The President of Germany, Joachim Gauck, arrived in Lima Thursday evening from Berlin, on an official visit focused on the inauguration of a special photographic exhibition at the new Lugar de la Memoria, or Memory Museum.
His visit will begin Friday with a meeting with President Ollanta Humala, followed on Saturday with the photographic exhibition at which he will address the theme — “There is no future without the past: Experiences, achievements and challenges in building a culture of memory in Peru and in Germany.”
The Memory Museum, now named the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion, was built thanks to the financial support of the German government and has faced its own challenges to achieve completion — not the least from the military and the political parties who governed Peru during the two decades of political violence initiated by the Shining Path.
Gauck is scheduled to visit a number of social inclusion projects in Ayacucho funded by German technical cooperation agreements, and plans to also visit Cusco and Machu Picchu.
