigenous Quechua-speaking woman, is never stripped of her agency completely. Rather, her agency is affirmed when she makes decisions for herself. The film portrays the violated subject from a non-hegemonic or post-hegemonic position that destabilizes the official discourses constructed around the conflict. With this, Magallanes presents the voice of the subaltern subject not as in need of salvation but as capable of agency and self-empowerment. It allows viewers, as Ranajit Guha would put it, to “listen to the small voice of history,” the voice of subaltern subjects that are never represented or included in official historical accounts as active, narrative agents.
