Abstract, Geopoetics, Geopolitics, and Violence: (Un)Mapping Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio

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Geopoetics, Geopolitics, and Violence: (Un)Mapping Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio

by Tamara L. Mitchell

Daniel Alarcón’s 2007 novel Lost City Radio positions post-civil-conflict Peru in relation to episodes of violence from across the globe by deploying two opposing cartographic impulses. First, the unnamed fictional nation of the novel shares historical, topographical, and sociopolitical traits with modern Peru. At the same time, the text refuses tidy association with Peru, principally by folding violent conflicts from a host of geopolitical spaces into the fictional nation via journalistic ekphrasis. This results in a unique geopoetics that serves to catalyze the localized reality of postconflict Peru as a means of interrogating the efficacy of human rights discourse in the neoliberal era on a global scale and bringing into focus the current inequity of responses to the global refugee crisis.

Abstract, Capitalism and Culture in Peru’s Neoliberal Process (1990–2013): Notes from an Ayacucho Community

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Capitalism and Culture in Peru’s Neoliberal Process (1990–2013): Notes from an Ayacucho Community

by Mario R. Cepeda-Caceres

Peruvian society underwent a profound transformation following the crisis of the 1980s and the structural reforms implemented in the 1990s. New paradigms were created in rural areas that connected previous discourses on local identity with market dynamics through tourism. The campesino community of Lucanas went from successful management of the vicuña to an economy that pursued market performance practices by adopting a neoliberal paradigm. A distinctive way of living with the structural changes, here called “culturally appropriated capitalism,” produced a new national consciousness—a new way of seeing and relating to the world, from the economic to the cultural.

Abstract, From Victims to Beneficiaries: Shaping Postconflict Subjects through State Reparations in Peru

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From Victims to Beneficiaries: Shaping Postconflict Subjects through State Reparations in Peru

by Ivan Ramirez Zapata and Rogelio Scott-Insua

The political and institutional coordinates that appear in official classifications of the victims of the Peruvian armed conflict (1980–2000) affect their subsequent recognition as beneficiaries of reparations programs. A review of the conceptual bases of the Comprehensive Reparations Program calls attention to the tension in the design and implementation of this program between a strictly reparative approach and another that addresses the structural disparities present in the aftermath of the war. Examination of the effects of that tension in two cases shows that the early stages of implementing housing reparations equated the concept of “victim” with that of “poor” and later made poverty a prerequisite for receiving housing reparations and points to the difficulty of making an appropriate offer of reparations for displaced persons, whose specific problems are not properly addressed by the traditional agenda of transitional justice.

Abstract Intercultural Disagreement: Implementing the Right to Prior Consultation in Peru

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Intercultural Disagreement: Implementing the Right to Prior Consultation in Peru

by Carmen Ilizarbe

How do state and indigenous representatives process disagreement? What challenges does cultural difference pose to intercultural dialogue? An analysis of the debates that preceded the implementation of the right to prior consultation of indigenous peoples in Peru points to the normative orientation toward consensus that informs the design of processes of intercultural dialogue and concludes that the structure and foundations of disagreement must be taken into account for fair, democratic dialogue to exist.

Abstract, Memories between Eras: ANFASEP’s Leaders before and after Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict

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Memories between Eras: ANFASEP’s Leaders before and after Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict

by Mercedes Crisostomo Meza

During Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000), many women formed associations of relatives of victims to demand truth, justice, and reparations. The Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos y Desaparecidos del Perú (National Association of Relatives of the Kidnapped, Detained, and Disappeared of Peru—ANFASEP) was the first of these organizations. Accounts by its leaders of their early lives challenge the stereotypes of them employed in previous studies and point to changes in their senses of identity in the postconflict period. Their memories are part of the development of a self-narrative in which new rationales emerge and they are led to question the validity of the characterization of them as poor, illiterate, dependent women unaware of having rights.

Abstract, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Law of Prior Consultation: Obstacles and Opportunities for Democratization and Political Participation in Peru

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Law of Prior Consultation: Obstacles and Opportunities for Democratization and Political Participation in Peru

by Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti and Lexi Seedhouse

A study informed by long-term fieldwork with Amazonian and Andean indigenous peoples examines their experiences of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Law of Prior Consultation. It engages with these efforts, which sought to address injustice by creating a new pact between the state and its indigenous citizens, their various failures, and the unintended opportunities that they have created for the political participation of indigenous peoples and their representatives.

Abstract, Continually Redefining Protagonismo: The Peruvian Movement of Working Children and Political Change, 1976–2015

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Continually Redefining Protagonismo: The Peruvian Movement of Working Children and Political Change, 1976–2015

by Jessica K. Taft

Activists in the Peruvian working children’s movement have been theorizing about “children’s protagonismo” for nearly 40 years. Changing political contexts and the infusion of discourses from other social movements have produced three major sets of meanings for this concept, each reflecting different dynamics in Peruvian social movement history. First, the concept, infused with ideas from liberation theology and Latin American engagements with Marxism, was primarily understood in terms of class struggle and collective organization. Second, because of opportunities and threats in the 1980s and 1990s, it became more closely associated with children’s rights frameworks. Third, since the early 2000s, the movement’s approach to protagonismo has drawn on indigenous theories of interdependence and relationality to challenge the individualism of neoliberal capitalism and governmentality. In holding these diverse ideological commitments together, the concept has allowed the movement of working children to communicate across multiple discursive communities.

Abstract, Doing Politics Differently: Middle-Class Youth and Politics in Contemporary Lima

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Doing Politics Differently: Middle-Class Youth and Politics in Contemporary Lima

by Franka Winter

Two recent studies of the political identities, discourses, utopias, and practices of young middle-class people in contemporary Lima indicate that, contrary to a common narrative of “antipolitics,” they had a critical rather than a negative relationship with politics. While they largely rejected traditional political institutions and identities, they had strong political values and ideals and many ideas for change. They were looking for a different way of doing politics rather than a retreat from it and pursued this through a diverse range of political practices. However, these discourses and practices had certain limitations, in particular with respect to their ability to forge strong alliances and bring about substantial change.

Abstract, The Ironic Legacy of an Opus Dei Bishop: Native Priests and Andean Catholicism in Postconflict Apurímac, Peru

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The Ironic Legacy of an Opus Dei Bishop: Native Priests and Andean Catholicism in Postconflict Apurímac, Peru

by Christine Lee

Since the end of the civil war, the diocese of Abancay in the south-central Peruvian Andes has produced a clergy made up entirely of men born and raised in the diocese where they now work. Yet, ironically, this diocese was specifically criticized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for its lack of engagement with local Andean populations. Abancay is a politically and theologically conservative diocese strongly influenced by the Opus Dei bishop who trained this generation of native clergy, but it is also a diocese in the process of forging a new relationship between Andeanness and institutional Catholicism.

Abstract, Narratives about Political Violence and Reconciliation in Peru

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Narratives about Political Violence and Reconciliation in Peru

by Jerónimo Ríos

The narratives of members of the armed forces, former members of the Shining Path, and victims of Peru’s armed conflict between 1980 and 2000 include very different views of the responsibility for the violence, the notion of terrorism, the concepts of truth, justice, reparation, and nonrepetition, and the meaning of reconciliation itself. Analysis of in-depth interviews reveals a society that, decades after the violence, in 2018, the Year of National Dialogue and Reconciliation, is still fractured and far from any type of recovery of its social fabric and symbolic resolution of its internal armed conflict.

Abstract, Presidents without Roots: Understanding the Peruvian Paradox

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Presidents without Roots: Understanding the Peruvian Paradox

by Carlos Ugo Santander Joo and Carlos Federico Domínguez Avila

Peru’s posttransition democracy presents a paradox: presidents have remained unpopular despite presiding over a period in which democratic institutions strengthened and the economy grew rapidly. O’Donnell’s work on delegative democracy suggests that the Peruvian paradox results from weak vertical accountability. Since Peru’s return to democracy, parties and civil society have been too weak to hold elected leaders accountable. Furthermore, presidents have faced opposition to reform from entrenched neoliberal technocrats. With no one holding them accountable and little capacity to govern, presidents have chosen to delegate decision-making authority to technocrats. Even when leaders have won office on reformist platforms, continuity has prevailed, and citizens have lost trust in their elected leaders. The origins of the Peruvian paradox and weak vertical accountability can be traced to the destruction of the institutional and organizational foundations of democracy in the 1990s under Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian regime.

Abstract, The Fall of the Alberto Fujimori Government: New Evidence and Interpretations

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The Fall of the Alberto Fujimori Government: New Evidence and Interpretations

by Carlos Ugo Santander Joo and Carlos Federico Domínguez Avila

New evidence and interpretations regarding the end of the authoritarian Alberto Fujimori regime and the Peruvian democratic transition of 2000 suggest that preexisting electoral and institutional rules intrinsic to the authoritarian regime contributed to a process of regime change. Thus Peru can be seen as one of the few Latin American nations in which the transition was caused by a rupture in contrast to the pacted-reform/rupture transitions most common in the region.

Introduction, The Arduous Task of Recomposing the Future in Postconflict Peru

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The Arduous Task of Recomposing the Future in Postconflict Peru

by Kristi M. Wilson

In 2000, President Alberto Fujimori fled Peru in the wake of a corruption scandal and faxed in his resignation. Shortly thereafter, in 2001, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created to investigate the atrocities committed between 1980 and 2000, a period of extreme political violence and human rights violations in Peru that included sexual violence against women, torture, disappearances, massacres, and extrajudicial executions. This violence, referred to as the “internal armed conflict,” included the actions of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) and state-sponsored and indiscriminate military actions against their suspected supporters in rural and indigenous areas especially. The years of the internal armed conflict were also characterized by authoritarian governance and high levels of corruption. This issue focuses on the postconflict period from Fujimori’s resignation to the present, challenging popular notions of Peru as an exemplar of postconflict reconstruction based on the presence of free and fair elections, separation of powers, a robust economy, and a powerful free press. A brief overview of recent political history will help to situate the period in its historical context.1