8           oblivious title

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Chapter 8 explores entanglements of land tenure in the final years of Shining Path’s Huallaga faction. Foreseeing a future for the region without Sendero Luminoso, the national government initiated a rural titling campaign. From that moment in 2007 I relay one episode of many in which insurgents manipulated the state’s administrative power so parcels seized from farmers, in the name of the Party, could be registered surreptitiously as the legal property of its members and sympathizers. My reflections unfold as a discussion of falsification—specifically how alterations in political time create opportunities to animate and selectively camouflage the multiplicity of social relations binding people to material things. Absent any formal peace process marking the cessation of armed conflict, land titling served as an unacknowledged mechanism of transitional justice. The registry campaign brought land, law, and time into a new, more complicated, constellation. In so doing, it concealed the breadth of enduring claims.