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1           malecón huallaga

A ridge of earth runs along the Huallaga. A road appears to ride that raised bank in gradual decline towards muddy waters. Here weathers of war have withdrawn, moving left to redouble upon themselves, deep in woods, on the other side. This chapter wonders if aftermaths of Peru’s internal conflict—pitting state forces against Maoist insurrection—might be read from territorial transformations of a region formerly dominated by cocaine. Beginning in a story of flight from left bank forests, I describe rural terrains, less far geographically than politically remote, being remade into new legal topographies. As these terrains shift, so do relations, hidden, between grievous pasts and postwar presents. Where violence events are visible no more, they animate riverine settings with a semblance, intermittently felt but hard to pin down. Lingering with ethnographic fragments, I trace how those pasts insist: arising from reliefs where matter meets sensation and image.

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