On December 8th (2007) the Peru Support Group held its annual conference at Oxford Brookes University. The PSG would like to thank everyone who participated in the conference: Lord Avebury, President of the PSG for opening and closing the event; workshop leaders Jelke Boesten, Patricia Oliart, Xavier Ricard, Francis McDonagh and Maritza Paredes and keynote speakers Rosa Alayza and Anthony Bebbington.

Rosa Alayza – Keynote Speaker
Rosa Alayza, director of the Lima-based Instituto Bartolome de Las Casas since 2001, examined the realities and challenges of civil society in Peru in her opening address. Civil society is the term used to denote the space beyond the realm of the market and the state where a broad range of organisations which are not public or profit-making organisations are active. This includes most non-governmental (NGOs), non-profit organisations, networks and voluntary associations.

They play an important role in society and are essential to democracy because they operate independently of the government to advance their vision of what makes a good society through the collective actions of their members. But how healthy is the civil society sector in Peru? And how much influence can they have in a society that some would argue is undemocratic and does not respect human rights? These were some of the issues that were raised and discussed.

A wide variety of civil society groups exist in Peru – some have become increasingly organised and are closely connected to the political process; others are more fragmented and have less influence. Understanding the role they play has important implications for the advancement of democracy, especially given the weakness of political parties and the lack of responsive political institutions that people can turn to. Politically, civil society organisations are being asked to take on a much greater role. But how representative are they? What level of engagement and consultation do they have with the constituencies they represent? And, who are they accountable to?

These are some of the challenges facing civil society organisations in Peru. Tensions exist between local and national organisations competing for national resources and a political voice. NGOs are also criticised because of their lack of diversity within (activists tend to be more middle-class and educated) and for their weak grassroots connections which can threaten and undermine their reputation.

The way to build a democratic state is to secure people’s rights. But it is very hard to do from the outside, and not as simple as telling the government what to do or what actions it should take. Rather, as Rosa argues, further consideration should be given to the types of democratic relationships that are being built and developed in Peru and civil society needs to be part of this process.

The Bartolome de Las Casas Institute is a non profit organisation founded in 1974 by the theologian Gustavo Gutierrez and a group of professional Catholics who wanted to contribute to the process of integral freedom and human development in Peru from the Christian perspective of a preferential option for the poor.

Workshop: Gender, race and class as intersecting inequalities, Jelke Boesten and Patricia Oliart
Jelke and Patricia used their workshop to explore how the intersection of gender, race, and class influences women’s access to public services, and how this helps to reproduce inequalities in daily life.

Jelke talked about services installed in the late 1990s to counter domestic violence. Various professional actors were supposed to work together to support women in their denunciation of violent partners, to protect women from further harm, and to apply for compensation. However, existing prejudices based on ethnicity and gender led many of these professionals to blame women for their own victimisation. Indigenous women living in rural areas face the triple disadvantage of gender, race and class, and receive little institutional support for their cases. Patricia presented some facts and figures that made evident the limited access that women of indigenous populations have to state services, and the historical and cultural complexities that lie behind the figures.

Workshop: Decentralisation, regional governments and conflict, Xavier Ricard
Xavier Ricard, the director of the Bartolome de Las Casas Andean Studies Centre (CBC) in Cuzco, looked at the topic of regionalisation with special reference to Cuzco. Regionalisation is a process that began in Peru in 2002 with the aim of strengthening citizen participation and local democracy. Mechanisms were set-up to transfer money and provide each region with their own finances. In exchange, regions were asked to draw-up their own strategies and demonstrate civil society participation in setting, monitoring and reviewing their budgets. It was a measure that was intended to widen and enhance democratic participation. But, there were problems in how these plans were conceived and whether or not they could be adapted to different local contexts. The question of how civil society voices would be represented and the extent to which decisions were made binding has also been controversial.

Nearly 5 years later and little has happened in terms of dispersing power, resources and responsibilities away from the centre to local state authorities. The role they are meant to play is still unclear. In practice, their ability to replace centralised political, fiscal and administrative control is very low.

In conclusion, Xavier believes that while popular, decentralisation happened too quickly. It is a process that cannot be driven from Lima alone and can only work if people are represented and able to reach a shared understanding of what ‘development’ means at both the national and regional level.

Workshop: Perceptions of ethnic inequality, Maritza Paredes

Maritza Paredes is part of the Latin America team of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the University of Oxford. In her workshop she considered how Peruvians are highly attuned to the consequences of ethnicity. She presented some of the results of a CRISE survey which drew on in-depth interviews to explore the concept of ethnicity in Peru. It looked at how being indigenous translates into opportunity – or the lack of it using interviews carried out in two highland (Sierra) locations and also in the capital, Lima. It prompted a lot of discussion on racism and discrimination and how to address the persistent exclusion of indigenous peoples in Peru
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Workshop: ‘Is the Church in Peru an Ally or an Enemy?’, Francis McDonagh
Francis manages the Andean programme of CAFOD, the Catholic development agency. For his workshop, Francis posed the question: ‘Is the Church in Peru an Ally or an Enemy?’ Peru is considered the cradle of liberation theology, a term derived from the book published in 1971 by Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez. This theology places Christians in opposition to systems and regimes that create inequality and mass poverty. With the election of Karol Woytila as Pope John Paul II, left-wing Catholic political engagement fell under suspicion. Appointments of conservative bishops gradually changed the official position of the Catholic Church throughout Latin America and in this process Peru seems to have been singled out for special attention. It has more bishops belonging to the conservative movement Opus Dei than any other Latin American country. However, even in Peru, in September 2007 the bishops’ conference (the permanent assembly of Catholic bishops in Peru) supported community protests against the Rio Blanco mining project in Piura, despite vehement hostility from Alan Garcia and his government.

Francis posed the question: ‘What do these events tell us about the future role of the Catholic Church in Peru in the struggle for human rights and social justice?’ This is an issue that the PSG will return to in the near future.

Anthony Bebbington – Keynote Speaker
The closing address was delivered by Anthony Bebbington (professor in the Institute for Development Policy and Management at the University of Manchester) and covered a subject area that has been a major theme of the PSG’s work over the last few years: mining and development strategy in Peru. Firstly, he considered the context of mining expansion and social conflict, focusing on new government policies and institutional arrangements in Peru which created an attractive investment regime for large multinational mining companies. Between 1990-97 global investment in mining exploration increased 90%, however in Peru it increased 2000 %.

In Peru, this investment is directed towards traditional areas of extraction such as Pasco, Huancavelica, and Junin. It is also being used to open up new frontiers of development that have had no history of mining extraction e.g. in Piura, Ayacucho, Apurimac. Between 2002 and 2007, concessions in Peru increased 77.4%: from 7,045,000 hectares to 13,224,000 hectares. Around 55% (3126) of Peru’s 6,000 or so campesino (peasant) communities have been affected in one way or another by mining. Mining concessions can bring development but also signal uncertainty and change for residents and local authorities.

Professor Bebbington explained that there was little evidence to show that past mining projects fostered local development. He argues this is compounded by the weak presence of the state in exploration processes, the lack of a national land use planning system, independent environmental safeguards and an inability on the part of junior mining companies’ to de-fuse conflict. It is true to say that different conflicts are being played out through mining conflicts. The government response to these protests has been either to adopt the use of force, authoritarian practices or demonstrate its “ambivalence” to local concerns and complaints. The Rio Blanco Project offers a good illustration of these points.

He concluded that it was difficult to assess the sector’s contributions to poverty reduction at the regional level, emphasizing that the issue is not to get the development plan right but to get the governance issues right. In this case, what is important is to build an autonomous, participatory land use planning system; create an independent environmental authority; and a binding human and social rights authority. A key question to consider here, is whether social conflict will deepen democracy or lead to increased authoritarianism?