Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori presented a new National Education Plan for 2026-2031 on September 14, 2026, alongside Education Minister José Antonio Chang, unveiling a curriculum overhaul that would change how school textbooks describe the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s.
The plan drops the term "internal armed conflict" from school materials. The government defended the change as an effort to remove ideology from teaching and focus instead on what it called concrete facts.
What Fujimori and Chang said
Fujimori said the curriculum needed to be modernized and stripped of ideology, and should instead be built on data, statistics and real information. Chang backed the move, saying the state would eliminate any political viewpoint or interpretation of the years of violence Peru lived through.
Chang said the government would withdraw all forms of ideology from the national curriculum, arguing there should be no ideological interpretation of history. He said the state would rely instead on what he called scientific historical rigor so children could form their own critical judgment, without the state steering their thinking along ideological lines.
Chang also objected to labeling that period of history as an internal armed conflict, rejecting the complexity of those years and setting aside the abuses committed by state agents. He said the government would remove what he described as interested interpretations of history, including the characterization of the period as a civil war, arguing that what took place was simply terrorism and that this should be taught as historical fact rather than framed in ideological terms.
Historian warns of a rewritten past
Historian José Ragas told the newspaper La República that the government's strategy amounts to an attempt to manipulate history in order to build a narrative favorable to the state, under the guise of objectivity and the elimination of ideology.
Ragas said the government is trying to simplify the past to avoid the responsibilities of the first Fujimori administration. He said there is a concrete attempt by the minister, backed by the government, to simplify and manipulate the understanding of what happened during those years of political violence. Reducing it solely to terrorism, he said, without including other aspects, establishes that the origin, development and consequences of the political violence rested exclusively with subversive movements.
Ragas said the new narrative reduces the conflict to the label of terrorism in order to conceal abuses committed by the security forces. He said the problem with that framing is that it deliberately omits the actions of the state, which were significant in the fight against political violence and which also led to abuses and human rights violations that are already well documented.
A precedent for democracy, historian says
Ragas warned that the government's strategy does not just distort the past but sets a precedent affecting democracy and citizens' rights. He said the aim is not only to impose a particular narrative but to normalize one that favors the government and its allies.
He said the approach also shields state arbitrariness under the cover of security, favoring a view in which any action taken by the state is framed as self-defense against subversive threats, so that any killing or human rights violation would not need to be judged because it was merely an "excess," in the government's own terms.
Ragas said legitimizing this view opens the door to open autocracy and impunity. He said it normalizes the idea that anything goes in fighting not only terrorist forces but, later, political opposition as well, giving the state free rein to act as it pleases. He said this builds a state discourse among citizens that normalizes violations and impunity, beginning with members of the army and police but also extending to the political responsibility of Alberto Fujimori.
Impact on critical thinking
Ragas said the current government's approach is in no way a neutral proposal, despite the minister's framing, nor is it free of ideology. He said what is being done is pure ideology and therefore does not deserve any support.
He added that the curriculum change is part of a political agenda pushed for years by sectors aligned with the ruling party, citing an earlier proposal by a Fujimorista legislator for a course on the history of terrorism, and describing the move as part of a broader strategy to attack the Truth Commission's report and deny institutional responsibility.
Ragas said imposing this narrative in classrooms directly undermines the development of critical thinking among younger generations. He said what is lost is not just a clumsy attempt to erase a period of history, but a basic and fundamental element of citizenship: the ability to know one's own past and form one's own judgment.
