Peru

Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Truth and Reconciliation Commission)

Garcia-Godos, Jemima. Victim Reparations in the Peruvian Truth Commission and the Challenge of Historical Interpretation.

The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR)) has been praised for challenging positivist approaches to truth by focusing on victims and narrative interpretation. In this article, I argue that such a focus is not as problem-free as widely assumed. In spite of its normative human rights base, the CVR underestimated the issue of historical and political recognition of particular actors during the Peruvian armed conflict – an issue that bears practical and tangible consequences for the actors involved. I use the case of peasant self-defense groups and their treatment regarding potential reparations benefits to explore the challenges involved in combining a human rights agenda with issues of historical interpretation. (author's abstract)

Laplante, Lisa J.. The Peruvian Truth Commission's Historical Memory Project: Empowering Truth-Tellers to Confront Truth Deniers.

This article examines the role memory recuperation projects play in responding to and preventing periods of state repression and abuse. In particular, the author discusses the case of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that worked for two years to produce its 2003 Final Report. Investigating its internal armed conflict (1980-2000), the TRC sought to engage victims-survivors in testimony taking in order to write a new official version of the violence between the various parties to the conflict, including state armed forces, paramilitaries, insurgent groups, and local defense committees. The author proposes that it is not just the memory product that has potential for curative and preventive purposes but also the process of empowering the formerly silenced to become protagonists in a human rights movement that holds the government accountable. Moreover, by helping to break down entrenched habits of fear and distrust, and nurturing the democratic value of free expression, the Peruvian TRC encouraged victims-survivors to participate in new grassroots movements to pursue their justice claims. However, she argues that the TRC provided only the first step in Peru's effort to reveal the truth about its tragic past, and that victims-survivors are beginning to reject passive telling to third-party authors and instead are appropriating their own agency in disseminating memory. The article concludes with a discussion on how it is the change in personal and political status as truth-tellers, and not just the content of this truth, that makes memory projects important endeavors.(author's abstract)

Rubio-Marín, Ruth and Guillerot, Julie and Paz y Paz Bailey, Claudia. Indigenous peoples and reparations claims: Tentative steps in Peru and Guatemala.

In situations of large-scale violence and repression, reparations are best conceptualized as rights-based political projects aimed at giving victims due recognition and at enhancing civic trust both among citizens and between citizens and state institutions. This paper explores, in the light of two case studies, some of the goals, expectations and limitations of reparations as means of redressing identity-based injustice and setting the terms for a more just political order. What do reparations require when we are talking about people who, as is often the case with indigenous peoples, have traditionally been denied equal citizenship status, have experienced long-term, systematic marginalization and who may resist standard notions of citizenship? We argue that the process of creating as well as the content of reparations policies should, first, affirm the commonality of members of indigenous groups as citizens and holders of basic human rights. It should also affirm their condition as members of sub-state groups with distinct cultures and/or communal forms of life. While both Peru and Guatemala took steps to satisfy both of these criteria, the case studies show the limits of what even a well-crafted reparations program can do in terms of providing due redress to victims. They further illustrate that there are limitations to taking even modest steps toward transformation absent a serious commitment on the part of the state and ruling non-indigenous elites to the wider transformations that crafting a more inclusive political order would entail. (excerpt)

Mantilla Falcón, Julissa. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Treatment of Sexual Violence Against Women

SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN is an expression of genderbased violence that affects thousands of women around the world during times of armed conflict, as well as in times of peace. Impunity and silence typically surround these cases. Many times, victims do not discuss what happened to them because of feelings of shame and guilt. In most cases, government authorities and some sectors of civil society do not consider sexual violence to be a human rights violation. Fortunately, international human rights instruments and judicial decisions have begun to define sexual violence as a violation of human rights and, in some contexts, as a crime against humanity or a war crime. The work of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) made important inroads in identifying sexual violence as a human rights violation. In its Final Report, the PTRC analyzed the situation of Peruvian women subjected to sexual violence during the armed conflict and countered the idea that it was simply a collateral damage of war. Asserting that sexual violence is a human rights violation, the PTRC established a record of the sexual violence that occurred during Peru’s 20 year armed conflict and recommended that the State institute a system of reparations for the victims. The Final Report of the PTRC, released on August 28, 2003, includes a chapter on sexual violence against women. This article presents its main findings.

Young, Paula. The Promise of Restorative Justice: Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Issues its Final Report

In the aftermath of a long war between the government and insurgent groups in the 1980s and into the 1990s, Peru established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to investigate the circumstances and effects of this brutal conflict. In this article, Paula Young outlines the findings of the Peruvian TRC’s final report, issued at the end of August 2003. She provides background to the Peruvian TRC’s approach and recommendations by discussing restorative justice principles and practices at the individual level and at the national level. Furthermore, Young compares the Peruvian TRC with the efforts of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.