“They Committed No Crime”

Abstract

This chapter provides a summary overview of indigenous politics in the town of San Pedro Necta from the 1940s to the early 1980s, focused on experiences with the dictatorship, armed rebellion, and state violence. The rest of the chapter explores how Sampedranos narrated this past after years of army efforts to promote official memories and subsequent truth commissions. I focus particularly on how they narrated themselves as uninvolved with the guerrilla movement, and as being caught “between two armies” during the armed conflict. It also examines how these frames were rooted in identities predicated on the failure of the revolution that took hold on a post-genocidal landscape of memory. I examine how these frames open and close spaces for indigenous agency in neoliberal democracy.