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Renato Cisneros couldn’t remember the day his sister Valentina turned four; at the time, he’d been only fifteen months old But recently, on an old 8 mm film, he found some footage of her birthday party, held at a country club in Lima during the spring of 1977 As Cisneros writes in his memoir, The Distance Between Us, he was enthralled by the discovery:   Grainy as they are, the images show around a hundred grown-ups mingling in the gardens of the Real Club de San Isidro, watching their children as they enjoy a clown show, dance to a band and take turns whacking a piñata with a plastic stick Everything is decorated with balloons and streamers with the colours and textures of the period A banner reads ¡Que viva la fiesta!   The camera captures their father, Luis Federico Cisneros Vizquerra, in a natty blue suit, cigar and whisky in his hand Despite his commanding air, Cisneros senior quickly gets stuck in He plays with the clowns; he sings Feliz cumpleaños a ti to his daughter; he ‘smiles and does the limbo and guzzles a fizzy drink from a baby’s bottle’, that baby being little Renato himself, now in his forties, staring back at this bygone age   Cisneros senior would have thought he deserved to relax He was not only a Lieutenant General of the Peruvian Army, but – it being one of Peru’s intermittent periods of military rule – the Minister of the Interior, and right-hand man to the President, General Francisco Morales-Bermúdez Five days before Valentina’s birthday, it was therefore Cisneros who had arranged for Carlos Alberto Maguid, an Argentinian left-wing activist, to ‘disappear’ from Lima’s streets This was a personal favour to the new military junta in Buenos Aires; the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla had paid a visit to Lima and expressed, over ‘liquor, cigarettes and chocolates’, what he thought of political gadflies who tried to hide abroad Maguid’s fate is a mystery today; Videla’s junta would sometimes drop its desaparecidos into the ocean, sometimes incinerate them alive And yet, despite knowing General Cisneros’s complicity, Renato can only