A Quecha woman and child in the Sacred Valley in Peru. Quinet/Wikimedia. Some rights reserved.
On August 28, 2003 the Commissioners of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) submitted their final report to President Alejandro Toledo and the nation. After two years and some 17,000 testimonies, the commissioners had completed their task of examining the causes and consequences of the internal armed conflict that convulsed the country during the 1980s and 1990s. The TRC determined that almost 70,000 people had been killed or disappeared, and that three out of four casualties were rural peasants who spoke some language other than Spanish as their native tongue. The distribution of deaths and disappearances reflected long-standing class and ethnic divides in Peru.
The Peruvian TRC: commissioning gender
Although the TRC was given a gender-neutral mandate, feminists were successful in insisting the commission think about the importance of gender in their work. They argued for proactive efforts to include women’s voices in the truth-seeking process. This reflected the desire to write a more “inclusive truth,” as well as developments in international jurisprudence with regard to sexual violence. Given that “(p)erhaps the most commonly underreported abuses are those suffered by women, especially sexual abuse and rape”, “gender-sensitive” strategies were employed with the goal of soliciting women’s testimonies about rape and other forms of sexual violence. The results? Of the 16,885 people who gave testimonies to the PTRC, 54% were women and 46% men (TRC 2003, vol. VIII: 64). Thus women spoke a great deal, but not necessarily about sexual violence–at least not in the first person. The total number of reported cases of rape was 538, of which 527 were committed against women and 11 were crimes against men (VIII: 89). The commission’s effort to provide a “fuller truth” about the use of sexual violence by various armed groups was met with a resounding silence.
