“Mujeres Tristes”: Coca, Violence and Gender in Ayacucho

• In Event: Women, Children, and Men at Risk: Gendered Bodies in Conflict Zones

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of illicit coca production, processing and transport on women’s lives in rural areas surrounding Huanta city in Ayacucho, Peru. Ayacucho is best known as the epicenter of violence between the Shining Path Peruvian Communist Party (PCP) and the Peruvian military in the 1980s and 1990s, during which time considerable rural emptying and industrial flight occurred. Due partly to the gendered nature of the violence, women’s responsibility for sustaining rural communities has increased, a role complicated by emphases on export-based agriculture following Peru’s 1992 Structural Adjustment. For decades the most lucrative labor, coca production in the nearby VRAEM Jungle, has been male dominated: men emigrated seasonally while women, with greater responsibility for childcare, remained, living low-income job to job. The availability of work in the VRAEM has become more important for women, however, as land around Huanta city is consolidated for export-based production and prices for coca increase, due, in part, to eradication of the crop elsewhere in the country. Women’s experiences with illicit economies are little explored in the social sciences, because of the difficult nature of such research and because, despite women’s relative pigeonholing into less-lucrative, informal employment, men are believed to predominate in upper levels of narcotrafficking. This paper suggests that women’s involvement with the trade is growing and that they are taking the more menial and sometimes more dangerous jobs therein; as they may also be less mobile, they are positioned to suffer disproportionately from associated forms of structural and literal violence.

Author

• Mary Elena Wilhoit, Northwestern University