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

Abstract

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.

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 fundamentos conceptuales del Programa Integral de Reparaciones destacamos una tensión tensión en el diseño e implementación de este programa entre una perspectiva propiamente 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 posteriormente 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

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 development 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 program 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 implementation 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 reparations with the government’s obligation to encourage development.” Additionally, for Ulfe (2015), because of their excessive reliance on econometric 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 component of the policies.

From a different perspective, Dixon (2016) puts forth a theoretical framework for complementing rights-based approaches with those based on structural 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 development 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 transitional justice and extend to other fields affected by political interests and governmental 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 criteria for obtaining the benefits and government resources that these policies offer. In the phase inaugurated by the Comprehensive Reparations Program, the victims/ beneficiaries simultaneously occupy a discursive space of legal-political recognition and one of populations to be managed under rationalities of regulation, administration, governance, and budget.

We focus on this realm of interactions in order to track the coordinates among which the victims/beneficiaries circulate, mobilize, and organize with respect to the programs of reparation. In this way we explore the paths these subjects take in order to fit into the criteria and thresholds of eligibility of these programs. This is a little-developed analytical entry but one with significant precedents in the research of Tejero Tabernero (2014) and de Waardt (2016). The former demonstrates that the construction of the “victim” by the normative state mechanisms is appropriated and leveraged by groups of victims in order to gain access to rights. The latter shows that the definition of “victim” ultimately depends on the definition of the potential universe of beneficiaries of the reparations program. While these writers analyze how these definitions affect the self-perceptions of different groups of victims, the relationships among them, and the discourses they develop as part of their political action strategies, we are interested in analyzing how the institutional determinations of victims and beneficiaries reformulate the principles of the reparations program itself and of Peru’s postconflict policies.

The following section presents the formal and practical contradictions and complications of the Comprehensive Reparations Program, and the next two sections outline two case studies. The first focuses on a victims’ organization in the Ayacucho region, and the second follows the trajectory of displaced persons in the Lima area. Finally, we present our conclusions and raise some issues for discussion and further research.

Analyzing the Comprehensive Reparations Program

There is consensus among Peruvian scholars that the postconflict scenario began in the last months of 2000, when Alberto Fujimori was removed from the presidency after the discovery of a network of corruption directly linked to his administration. At the center of the first stage of the postconflict period was the pursuit of truth, justice, and responsibility with regard to the violence of 1980–2000, culminating in the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A second stage began with the creation of the Comprehensive Reparations Program, which focused on providing reparations to the victims.

The program was launched in December 2005 with the passage of Law 28592, which also created the Reparations Council and its Official Registry of Victims. During the previous year, the High-Level Multisectoral Commission had been created to design, implement, and evaluate the results of the policy of peace, reconciliation, and reparations,² now under the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. While a large part of the technical design and the early stages of implementation of the program took place during the presidency of Alan García (2006–2011), it was during the government of Ollanta Humala (2011–2016) that reparations garnered greater public visibility through lobbying by civilian human rights groups (Bebbington, Scurrah, and Bielich, 2011). The president’s inaugural message (Humala, 2011) illustrates this context of promises and expectations:

We must put an end to the legacy of the terrorist violence we lived through and fulfill our commitment to individual and collective reparations. It is necessary for the victims and survivors to rebuild their personal and family lives, to look toward their future through different eyes, because they live in a country that includes them and that recognizes them as Peruvians.

This was the first inaugural speech to mention victims as postconflict figures and the state’s duty to provide a remedy. Having expressed the will to undertake reparations was indicative of the state’s adoption of mechanisms for transitional justice, which nonetheless took place in a volatile political context that jeopardized those very mechanisms. The first indicator of this was the political power of the movement inspired by Alberto Fujimori, whose members demonstrated their opposition to human rights policies and advocated for more repressive authoritarian actions (Balasco, 2016). Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the former dictator, barely lost the 2011 and 2016 presidential elections, and Fujimorism remains the largest block in Congress to this day. A second indicator was the substantial rise of controversy in public opinion regarding the period of political violence, with human rights leaders and rallies being systematically targeted and accused of bearing pro-terrorist sympathies (González, 2018). To this we must add the government’s delay in implementing institutional reforms, which has meant that many of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the demands of the victims of the violence have received little or no attention (Macher, 2014). Thus, although the implementation of the reparations program itself has not been the main subject of controversies over human rights, it has taken place in a context of suspicion, political polarization, and institutional weakness.

Once the program was under way, two important shifts occurred: the state moved from the promotion of memory and the search for truth to the implementation of public policies in favor of the victims; at the same time victims’ organizations broadened their range of action to include, in addition to litigation and reclaiming their memories, strategies for concretizing those policies. Seven kinds of reparation programs were established: restitution of citizen rights, reparations in education and in health, collective reparations, symbolic reparations, facilitation of access to housing, and individual economic reparations.³ Those legally labeled as victims and therefore legally entitled to remedy and compensation were considered individual beneficiaries and classified as either direct or indirect victims. There was also a registry of collective beneficiaries, groups of displaced persons who did not return to their places of origin, and peasant and indigenous communities whose physical and social structure was damaged.⁴

The debate over reparations in Peru has two poles. The first asserts that the program’s objective is to “compensate victims for the infringement of their rights or those of their relatives during the period of violence” (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2013: 23). The subjects of reparations are persons who have suffered some harm to their human rights or life plans due to aggressions committed by an armed actor. We refer to this perspective, whose referent is the violation of civil and political rights, as the narrow approach. The second perspective, in addition to compensating for violations of rights during the period of violence, considers the program’s objective to be seeking to “balance the disparities in terms of economic, social, and cultural rights and provide full citizenship status to historically marginalized communities” (Correa, 2013: 5). Here the subjects of reparations are not only the victims of aggression but also persons who are excluded or vulnerable because of structural factors. We call this the extensive approach, which proposes that compensation should not be limited to violations of civil and political rights but extend to economic, social, and cultural ones.

The extensive approach stems from the needs assessment performed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the economic, educational, linguistic, geographic origin, and rural-life differences that made the development of the violence possible and increased the likelihood of fatalities (Guillerot and Magarrell, 2006: 23–24). On the basis of this assessment, the commission asserted the need for changes “to close the enormous gaps between Peruvians . . . that indicate how we have moved away from justice and solidarity” (CVR, 2003: 86) and viewed a reparations program as one way to achieve such changes. For Laplante (2007), the distinction between reparations and antipoverty programs made by the commission was blurred from the moment of their implementation. She argues that both the content of the final report and its recommendations regarding reparations include elements that eliminate the distinction between civil and political rights (associated with transitional justice policies) and economic, social, and cultural rights (associated with development and antipoverty programs). Additionally, she shows that the first draft of these recommendations, which adopted an extensive approach, was later replaced by one based on a narrow approach because it was considered materially impossible to correct the structural inequalities of Peruvian society through a reparations program. Similarly, Guillerot and Magarrell (2006: 135–141) report that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s group in charge of designing recommendations for reparations was aware of the existence of structural inequalities but opted for a narrow approach dealing with practical considerations regarding the problems that a reparations program could address. This may explain the choice of a limited definition of “victim” and the restrictive criteria for deciding what type of victim would receive economic reparations.

The rules for implementation of the program reflected the tensions between and the overlap of the two approaches. They began with a narrow approach, as when they asserted that reparations “allow [victims’] accessing justice, the restoration of their rights, the resolution of the after-effects stemming from human rights violations, and the physical and moral, material or symbolic, redress of their harm” but at other moments resembled an extensive approach, as when they claimed that reparations would foster the “reestablishment and full force of rights as well as the conditions, resources, capacities, opportunities, and quality of life lost through the violence and its consequences” (MIMDES, 2010: 77). A fundamental criterion for reparations was to be rectification, “the restitution of conditions existing prior to the rights violations, as long as they do not impede or hinder their pursuit” (81). This was especially problematic since the preexisting conditions in many concrete cases included the structural gaps noted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In other words, although the regulations initially seemed to lean toward a narrow approach, it is not clear whether the relation between it and the extensive approach was mutually exclusive or complementary.

The tension between narrow and extended approaches also appears in the interactions between victims’ movement and human rights organizations. Some have noted a “false division” between human rights and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Reid, 2008: 71). However, others claim that there is no clear-cut distinction between “victim” and “poor” and that the analytical distinction of these concepts is complicated by the differences in the agendas of NGOs in Lima and those of other regions (Bebbington, Scurrah, and Bielich, 2011).⁵ There are also tensions between the expectations of the victims and those of the human rights organizations. Laplante (2007) demonstrates that many beneficiaries of reparations hope for results similar to those of development actions and the fight against poverty, while Agüero, Portugal, and Muñoz-Najar (2012) argue that several NGO human rights projects fail to warn of the danger of making exhibiting pain an object of morbid curiosity rather than a tool for reflection and to prioritize concrete strategies for citizen access. Thus we find ourselves in a context in which the figure of the victim of political violence is disputed by state and nonstate actors with divergent priorities, goals, and moral economies.

Housing Reparations in Ayacucho

The first case study is based on fieldwork carried out in Morochucos, Cangallo (in Ayacucho), in Peru’s southern Andes, during 2013 and 2014. It examines how the first steps in implementing housing reparations classified as beneficiaries those victims whose income did not exceed a certain monetary limit. This measure distorted the reparative foundations of the program, which should have benefited all those who had seen their housing situations affected by the internal armed conflict.

The Promotion and Facilitation of Housing Access Program carries out housing reparations for those who “lost their houses through destruction caused by the process of violence and those who face housing problems as a direct effect of the process of violence” (Consejo de Reparaciones, 2013: 64). By March 2013 the Reparations Council was reporting more than 44,281 potential beneficiaries of the program in the Official Registry of Victims. The program coordinates the delivery of reparations with the Ministry of Housing, Construction, and Sanitation through the preexisting program Techo Propio (Own Roof), operating since 2002, providing housing access to persons living in poverty. It exhibited problems from the beginning, starting with the fact that when the study was carried out there still were no guidelines for housing reparations.⁶ Second, because the preexisting program was part of a broader policy for fighting poverty, its guidelines included thresholds for inclusion based on socioeconomic criteria: the family’s net income could not exceed 2,427 soles if it intended to purchase a house and 1,915 soles if it aimed for housing improvements or building on its own land.⁷ Similarly, in order to obtain housing one could not own property, even an empty lot, in any other part of the country. Third, if the property to which one wished to make improvements had any type of lien, bank loan, or mortgage, one did not qualify.⁸ The victims’ organizations criticized the transfer of responsibilities from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Housing, noting that they would be receiving, from then on, the same treatment as the average beneficiary of Techo Propio (Méndez, 2013). In other words, they would be evaluated not in terms of human rights legal standards (being a victim) but in terms of socioeconomic criteria (income level and property ownership).

These provisions created administrative problems in fulfilling their reparation commitments. Excluding beneficiaries on the basis of income, financial status, and private property ownership raised the possibility of excluding a large number of recognized victims from the program, and the victims’ organizations made this a cause for mobilization. At the Fifth Regional Congress of Organizations of People Affected by Political Violence in Ayacucho in June 2013, participants discussed the problem of basing housing reparations on the economic and physical status of the victims:

People who have a [bank] loan cannot obtain [housing] reparations, because they tell you, “You have money, that’s why you took out a loan. You no longer need help.” That’s how it is here: if there is a loan, then there is no poverty and there is no more reparation. (leader of the Coordinadora Regional de Afectados por la Violencia Política [CORAVIP], interview, Pampa Cangallo, June 22, 2013)

The [Ministry of] Housing representative talks about housing access for victims, but he never talks about Techo Propio. But when he acts it’s always about the Techo Propio problem. (leader of CORAVIP, Huanta, public remarks in Ayacucho, June 22, 2013)

The day after the conference ended, the victims marched through the city of Ayacucho demanding changes to the law that would include them in the state’s social programs without their being socioeconomically classified: “It’s a law. Why are we asking for a favor? ‘Please’ stops here, brothers and sisters, let’s not give in. . . . There are laws for the poor and laws for those affected. These laws are for the affected. They must respect them” (leader of CORAVIP, public remarks in Huamanga, Ayacucho, June 22, 2013).

These activities changed the conditions under which government resources were assigned and contributed to altering the conceptual shape of the victim. First, whereas under the basic principles of transitional justice victims are persons exposed to violations of their human rights, under Techo Propio beneficiaries of reparations were defined according to their level of poverty. Second, the legitimacy of the reparations, originally based on the (civil and political) right to reparations, was redefined as a matter of the mere need for housing (closer to economic and social rights) and therefore excluded those who demanded housing reparations without being poor.

Thirdly, while the theoretical time frame of the Comprehensive Reparations Program was the past—the time when the victimization occurred—the housing access program superimposed on this past a criterion of present socioeconomic situation. This last point is not a minor one: the only time that both rationales converged was when the victim was also poor. Victims who had lost their homes because of the violence but managed to achieve some material progress were no longer eligible for benefits because they exceeded the economic thresholds of Techo Propio. Under this logic, having attained some quality of life in recent years was “punished” with the loss of the right to housing reparations and, in practical terms, the status of beneficiary.

Thus the figure of the victim was gradually dissolved into the world of the economically vulnerable population that needed state subsidies, and it became commonplace to find victims who had been part of Techo Propio long before their registration into the Official Registry of Victims. While this may be relevant in certain cases, neither the housing access program nor Techo Propio considered unfolding mechanisms that would allow nonpoor victims to retain their right to housing reparations.⁹

The Displaced Living in Cities

The second case study is based on research done between 2012 and 2016 largely in the Lima region and shows that displacement is a means of victimization that is difficult to locate at some point along the arc between limited and comprehensive approaches and that the concurrent actions of various ministries created problems in achieving reparations.

The number of persons displaced during the conflict nationally has been calculated at 430,000–600,000 (Barrantes, 2012), although some maintain that it could be a million (Isabel Coral, interview, Lima, January 17, 2015). Much of the literature characterizes displacement in Peru as a new type of migration─driven by the violence and insecurity─different from the previous economic migration processes in the mid-twentieth century (ASFADEL, 2009; Coral, 1994). A different perspective emerges from observing not how displacement events differed but what they have in common (Pando, 2003; Sánchez, 1999). The best conceptualization of this approach is provided by Sөrensen (2002: 39–40), for whom “the categories of migrant and IDP [internally displaced person] tend to lose meaning and analytical applicability when complex processes of violence and displacement generated by civil war combine with already established patterns of mobility.”

The passage in 2004 of the Law on Internal Displacement (Law 28223) granted governance to the Ministry of Women and Social Development (since 2012 the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations) on the issue of displacement, a task it carries out through the Directorate for the Displaced and a Culture of Peace. This office’s principal activity was setting up the National Registry for Displaced Persons, which by the end of our research included slightly more than 60,000 people. By enrolling in this registry, persons displaced by the armed conflict were granted recognition that constituted, at the time, the first step toward inclusion in the Official Registry of Victims (MIMP, 2012: 6). Therefore, there are two laws that allow the displaced to demand attention from the state: the comprehensive reparations law, which focuses on victims from the 1980–2000 period, and the law for the displaced, which centers on displaced persons during that time. The latter declares that one of its objectives is the “comprehensive and sustainable development of the areas that expelled and received [the displaced]” (MIMDES, 2010: 53). In other words, while the Comprehensive Reparations Program proposes compensation for a violation of the rights of the victim, the law for the displaced also calls for the promotion of territorial development of areas with displaced populations.

This broad legal framework has brought complications. One is that displaced persons were filing for enrollment in two registries. The National Registry for Displaced Persons commenced operations in 2006, and many displaced people rushed to enroll in it in order to obtain eventual benefits. The following year, the Official Registry of Victims began to function, relying on information from registries considered “preexisting,” among them the Registry for Displaced Persons, and therefore those who had already enrolled in it began to figure automatically as displaced in the victims’ registry. The fact is, however, that displacement is not a form of victimhood that grants the right to receive individual economic reparations.¹⁰ Many displaced persons were surprised to find out that it would have been better to wait and enroll directly in the victims’ registry under a victimhood category different from displacement that was more suitable for economic reparations. This is what a leader of the displaced in the Puno region told us (interview, Lima, February 2, 2016):

There are several widows and orphans in the group of displaced who have not enrolled as relatives of victims or of the deceased; they have enrolled as displaced in the Official Registry of Victims . . . and we didn’t know that they had to have enrollment separate [from the National Registry for Displaced Persons] to be beneficiaries. They’re only just finding that out now, and many people say that enrolling as displaced was a waste of time if such-and-such had happened to their father. And they’re blaming us [the leaders]. But it’s not our fault. We always talked about the issue of the displaced. We never told the state that we were victims [of a different type of damage]—not even I.

These and other problems associated with double registration led the Directorate for the Displaced to decide in late 2015 to pursue direct enrollment of the displaced in the Official Registry of Victims, with some exceptions (Carlos Portugal, chief of the Directorate for the Displaced and a Culture of Peace, interview, Lima, July 13, 2016).

The main reparations program aimed at displaced populations as we undertook our study was the Collective Reparations Program, which consisted of grants of up to 100,000 soles to communities that had been razed and to groups of the displaced living in cities (CMAN, 2013). There is a subtle distinction here: while monetary reparations were designated for a certain type of victim, collective reparations were designated for the displaced (Ramírez Zapata, 2017), tacitly suggesting that displacement was dealt with only when it was known to have had collective consequences and ignoring the individual dimension of displacement as a form of victimhood.¹¹

Similarly, matters of timing reinforced the distinctions in priorities for attention to victims. While campesino and indigenous communities had been subjects of collective reparations since 2007, it was only in 2014 that 10 groups of nonreturning displaced persons received authorization for access to them.¹² However, not all the difficulties stemmed from the state. One leader of the displaced acknowledged that one of the reasons that none of the 10 groups had managed to fulfill the requirements for access to reparations was that “our organizations are very weak” (Teófilo Orosco, personal conversation, Lima, February 7, 2015). Evidence of this is that while the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations estimated 192 such, only 46 were represented in the Official Registry of Victims (CMAN, 2013: 5). Significantly, in the Junín region, which had one of the first prominent organizations of the displaced (Mendoza Mesías, 2003), only 2 of an estimated 25 were registered.

Moreover, the human rights community’s links to the organizations of the displaced had disconnects. Several human rights NGOs have sponsored publications about displacement (CEPRODEP, 1997; CONDECOREP, 2011; Mendoza, 2000), and many of them supported the displaced population during the armed conflict in various parts of the country (Gibaja Vargas-Prada, 1994: 115). Dissatisfaction, however, was common. One leader in the Junín region (Oré, 2001) indicated that some NGOs “only want to tap into resources, without producing significant results,” in addition to seeking “the organizations’ dependency on them.” Another work illustrated how the relation between an important organization of the displaced in Lima and the human rights organizations has gone from “alliance and cooperation . . . to a relationship of non-allies, restricted and confined to the public-political realm” (Zavala Respaldiza, 2008: 206). Beyond the accuracy of those remarks, what interests us is that they describe a distant relationship between the displaced and the NGOs in the postconflict scenario.

The human rights agenda is closely tied to the field of transitional justice, whose traditional concerns are crimes characterized by direct bodily aggression (murders, extrajudicial executions, disappearances, etc.). The needs of the displaced have occupied a marginal position, to the point that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not treat displacement in the same depth as other topics (Barrantes, 2012: 8). This suggests that there is no consistent relationship between the human rights discourse and the identity of the displaced (Ramírez Zapata, 2017). It has been argued that in some cases considering oneself displaced is a function of the possibility of “benefiting from programs aimed at tending to their needs” (Deng, 2010 [1995]: 228–229) or having access to “sources of opportunities” (Zavala Respaldiza, 2008). For example, one interviewee stated, “I began to participate in the organization of the displaced when I saw that my uncle and others were calling people because they said some opportunities would be coming from the Ministry or from the reparations” (Ramón Cuti, interview, Lima, April 5, 2015). In other cases, this identification occurred in correlation with government policy decisions: “When the PAR [Program for the Support of Resettlement and Development in Emergency Zones] law came out, there is a part that says that one of its functions is to organize the return of the internally displaced. That’s where I saw that little word, and I said, ‘That means us’” (Kevin Galdo, interview, Lima, February 2, 2016). Also, contact with the organizations or leaders lets the displaced know that their situation falls into that category: “When I met with the Association of Displaced Families in Lima I began to understand what displacement meant” (Remigio Pablo, interview, Lima, January 31, 2016).

In sum, double registry shows that bureaucratic provisions can hinder access to reparations. Furthermore, identifying oneself as displaced may come from contact with actors outside the human rights community or through demands for development or material improvement. In government discourse, displacement is not granted the same status as other forms of victimhood linked with economic reparations—one practical effect of the limited approach and its restrictive definition of “victim.” In parallel, both the law on the displaced and the delivery of collective reparations seem to be directed toward a development proposal aimed at organized groups of the displaced. This leaves displaced persons who cannot or do not wish to be part of an organization without a way of obtaining reparations.¹³

Conclusions: Reparations and Postconflict Peru

The motivations of organized victims in pursuing access to reparations and the way in which the idea of victim is construed and communicated are closely related to the way in which the state, the victims’ organizations, and the human rights NGOs have forged their relations in the past decade (de Waardt, 2013; 2016; Tejero Tabernero, 2014). Studies of reparations in Peru have pointed to the absence of comprehensiveness in their implementation (Correa, 2013), their regulatory and institutional design weaknesses, their lack of evaluation and monitoring (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2013), and their insufficient installed capacity for implementing reparations at the regional level (Barrenechea, 2010). Meanwhile, mixed attitudes have been reported in the reception of collective reparations in Andean and Amazon communities (APRODEH and ICTJ, 2012), while in some local settings reparations are perceived not as a restitution of rights but as social assistance (Ulfe, 2013).

This essay contributes to the literature on reparations in Peru by analyzing the concepts that govern the Comprehensive Reparations Program, showing the breadth of the framework in which notions about reparations appear. This breadth is problematic with regard to the content of reparations, the bureaucratic provisions for obtaining them, and the contexts of the victims’ organizations. The ways in which these points and practices relate to one another reaffirm the importance for comprehending the postconflict situation of examining the concrete interactions between state and society. In the case of housing reparations, we have seen that the logic of attention to current material needs prevails over the logic of compensation for past grievances. As a result, many victims who were initially eligible for housing reparations were at risk of losing them because their current socioeconomic situations did not fit into the requirements of Techo Propio. In the case of the reparations for displaced populations, we have shown the difficulty of integrating this category of victimhood into human rights discourse and therefore into a narrow approach to reparations. In addition, many of the displaced identify themselves as victims because of physical privations rather than human rights violations. These and other elements converged in the decision to make collective reparations a program directed at displaced groups without a counterpart aimed at displaced individuals.

The perspective employed for this work favored an empirical referent. In our judgment, the lack of one is a problem in the work of Ulfe, Ríos, and Málaga (2013), for whom the government’s desire to convert reparations into “strategies that help to ease poverty” prevents them from reaching their goal of restoring freedom and citizenship. Something similar is stated in a later text, which laments the lack of “the reparative sense of social ties, restoring citizenship and dignity to the citizen” (Ulfe and Málaga, 2015). They do not indicate what the concrete expressions of ideas such as “freedom and citizenship” and “restoring citizenship” would be. From our standpoint, there is no need for conflict between promoting the restitution of rights or respect for human rights and combating poverty. While contradictions arise in practice, as the Ayacucho case shows, these are situations that can be remedied, at least partially. Delivery of reparations in housing was constrained by the income thresholds of Techo Propio, which functioned to invalidate access to those reparations when they could have been a pivotal point for prioritizing access, as has been recommended for Colombia (Silwa and Wiig, 2016). In the case of the displaced, we have seen that demands for access to reparations do not necessarily favor a discourse based on respect for human rights but may be framed in terms of expectations of development or material provision (Bebbington, Scurrah, and Bielich, 2011; Delacroix, 2014).

Elaborating on the principal features of a reparations program, De Greiff (2006) points to the forms of victimhood excluded at the beginning of the implementation of reparations in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Germany, and South Africa. In this article we have delved into the way in which state institutional frameworks establish access to reparations, where the tension between approaches dubbed “comprehensive” and “limited” resulted in mechanisms whereby the transition from victim of violence to beneficiary of reparations came into conflict with the expectations and demands of several organizations. Ulfe and Málaga (2015; 2017) show that the systems of classifying victims have an unwritten dimension exhibited in the way public officials envision the average profile of a victim. Our cases contribute to demonstrating that these classification mechanisms are still in effect and are redefined at the moment of deciding which victims will become beneficiaries of particular programs of reparation.

Reflection on the different meanings of “victim” is not new (García-Godos, 2008; Laplante, 2008; Robin Azevedo, 2014; Theidon, 2004) but is insufficient in light of new postconflict situations. The cases studied show that reparations are not only a legal or moral matter but also one of public administration in which demands, finite resources, and installed capacities are managed.

Supplemental Material

DS_10.1177_0094582X19861097 – Supplemental material for From Victims to Beneficiaries: Shaping Postconflict Subjects through State Reparations in Peru

Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0094582X19861097 for From Victims to Beneficiaries: Shaping Postconflict Subjects through State Reparations in Peru by Ivan Ramírez Zapata and Rogelio Scott-Insúa in Latin American Perspectives

Footnotes

Notes

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.

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