It was supposed to be a museum of memories: a place of dialogue and reconciliation where Peruvians could commemorate the victims of a brutal internecine conflict which killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s and 1990s.
Since its controversial inception in 2015, the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion has received about 60,000 visitors a year.
But Lima’s ultra-conservative mayor, Rafael López Aliaga, has now presided over the museum’s closure in a move that human rights activists fear reflects a growing denial of the mass killings carried out by the armed forces in the conflict. The Mao-inspired Shining Path were not alone in committing atrocities.
The official reason for the sudden closure of the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion, known by its Spanish acronym Lum, was due to the museum’s failure to meet municipal safety norms.
But López Aliaga, founder of the far-right National Renovation party and a member of the ultra-conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, has long voiced his opposition to the museum, which was opened eight years ago in the face of protests from far-right groups.
He has alleged that the Lum peddles a “false narrative” about the period of violence between 1980 and 2000 in which nearly 70,000 people were killed by both the Shining Path rebels and the armed forces, according to Peru’s truth and reconciliation commission.
In January, the former presidential candidate said the museum was an “offense to the nation” and should be put under the control of the armed forces, insisting it was time to “take control of the narrative”. The museum was closed last week by the municipality of Miraflores, a district of Lima whose mayor, Carlos Canales, also belongs to López Aliaga’s political party.
“It took me by surprise,” said Eduardo González Cueva, a Peruvian sociologist and human rights consultant working at the International Centre for Transitional Justice in New York. He believes the move fits into a wider trend of rightwing denialism of crimes committed by state forces in Latin America – and even the global push by radical conservatives to take control of cultural battles.
“López Aliaga is immersed in this kind of extremist position but he also knows that this is an act of opportunism that makes sense in terms of feeding the narrative of his base,” he added.
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, a professor of Latin American history at the University of Kent, said the mayor’s party had managed to “seize power at the local level … in addition to coinciding with a weak government that is supported by the military and the most recalcitrant sectors of the right”.
News of the closure came on the day that Amnesty International was due to launch a hard-hitting report at the Lum criticising the armed forces’ disproportionate use of force in recent violent protests.
It is perhaps no coincidence that in the same week, Lima’s mayor hosted the second annual meeting of the Foro de Madrid, organised by the thinktank of the far-right Spanish political party Vox.
The group, which claims its mission is to defend democracy in Latin America from the “threat of communism”, praised Peru’s government for deterring a supposed leftist destabilisation plan in recent months of unrest which claimed more than 67 lives.
“This is the current political juncture we are living in Peru right now,” said González Cueva.
“Extremist positions can attempt to take over the narrative because the government has given itself to the public dissemination of extremist fantasies,” he added.
In January, Peru’s President Dina Boluarte barred Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales from entering the country as she accused foreign interests of stirring up deadly protests in support of the jailed former president Pedro Castillo.
“Historical memory is a fundamental value of all democracies,” tweeted the European Union in Peru last week, describing the Lum as a place where citizens could “inform themselves and reflect on what Peru suffered, so that it will never be repeated”. Germany was the major donor for the museum’s construction.
Peru’s minister of culture, Leslie Urteaga, admitted other museums also lacked up-to-date safety certificates, although no others had been closed, and said her ministry was working with Miraflores’s municipality to reopen the Lum as soon as possible.
