Mourning Remains - State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru's Postwar Andes - Grand Format

Mourning Remains examines the attempts to find, recover, and identify the bodies of the disappeared during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru's central southern Andes. It focuses on the ways elderly Quechua mothers engage forensic exhumations of mass graves as part of their longtime struggle in search for their missing kin. Of the estimated 16,000 Peruvians disappeared, by mid-2016 only the bodies of 3,202 victims had been located, and only 1,833 identified.
The rest remain unknown or unfound, scattered across the country and often shattered beyond recognition. Isaias Rojas-Perez examines how, in the face of the state's failure to account for their missing dead, the mothers rearrange senses of community, belonging, authority, and the human to bring the disappeared back into being through everyday practices of mourning and memorialization. Mourning Remains reveals how this collective mourning unsettles, and becomes an alternative to, the state's project of securing the future of the body politic by means of governing past atrocity.