José Carlos Agüero’s The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining Path

Translated and edited by Michael J. Lazzara and Charles F. Walker

Durham and London: Duke University Press 2021

José Carlos Agüero could be introduced in many ways - a poet, a public intellectual, author –
but in The Surrendered, now translated and published in English together with an
introduction and an illuminating conversation with the author, he is first and foremost, a
son. Both of Agüero’s parents fought in Shining Path, the guerrilla organisation that declared
war on the Peruvian state in 1980 and which, according to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (2001-3), committed the most human rights violations, having a ‘genocidal
character’. Before he was out of his teens, both had been killed.

The Surrendered is not a memoir as such, certainly not an autobiography; it is a series of

fragmented comments and introspective vignettes reflecting its original form of blog posts.
It feels intimate, with the prose often an internal dialogue that is reflexive, tentative, with a
hesitant back and forth as Agüero argues in one direction, and then often in the next
paragraph – sometimes even in the same paragraph - he’ll argue to the contrary. The
translators comment in the introduction on the number of times the word ‘but’ appears in
the text. To ‘give an account of the self’ is always going to be a negotiation of sorts, of other
existent accounts, and indeed, a mode of ‘surrender’, since once printed, your positions and
even your memories of your closest relatives, are available for judgement. This is one of the
meanings he gives the title. Thus do vulnerability and fragility infuse the book, written as he
says himself from a place of ‘doubt’ (2021:20), in which Agüero attempts to be ‘brutally
honest’ and ‘not shy away from the word ‘perhaps’’ (2021:28). It is a refreshing and
engaging attempt to convey hesitancy, a textual equivalent of attempts to create works – be
they artistic, memorial or educational – that respond to incidents of violence while carrying
with them a sense of their own limitations and impediments, their own delimited conditions
and impossibilities.

Agüero describes the book at one point as an attempt to consider the ‘elusive nature of
subjectivity of public life’, explored through the elusive nature of what motivated his
parents, the choices they made, the formation and journey of their political subjectivities.
They were, he says, ‘common senderistas’ (2021:35), poor but educated union leaders and
well known in their neighbourhood, but not high-ranking leaders of Shining Path. He
remembers being present for political discussions, the family giving shelter to political
comrades, even helping with the construction of explosive devices. But some of the crucial
questions he would wish to have answers to now, as an adult trying to understand what
happened, remain unanswered. This is partly because he was so young when his father, José
Manuel Agüero Aguirre, was killed in the El Frontón prison massacre in 1985 and partly
because his mother was reluctant to be drawn on her motivations. Agüero did broach such
conversations, but she would give partial answers, batting his questions away with ‘all in
good time’. The answers were to remain elusive after his mother was the victim of a
selective assassination in 1992, carried out by state military personnel, who left her body on
the beach south of Lima, attempting to blame the murder on Shining Path. Unsurprisingly,
his ‘research archive’ is also limited, with little documented on paper for him to pore over,
so that he relies in large part upon his what he himself recalls, his impressions, those

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moments have stayed with him. Yet despite this paucity of evidence or answers, he does
manage to convey something of his parents’ political motivations, not least the power of the
political dream, their commitment to equality and social justice, their horizons of hope. It is
clear that they had different relationships to ‘the Party’ (Shining Path), which changed over
time, as did their commitments to each other. On this last point, one memorable document
that Agüero does refer to is a letter from his father to his mother at a time when his mother
was reconsidering her relationship to ‘the Party’, about which his comments are
characteristically nuanced, referring both to his expectations and desires for the letter to be
a supportive, even a romantic one, and his disappointment that instead the letter was much
cooler, as his father articulated a harder line, advising her instead to stay steadfast. Indeed,
The Surrendered is an account that conveys how crucially political imaginations and loyalties
are intertwined with intimate familial politics and loyalties. On the relationship between his
parents, and especially the question of who persuaded whom to join Shining Path, Agüero
says that this is something he doesn’t ‘want to know’ too much about, his reluctance due to
a wish to avoid his speculations feeding into a still on-going family blame-game.

As someone with a personal relationship to the stories being told about the violent past in
Peru, positioning himself within public debates has proven complicated. At moments he has
needed to tread carefully, considering which groups and with which arguments to align
himself, as the projections of others seek to mould him to their desires and understandings.
One of Agüero’s arguments early on in the book concerns what he calls the tendency for
well-meaning commentators to want to ‘contextualise’ militancy and violence, to humanise
the militant, even to start to regard members of the Shining Path in heroic terms. This, he
argues, carries a danger with it, that of replacing old myths with new. In the chapter
‘Stigma’, he recalls a conversation with a group of young people after a film screening of a
documentary about a Shining Path militant, a conversation in which he felt obliged to raise
the possibility that the militant’s decision to distinguish herself within the family and the
community could be read less heroically, even as self-centred, an egotistical act (2021:27).
Agüero reflects on the process of these conversations; he knows he could potentially wield
an unassailable authority in the conversation, even have the final word. But, ‘I felt I was
ambushing them’ (2021:27), and he desists. To continue in what was becoming heated
would only impose silence or drive people to rehearse well-trodden positions that would
not facilitate meaningful communication. This was a ‘betrayl of language’ Agüero
comments, by which he seems to mean that language betrays him rather than that he
would be betraying the purpose of language, ie. to communicate. His choice to fall silent,
and the sense of intense discomfort that silence brings, recur throughout the book.

The moments in the book where he writes about his mother’s death are among the most
poignant. Silvia Solórzano Mendívil was shot on the beach in Lima in an extrajudicial killing
in 1992, probably by ‘state security agents’. Among his other reactions – including his flat
mutter of ‘OK’ on receiving the news from an officer who appeared at the shop where José
Carlos worked with his mother at the University – he reports a deep sense of relief. ‘Finally!
Finally, after so many years my mother had finished dying. I’d never have to wait up for her
until dawn. I’d never have to ask friends or acquaintances about her after she’s been gone
for days on end. There’d be no more jails, no more visiting her in prison, no more begging
her to leave the country … No more of any of it’ (2021:42). With such deaths, he comments,
there is a certain sense of freedom because all one’s fears and worries about the loved one

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have to stop (2021:44). At the same time, he was ‘wracked with guilt’ (2021:42). This is his
problem, Agüero writes, a personal issue that we needn’t be interested in; but on the other
hand, he avers, of course it is ‘not just a personal matter’. He has read Elie Wiesel and Primo
Levi, he knows about these tensions and that ‘affect can fail’ because - or as a result - of
impotence and fear. If, as he suggests to Michael Lazzara and Charles Walker in the helpful
and characteristically frank interview that is included in the book, writing is ‘part of my
process of resolving’ (2021:116) issues of his own, the entanglements of love and judgement
more often than not end with Agüero’s self-admonishment. He accepts that his parents are
a ‘pretext’, and that he is ‘using them. And in every act of using someone there’s always
some degree of violence’ (2021:117).

The Surrendered mounts a subtle critique of dominant discourses around reconciliation. In

particular, Agüero reflects on the inadequacies of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission’s (2001-3) task, for whom he worked for a time. He recalls a time when a man
approached him to explain that the reparations were not important to him, or to his fellow
villagers, but they wanted Agüero and the TRC to help them reconcile with their neighbours.
The man asked: ‘Please help us to convince our neighbours [from the Ichu community] to
forgive us’ (2021:46). It was a request to which Agüero felt he couldn’t adequately respond.
He understood the man’s need, to have his conscience calmed, that he couldn’t live easy
with people ‘justifiably hating him’(2021:46). It was clearly a sentiment he himself related
to, for the justified hatred that ‘marked’ the man was also that aimed at Agüero’s parents.
But the act of forgiveness is profound, Agüero suggests; it is exceptional. This exceptional
quality is lost through the repetition of scripts played out in Peru, where human rights
language has become ‘formulaic’. He writes: ‘we don’t recognise how exceptional
[forgiveness] is because we take part in the theatrics of our communities and institutions’
(2021:98). Such performances risk becoming unresponsive to the true complexities of
human emotion. If easy sloganeering around reconciliation draws Agüero’s critical response,
most concern is reserved for those who are so sure of their moral supremacy, who speak as
if from a ‘pristine pedestal’ and order people ‘not to forgive, not to forget’ (2021:100).
Sometimes even the idea of justice becomes so hardened, he comments, that it is wielded
like a weapon, a ‘justice without mercy’ (2021:99). He is concerned about the way those
close to him can become ‘overcome by an impulse toward open confrontations, toward
outbursts that draw a line in the sand between angels and demons’ (2021:99). Throughout
the book he is wanting to complicate such lines. He has known those - his parents but also
friends of his - who were involved in violent crimes: ‘It’s hard for me to remember those
friends as monsters. But, yes, they committed atrocities, and yes, they justified them’
(2021:51).

On his father’s actions, Agüero confesses, he has himself succumbed to the desire for
forgiveness and its promise of closure, tacking on a pathetic plea for forgiveness to some
emails he was writing to people he knew had shared experiences with his father. He found
himself asking forgiveness for his father’s acts – ‘if my father caused you harm, I ask your
forgiveness in his name’ (2021:54). He then felt ‘ridiculous’ about asking such a thing, as one
kind but curt reply - ‘We kindly request that you do not contact us any more. May peace be
with you’ - was followed by another that pointed out that ‘it’s out of place for you to ask
forgiveness in his name’ (2021:54). Agüero was ashamed at his clumsy gesture. He ‘would
have preferred not to write anything nor to receive any response’ (2021:55).

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Members of the Shining Path assumed that Agüero would wish to have retribution for the
deaths of his parents (2021:101). Sharing information with him about who killed his father,
not only who ordered the deed but also who tortured and killed his father ‘with their own
hands’, their assumption was that he would wish to pursue that person (2021:101). Similarly
after his mother was assassinated, he was approached by a messenger from the Shining
Path who called his parents ‘heros of the revolution’ and invited him to ‘avenge their
deaths’ (2021:101). Agüero ponders why he doesn’t feel this desire for retribution,
reflecting, among other things, and with a very generous spirit, that ‘I don’t want their
children to inherit any stigma. I want to give those men an opportunity to leave their
children the best versions of themselves’ (2021:102). But Agüero doesn’t wish to offer his
own as a superior attitude. Here, as throughout the book, he includes in this same passage a
hesitation: ‘I don’t know if my reasoning is sound’ (2021:102).

The title of the book works on several different levels. Agüero speaks of his mother not
being ready to ‘surrender’ her relationship with the Party even though by the early 1990s
she was understood its purpose as profoundly mistaken. Yet it ‘was the only thing that gave
sense to her life’ and she simply ‘wasn’t ready to surrender’ (2021:51). A second sense
refers to Agüero’s refusal of the term ‘victim’, despite the fact that both his parents were
killed extra-judicially: ‘I never protested for them’ (2021:96). Something would certainly be
surrendered if he became a victim, but conversely the term also refers to what he imagines
would possible if he did accept the label, insofar as he could then ‘surrender’, handing
himself over to the judgement, scrutiny and compassion of others’ (2021:97). In a sense the
book gives form to this generous but potentially risky gesture, as Agüero surrenders his
thoughts to us, allowing us to see their ambivalences and debate their limitations. Finally,
Agüero refuses to offer a simplistic model for peace, and as such he refuses to surrender to
the pressures on commentators such as himself. Characteristically self-effacing, he
comments ‘forgiveness should be understood as a painful loss, a difficult letting go that at
the same time means completing oneself in another’, adding to this complex thought ‘I can’t
however, find the words to describe this’(2021:105). Agüero quotes from a short story by
Jordi Ibáñez in which a Francoist soldier declares ‘I am a surrendered man’ even though he
has won the battle. Agüero comments: ‘this paradoxical act, the soldier’s will to share the
fate of the conquered, has inspired my thinking, though I still stumble through my thoughts’
(2021:105-6). This work is given its character, and makes its most profound contribution, by
allowing the reader to think through this stumbling, with Agüero becoming a trusted
companion to moments in his own life-story, whose honesty in and through the embrace of
contradiction makes for a compelling and surprisingly – given the subject matter – tender
read.