Week 11: Writing About War Is Weird

I put off writing this blog post for a while because I didn’t really know how to write about this. Reading about the atrocities that occurred on both sides and just listing them down seems so arbitrary and clinical. I think the meaning is lost and the importance of the wars is ignored when you’re just writing down bulletpoints. But it’s hard to conceptualize the atrocities and when you do conceptualize them, how do you explain them without belittling the meaning? There’s a strange and unique tension when you’re reading or writing about war, because unless you live something personally, you will never be able to give a worthy analysis on whatever it is you’re writing about — at least that’s what I believe. So then the question must be asked, how do we write about war? And as I went through Dawson’s accounts of the dirty wars taking place in Peru and Argentina I don’t think I’ve found an answer and I’m not so sure there will ever be one.

Reading the documents made me really uncomfortable; I didn’t know if what I was doing — reading about these gruesome acts would provide any service to anyone or if I was just fascinated by the death and gore and participating in a sort of voyeuristic violence. It was a hard line to tread. With that being said, the document that stuck out the most to me was Mario Vargas Llosa’s piece on the killings of the eight journalists in Peru. I know what that sounds like… however, it wasn’t because of the violence that drew me to it, but his departing words in the piece.

Llosa said the story of their deaths revealed the fissures of democracy in Latin America. It’s difficult for people who don’t gain anything from democracy (i.e. free press) to defend it. The Uchuraccayans didn’t understand the press, they were constantly bullied and degraded by the press, their circumstances didn’t allow them to benefit from democracy because of the inherent flaws of democracy. These events, although brutal and horrifying and should never have occurred disclosed to the public how vulnerable democracy was/is in Latin America. Democracy fails the lower classes because of constant class warfare and privileges given to one class over the other.

Llosa’s words reminded me of the absolute failure of modernity in Latin America; modernity has  always been viewed as the final point a nation should reach, the end goal for everyone. But in every step to “modernize,” Latin America has suffered immensely. The western notion of modernity is not applicable to other nations, it makes development seem like a straight forward line, but it’s never that easy. I think nations should be allowed to progress in their own timeframe within their own circumstances, pushing that idea of modernity forward has never worked, I mean look at any African nation who tried to modernize using the west’s methods. And Llosa voiced an idea I had been thinking about for a long time, but didn’t know how to phrase: guerilla movements and communist revolutions are almost always spurred on by the elite intellectual class, the privileged in society. It’s always heralded as a peasant, a proletariat revolution but that’s never the case. Especially with the Sendero’s, university students comprised the largest of the group, and I kept thinking how ironic it was that they were fighting against the bourgeoisie class when they were literally the bourgeoisie class…