Dissident Feminisms

Decolonizing Transitional Justice

Pascha Bueno-Hansen

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097539
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In 2001, following a generation of armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the Peruvian state created a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). Pascha Bueno-Hansen places the TRC, feminist and human rights movements, and related non-governmental organizations within an international and historical context to expose the difficulties in addressing gender-based violence. Her innovative theoretical and methodological framework based on decolonial feminism and a critical engagement with intersectionality facilitates an in-depth examination of the Peruvian transitional justice process based on field studies and archival research. Bueno-Hansen uncovers the colonial mappings and linear temporality underlying transitional justice efforts and illustrates why transitional justice mechanisms must reckon with the societal roots of atrocities, if they are to result in true and lasting social transformation. Original and bold, Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru elucidates the tension between the promise of transitional justice and persistent inequality and impunity.

1

Parallel Tracks and Fraught Encounters

The Human Rights and Feminist Movements
(and Campesina Protagonism) in Peru

The disappearance of family members, as told through Rosa Cuchillo’s reflections, traces back to events that occurred in May 1980. The Shining Path—Peruvian Communist Party (Sendero Luminoso) had a very strong presence in the Andean region of Ayacucho. In rejection of the legalization of leftist parties and participation in electoral democracy, the Shining Path burned electoral cards in Chuschi, Ayacucho. This event marked the inception of the armed conflict. Rural communities found themselves caught in the crossfire between the armed forces and the Shining Path. Both sides demanded allegiance from rural communities, which made the communities vulnerable to the constant accusations from both sides of conspiring with the enemy.

From the beginning, rural Andean women, or campesinas, struggled for the defense of their disappeared, tortured, and executed family members’ human rights1 and the survival of living family members.2 They visited police departments and military installations, asking the whereabouts of their family members; they combed through open communal graves where the bodies of disappeared persons were dumped. Campesinas spearheaded local efforts to denounce human rights violations and address the needs of affected people with the help of church groups and human rights advocates. Campesina organizing, especially in Ayacucho, contributed to ending the conflict in the early 1990s. Their collective organizing was unprecedented, creating the context of possibility for the PTRC.3 However, campesinas were not recognized, and many do not recognize themselves, as full political subjects in their own right.4 The immediate needs of their loved ones trumped their concern with individual experiences of violence, particularly gender-based violence. Their role as caregivers based on maternal sacrifice, as well as social taboos, tended to bury such violations in silence.

An intersectional sensibility brings attention to the multiple social factors that contribute to marginalizing campesina voices. Although campesina protagonism held a key role in publicizing human rights violations, social exclusions marginalized their voices in the transitional justice process. Campesinas are second-class citizens, especially because their illiteracy rate is high. “The condition of illiteracy is defined in relation to the woman’s ability to develop herself in the urban and Spanish literate world, which does not value her knowledge and resources.”5 Their distance from the ideal type of Peruvian modern citizen is determined by a combination of gender, ethnic, linguistic, geographic, and class components.

Besides the important work campesinas did on behalf of their families and themselves, the human rights and feminist movements presented the strongest potential for taking on the defense of campesinas’ rights. The human rights movement made a herculean effort to respond to the ever-growing number of victims and survivors of the internal armed conflict. It consistently prioritized the human rights violations of campesinos yet did not place emphasis on gender-based violence. Turning to the feminist movement, while women’s rights held a central position in the growing movement, conflict-related gender-based violence was not a top priority. As campesina organizing did not prioritize the gender-based abuses they sustained personally, nor did the human rights or feminist movements.

This analysis explains how and why, despite campesina protagonism and human rights and feminist movements’ best intentions, the gender-based violence directed at campesinas during the internal armed conflict slipped through the cracks. Campesina protagonism and the violations of campesina rights are relevant elements of the story that tend to get erased through the workings of legitimated inequalities. My personal affiliations with the feminist movement undermine any claim to objectivity, yet my analytical drive emphasizes understanding the dynamics of legitimated inequalities rather than criticizing the movements.

Utilizing an intersectional sensibility, this analysis reads against the grain of the intersecting progressive discourses of human rights and democracy, as well as the politically regressive discourses of sexism and racism. This approach underscores the workings of legitimated inequalities within the feminist and human rights movements during the conflict (1980–2000) to contextualize the limits of the transitional justice process, especially the work of the PTRC. This sketch of the human rights and feminist movements’ trajectories draws upon interviews, field notes, primary documents, and a few women’s movement magazines to explain the lack of attention to gender-based violence and the marginalization of campesina voices.6

The human rights and feminist movements have similar origins and timing, and both highly value the international realm. Both movements’ participation in the second UN Conference on Human Rights, held in Vienna in 1993, illustrates the importance of international law and international political pressure to meet their goals. This event proved to be a lost opportunity for movement collaboration with regard to conflict-related gender-based violence, given the conference’s nascent yet promising headway on the issue. The national context of terror and distrust reinforced the distance between the human rights and feminist movements and their development on parallel rather than combined tracks.

Political processes in the mid- to late 1990s, including sectors of the feminist movements’ alliance with authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori and the prodemocracy movement to oust Fujimori’s regime in 2000, exemplify the limits and possibilities of collaboration between the two movements as well as continued sidelining of campesina rights. Nevertheless, the human rights movement and to a lesser extent the feminist movement play a central role in creating the conditions for a transition to democracy and the establishment of the TRC. The feminist movement advocated for the PTRC to include a gender analysis and the issue of sexual violence. The struggles and gaps this chapter makes evident between campesina protagonism and movement priorities underscore the challenges the PTRC would face in its efforts to incorporate a gender analysis and the issue of sexual violence in its investigation.

Campesina Protagonism and Social Exclusion

The internal armed conflict marked a radical shift in the lives and roles of campesinas.7 They broke from traditional daily activities to come together in search of their loved ones. Church groups, especially the Evangelical Church, offered support to women’s organizing in Ayacucho, the Andean department most heavily affected by the conflict.8 Through these spaces, women shared experiences, held meetings, and inserted themselves into the public sphere. They lost their fear in the process. In early 1983 in Ayacucho, Angelica Mendoza formed a group, composed primarily of mothers, under the name National Association of Families of the Kidnapped, Detained, and Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP). ANFASEP used the Christian cross and religious symbolism to dissociate itself from subversive groups and received support from human rights organizations. Besides religious groups, human rights organizations were the only civil society groups that listened to them.9

In November 1984 the Episcopal Church sponsored Angelica Mendoza and Ofelia Antezana, a victim of the conflict from Huancavelica, to participate in an international conference held in Argentina with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In 1977 a group of mothers who had lost their family members in the Argentine dirty war came together in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to protest the military government’s brutality against leftist activists and their children’s disappearance. Over the years the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo gained international recognition for their work. The solidarity forged between Argentine and Peruvian women broke the isolation of the Peruvian women’s struggle and started a process of sharing strategies with women globally. When Angelica Mendoza and Ofelia Antezana returned to Peru, Ofelia Antezana founded the Committee of Family Members of the Disappeared (COFADER), based in Lima, which focuses on displacement and disappearances. To date, both organizations continue to demand truth and justice.

In addition to ANFASEP and COFADER, organizing for family survival and meeting basic economic needs led to the formation of mothers clubs. “These organizations facilitated negotiating for resources and jobs before offices of the state and developing links of collaboration and support with organizations such as NGOs and human rights groups.”10 The mothers’ clubs expanded, and in 1988 they founded the Federation of Mothers Clubs of the Province of Huamanga and participated in a national peace march. The Shining Path attempted to intimidate and disperse this growing movement, but the women would not back down.11 By 1995, the Departmental Federation of Mothers’ Clubs of Ayacucho (FEDECMA) came to include eighty thousand affiliated women.12 Their main concerns included economic survival and the defense of human rights. A holistic vision encompassed the need to secure employment and income for women, improve nutrition and health, and address displacement and children’s mental health.13 In spite of being constantly stigmatized as proterrorist, Indias-terrucas,14 these women’s organizations remained strong as the social fabric frayed under the strain of extreme violence.

While campesinas and campesinos do organize politically, their organizing is not purposefully marked as ethnic. As the campesinas in question do not self-identify as indigenous and in the Andes a significant self-indigenous movement has not been articulated, I do not make reference to indigenous movements. Degregori underscores the fact that that people do not choose to identify themselves as Indian because during the nineteenth century the term became synonymous with poor peasant or servant.15 To break with this label, people demanded integration into the national culture through access to education, specifically the Spanish language. This assimilationist approach was met with a state willingness to process their demands as peasants, particularly around the recuperation of territories taken from them by powerful regional landowners.

The dominant state discourse on national culture excludes indigenous peoples from the prospect of modernization. Paulo Drinot points out that indigenous people are seen as an obstacle to the nation-state’s drive toward progress.16 Given that progress depends on labor, people marked as indigenous utilize this logic of production to frame themselves as workers and peasants/campesinos to organize and get their demands heard. People who, because of their native language, traditional customs, and connection with territory, might be classified as indigenous, have been on the front lines of class-based organizations like peasant federations and unions. De la Cadena frames the issue from a different angle, arguing that “indigenous social movements qua peasant movements, have been on the forefront of social change.”17 Yet in such organizations gender is subordinated to class, and women participants face personal and structural forms of discrimination.18 Women fight fiercely to gain leadership positions and must constantly prove themselves. Even though the organizing practices of the unions, for example, have become more flexible and have allowed women’s participation, they lack awareness of the specific problems women were facing.19

From a broad national perspective, campesinas’ rights are perceived as addons to the main demands of class-based and feminist movements. Campesinas generally do not identify with feminists, since community leaders and members commonly view them as bourgeois, given their urban middle-class focus. Furthermore, the rural women’s movements express ostensibly different demands than those of the feminist movement, which in the 1980s was working to establish their autonomy from politically left parties. The feminist movement reflects the same hierarchies seen in the society as a whole, as does class-based organizing and the human rights movement. Therefore, this analysis focuses upon the workings of legitimated inequalities within social-justice-oriented political projects.

Despite campesinas’ important role in ending the conflict, they were not integrated substantively into the official transitional justice processes.20 Conversely, the human rights movement played an important role in this process. The human rights movement embraces the interpretation of rights as universal, individual, and inherent in each morally equal citizen. While the human rights movement holds this interpretation of rights as a goal to work toward, in practice this set of assumptions offers little traction in addressing the entrenched social hierarchies in question. The dynamics of legitimated inequality through the human rights and feminist movements at both the national and international levels contextualize the marginalization of campesinas during the transitional justice process and situate the challenges the PTRC investigation faced in addressing gender-based violence.

Movement Commonalities: The International Realm

Just as rural women’s organizing in Ayacucho in the 1980s benefited from organizing with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained (FEDEFAM), the international realm holds great significance for the human rights and feminist movements. External and internal political pressure on the state to comply with international law presents a formidable force for change. The participation of the human rights and feminist movements in the 1993 second UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna demonstrates the significance of the international realm. The violent fragmentation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s brought the issue of conflict-related gender-based violence to the attention of the conference, and the international stage, for the first time. Although the outcome of the conference directly addressed this issue, the potential for the Peruvian delegates to work collaboratively on the matter of gender-based violence did not come to fruition.

As women’s issues began to gain international attention, with the 1975 International Year of Women and the first Conference on Women in Mexico City, human rights violations were taking place in the southern cone. The 1973 U.S.-backed coup d’état against Chilean President Salvador Allende ushered in General Agosto Pinochet’s military dictatorship and a period of political repression and mass human rights violations. Peruvians plugged into the international human rights network that had its beginnings in the early 1970s with the Chilean coup d’état; for example, aiding in the cross-border escape of Chileans under threat. The human rights movement built off of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Waiting in the Garden of Broken Trees
• 1. Parallel Tracks and Fraught Encounters: The Human Rights and Feminist Movements (and Campesina Protagonism) in Peru
• 2. Gender Implementation in the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• 3. National Reconciliation through Public Hearings: Representative Repertoire, Choreography, and Politics of Reception
• 4. Sexual Violence beyond Consent and Coercion
• 5. Finding Each Other’s Hearts: Weaving Interculturality into Gender and Human Rights
• Conclusion: Paradox and Temporality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index