Victims’ Responses to State Economic Reparations in Colombia and Peru

• In Event: 1520 - Political Economy and Economic Sociology

Abstract

Economic reparations have been recognized as an opportunity to redress victims’ losses after war. However, this is a complex process whereby economic values are assigned to a variety of experiences of suffering. Recent theoretical and applied work has coincided in arguing that compensations require recipients to negotiate and determine what can and cannot be commensurate with money. This chapter explores the reparations regime as a contentious process in which victims negotiate different and sometimes contradictory moral frames that operate in tandem to give meaning to the money they receive. Specifically, I investigate victims’ responses to the economic reparations program put in place by the Colombian and Peruvian states for those directly affected by armed conflict. Building on interviews with compensated victims, official testimonies, and ethnographic observations, this paper identifies three different moments of meaning making throughout the reparation process. First, victims reject the idea that their suffering can be ‘repaired’ with monetary compensations. Second, their acceptance of the payments reflects on alternative cultural meanings of money. Third, at the end of the reparation process, victims evaluate compensatory money according to whether their expectations were met or not by the state. This article demonstrates that there is a surplus of meaning around monetary compensation that cannot be contained by the legalistic language of reparations policy.

Author

• Diana Catalina Vallejo Pedraza, University of Virginia