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

• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Ivan Ramírez Zapata,Rogelio Scott-Insúa
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19861097
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19861097

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 228, Vol. 46 No. 5, September 2019, 158–173

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19861097

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

158

From Victims to Beneficiaries

Shaping Postconflict Subjects through State

Reparations in Peru

by

Ivan Ramírez Zapata and Rogelio Scott-Insúa

Translated by

Victoria J. Furio

The political and institutional coordinates that appear in official classifications of

the victims of the Peruvian armed conflict (1980–2000) affect their subsequent recog-

nition 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 prob-

lems are not properly addressed by the traditional agenda of transitional justice.

Las coordenadas políticas e institucionales que atraviesan la calificación oficial de

las víctimas del conflicto armado peruano (1980–2000) afectan su consiguiente reco-

nocimiento como beneficiarios de programas de reparación. Al revisar los fundamen-

tos conceptuales del Programa Integral de Reparaciones destacamos una tensión

tensión en el diseño e implementación de este programa entre una perspectiva propia-

mente de reparación y una perspectiva de combate a las disparidades estructurales

presentes en el período posconflicto. Examinamos la presencia y efectos de esta tensión

en dos casos concretos. El primero muestra cómo los inicios en la implementación de

reparaciones en vivienda equipararon la figura de la víctima con la de pobre, y poste-

riormente pusieron a la pobreza como requisito para recibir reparaciones en vivienda.

El segundo muestra la dificultad de proponer una oferta adecuada de reparaciones

para personas desplazadas, al ser una población cuyas características no encajan en la

agenda clásica de la justicia transicional.

Keywords: Peru, Postconflict, Transitional justice, Reparations, Victimhood

Ivan Ramírez Zapata is an anthropologist and a Master’s student in political science at the

Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia. Rogelio Scott-Insúa is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at

Cornell University. Victoria J. Furio is a translator and conference interpreter located in Yonkers,

NY. The authors thank Fiorella Vera for her bibliographical suggestions, Eduardo Dargent and Jon

Arrizabalaga for their comments on a preliminary version of this text, and the reviewers of this

article for their observations.

861097LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19861097Latin American PerspectivesRamírez and Scott-Usúa / Reparations and the Shaping of Subjects in Peru

research-article2019

Ramírez and Scott-Usúa / REPARATIONS AND THE SHAPING OF SUBJECTS IN PERU 159

According to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Peru’s

internal armed conflict caused 69,280 deaths and the displacement of more

than a half million people between 1980 and 2000. Adopting the normative

guidelines of transitional justice,1 the commission recommended the develop-

ment of a program of reparations for the victims, which came to fruition in 2005

with the creation of the Comprehensive Reparations Program. This program

required the concerted action of various government offices that related to its

beneficiaries through top-down (laws, standards, and regulations) and bottom-

up (complaints, demands, and demonstrations) interactions that shaped its

outcomes. This article describes some of the state mechanisms through which

the victims of the Peruvian conflict became beneficiaries of reparations.

Several scholars have studied the conditions that make a reparations pro-

gram viable. Powers and Proctor (2016) identify three conditions in a country

that facilitate a massive reparations program in a given country: a democratic

transition, sustained economic growth, and previous experience in the imple-

mentation of other transitional justice policies. These three conditions were

met in Peru in the early 2000s. However, Iliff, Maitre-Muhl, and Sirel (2011)

point out that in postconflict scenarios reparations tend to be confused with

the implementation of development policies and nation building, and this

may interfere with reparations processes because of the political agendas of

incumbent governments. Moreover, they maintain that the line separating

reparations from development policies is further blurred when the former are

administered by agencies in charge of the latter. In this regard, Carranza (2009:

3) states that “even in countries like Morocco and Peru, where reparations

programs are relatively on track, there is still debate over how to balance rep-

arations with the government’s obligation to encourage development.”

Additionally, for Ulfe (2015), because of their excessive reliance on economet-

ric and statistical criteria for fighting poverty neoliberal policy designs are

antithetical to those of transitional justice. This lack of distinction could impede

the recognition of human rights violations or distort the reparatory compo-

nent of the policies.

From a different perspective, Dixon (2016) puts forth a theoretical frame-

work for complementing rights-based approaches with those based on struc-

tural disparities; he asserts that, in some contexts, it is advisable to avoid a

sharp distinction between them. In a similar vein, Balasco (2017) proposes the

idea of “reparative development” to describe the intersection between devel-

opment initiatives and reparations programs (emphasizing that both should be

sensitive to the actual sources of insecurity). The two case studies we present

show that, in practice, there is a juxtaposition of and contradiction between two

approaches we call "narrow" and "extensive" due to both conceptual problems

and deficiencies in government action. This tension is reflected in an absence

of unified criteria for making the victim a true beneficiary of the respective

programs among the bureaucracies in charge.

In line with Fassin (2011), we grant that postconflict realities transcend tran-

sitional justice and extend to other fields affected by political interests and gov-

ernmental calculations, as is the case with public policies on human rights and

development. Therefore, we also witness new mechanisms of classification,

evaluation, and verification that determine who fulfills the officially established