In The End of the Future, author Bartholomew Dean broadens the theoretical framework for understanding memory's role in reconciliation following a violent conflict. This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of violent attempts by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru, MRTA) to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin.
To give context to the causes and consequences of the MRTA's presence in the lower and central Huallaga, this book relies on the written works and testimony of Sistero Garcia Torres, an MRTA rebel commander; the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; MRTA propaganda; media accounts; and critical historical texts. Besides exposing Huallaga Valley human rights abuses, the book's contribution to political anthropology is consequential for its insistence that reconciliation is by no means equivalent to local, Indigenous notions of "justice" or customary forms of dispute resolution. Without deliberately addressing the diverse socio-cultural contours defining overlapping epistemologies of justice, freedom, and communal well-being, enduring reconciliation will likely remain elusive.
