Grassroots Reparative Justice: Local Victim Participation in Post-conflict Peru

• In Event: Responses to Human Rights Abuses: Democracies, Marginalized Groups, and Justice

Abstract

Since 2007, Peru’s Programa Integral de Reparaciones (PIR, Comprehensive Reparations Program) has provided material, symbolic, individual, and collective reparations to victims of the civil conflict (1980-2000). While the PIR was a top-down national program based on globalized notions of justice and human rights, in practice reparations were implemented very differently across Peru. This paper seeks to explain this variation by asking the following question: why are there substantial differences in the implementation of reparations across regions affected by the conflict? Previous studies examined international and domestic factors conditioning the creation of national-level reparative justice laws and models. However, how this process unfolds on the ground from policy design to local implementation remains underexplored. This paper examines the interplay between victims’ organizations and regional state actors to depict the local politics behind the implementation of reparations within marginalized Quechua indigenous communities that were disproportionately affected by the conflict. The study employs original extensive interview and archival data to build a comparative analysis of the local politics of reparative justice across three Andean regions where PIR efforts have been concentrated: Ayacucho, Junín, and Apurímac. These regions provide an excellent opportunity for comparative analysis, because although they are similar in many ways, their reparations outcomes vary widely. Thus, this paper is able to closely examine how the variation in capacities, resources and strategies of local actors constrains or advances the output of the reparations policy. Ultimately, the paper shows how, in response to the lack of formal and institutionalized channels for victim participation both in the design and implementation of reparative justice, victims’ organizations have reclaimed the PIR policy space at the local level by building new avenues through which they articulate and negotiate their political demands in order to reflect their sense of justice.

Author

• Fiorella Patricia Vera-Adrianzen, University of New Mexico