Towards Homes and Graves. About the Returns, Desaparecidos and Exhumation Challenges in Peru at the End of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The article concerns the wartime history of Peru and examines both topdown and bottom-up practices of accounting for the internal conflict of 1980–2000, which were initiated in the background of the warfare. The aim of the article is to discuss the connections I observed between the phenomena referred to in the title: return migrations of the inhabitants of the central-southern province, their search for the victims of forced disappearances, as well as the exhumation challenges emerging since 1 The article contains a few examples of borrowings from Spanish, which concern various categories of war victims. The translation of majority of them into English is possible, but I have chosen the Spanish terms as they are commonly used in scientific literature also in the English language. This is due to the fact that they literally express the social and cultural idiosyncrasy of the Peruvian conflict, and therefore seem more precise. All of them, however, are explained in the text. The first one is desaparecido, a participle of the Spanish verb desaparecer, meaning