Capa Física (PHY)

Peru is a country with persistent historical denial of its multiculturality. The home of

‘great indigenous civilisations’, of which the last and most widely known were the

Incas, is the place of an impoverished peasantry (Stem 1982:33). In Peru, all ethnic

references were deleted from public declarations by governments throughout the

Republican era. We are all Peruvian, we are all citizens but historically sectors of

coastal people have been ‘more citizen’ than others. For us on the coast, it is possible

to make accountable the legal representatives such as police and judges to perform the

role assigned by the Constitution, in other regions of the country the same legal

representatives can be agents of repression and exploitation with much more impunity.

If the Peruvian state made our ethnic groups ‘invisible’ under the umbrella of

citizenship, the feminist movement in Peru did the same but under another umbrella :

the cultureless, raceless and classless category of ‘women’. This tendency has been

difficult to reverse even though in recent years there has been a growing awareness of

the tensions arising from the concept of a universal category of ‘woman’'’.

During the left wing military government, in the 1970s, there was an effort to make the

Andean communities take an active role in the political process. This was a top-down

approach but because of the appalling conditions of the Peruvian peasantry, it meant

an air of renewal and the acknowledgement of their long and unheard struggle for

survival. In this context, the feminists started to consider peasant women and to

highlight here and there the problems of poverty and underdevelopment in rural areas.

programmes. In the following years the feminist organisations in Lima established a

collaboration with other groups in the provinces which emulated the urban-style of

feminism of the Lima groups. It was not until the nineties that there was a sustainable

support for other kinds of Non Governmental Organisations for Development (NGOs)

in the rural areas to establish a collaboration in training on gender issues. These

organisations were traditionally involved in ‘agricultural promotion’ but pressured by

the international funding bodies were obliged, not without resistance, to include

gender themes in their programmes.

In any case, from a feminist approach rural women have never been addressed in

terms of their ethnic categories, that is, they have never been named as Quechuas,

Aymaras, or Shipibas. Still, noticeable in the feminist public declarations is this

strong feeling and conviction to talk in representation of all ‘Peruvian women’ without

even having any kind of involvement with a large sector of them. Furthermore, despite

their original self-identity as ‘socialist feminists’ their perspective on ‘development

issues’ and also on law has been uncritical, in other words, has held a liberal approach

which ‘tends to assume that underdevelopment' and with it, the oppression of women,

is caused by ‘traditional values’ and ‘to develop’ also includes to embrace certain

Western values and political institutions (Stewart 1993:222). This is noticeable when

in Peru some feminist voices talk about ‘rural women’. In a paper entitled ‘Rural

women: citizenship and exclusion’. A feminist lawyer claims:

‘In general, the exercise and development of citizenship of the rural women has been affected by the particular intention in which the gender hierarchies are assumed in these settings...’ (Tamayo 1998)

Consequently, the social groups to which these undifferentiated 'rural women’ belong

denies them the full enjoyment of their status as citizens. Why? It is never explained.

Another feminist lawyer evaluates:

‘The revision and analysis of the constitutional, civil, work, agricultural laws in force in Peru let us claim that formally there are few legal norms that discriminate against rural women. However, there subsist important obstacles which neither permit the full enjoyment of their rights nor the effective application of the current legislation’ (Macassi 1998)

That is, the state has provided the 'rural women’ with all that they need for their full

development as citizens, however, there is a fundamental ‘obstacle’:

‘... rules of ancestral character which relegate women to a subordinate role and they are uniformly accepted. The traditional customs and values... reinforce women’s isolation and discrimination...The value and customs used as parallels not written norms, but strictly observed, do not permit that the laws are enforced in the daily life, reducing them to their formal aspects’ (Macassi 1998)

Consequently, for the rural women everything has already been created but it is their

'own culture’ that prevents 'a law’ as a magic act, improving the life of the Andean

women. The conclusion, can not be more obvious:

‘Because the cultural factor is a key aspect that permits the persistence of discriminatory practise and interpretations it is necessary to develop a training programme toward the different agents o f the State and the civil society involved in projects of rural development, with the objective of incorporating the gender perspective in the planning and execution of projects, and [in this way] to improve the condition for the exercise of the rights of rural women’. (Macassi 1998)

For the rural women very little protagonism and self-determination is conceded in such