Grassroots support organizations (GSOs) or development promotion centers have played a crucial role in rural development in Peru. Their impact goes far beyond the amount of funds invested in the countryside. They have served as social laboratories in efforts to break through the bottlenecks of development in the Peruvian Andes. They have frequently provided a safety net and catalyst for grassroots organizations and local communities. By mustering strength and resources, the emerging social groups have staked a claim as protagonists on the regional and national stages.
Since 1980, a rising tide of political violence has swept across the country. By the end of the decade, the conflict had cost nearly 20,000 lives and billions of dollars in damages. The social and political dynamics set loose by this trend have called into question the viability of civilian institutions and democratic government itself. It has also blocked development prospects in rural areas of the country. Naturally, this violence touches the centers along with Peruvian society and communities which are the objective of their programs. Indeed, they have found, at times, that they become targets for the belligerent forces.
The sharp rise in violence in late 1988 drove home to GSOs and other institutions a disturbing fact. Violence was going to be a constant shadow in their work. This realization was disconcerting. Awareness of its full consequence has just started to sink in. The threat from political violence touches the centers in several ways. It puts in jeopardy the centers as institutions in their own right, reducing their capacity to carry out their programs. It poses a serious impediment to development itself in the midst of Peru's worst crisis this century.
On a personal plane, violence questions private development work as a option for channeling an individual preoccupation for the wellbeing of underprivileged sectors into practical actions and organization, as a professional career option and as a way of life.
Peru is not unique in having a non-conventional war or low-intensity conflict take place in its territory. Peruvian GSOs and foreign consultants, however, have not found any literature on the role of development agencies in situations of political violence. Perhaps, there exist evaluations about grassroots support organizations and centers which have remained in internal documents, due to their sensitive nature.
This paper proposes to address this vacuum contributing to an evaluation of GSOs, local partners, funding agencies and other interested parties and how they can fulfill their roles. Because Peru is under extreme social, political and economic duress, it offers an opportunity to examine their practices in conceiving, planning and putting into action programs for rural development. This situation requires a reassessment of many assumptions which staff members and experts take for granted. It is also our opinion that much of this questioning may be applicable to development programs in general.
This report does not aim to examine specific rural development programs or practices. This task lies beyond the author's capacity. It aims to survey GSOs within the context of political violence. However, we may comment on some aspects which have a direct bearing on the report.
We divide the report into five sections:
In addition, the text contains a series of higlighted remarks. We felt that it was more important to highlight them in context rather than to extract them into the conclusions. Due to the length of the text and treatment of the issues, they tended to get lost the case studies and general discussion.
The goals are three-fold. This essay aims to provide a systemization of material on centers and political violence with enough background information to aid donor agencies and GSOs to understand the domestic situation and make more informed decisions about funding and executing Peruvian projects. Second, we will draft preliminary conclusions abo ut the situation, with the understanding that they are tentative and prone to simplification. Third, we will hopefully provide a few elements that might be applicable to other societies that are facing armed conflicts. However, it is not the intention of this paper to become a manual for operating in zones of political violence. Local and national conditions vary widely.
The International Development Research Centre of Canada though its Latin American and Caribbean regional office provided funding for research and writing on grassroots support organizations. This opportunity allowed me to repay a debt of gratitude to GSOs and centers in Peru which have provided me with insight, first-hand information and encouragement over the past 12 years in Peru. It also opened up a series of research avenues that I will try to follow in the future.
The body of this paper comes from interviews with staff members of centers working in rural areas. I consulted a bibliography on rural development and subversive violence in Peru. Though disperse and little known, there is a growing body of work that made this investigation easier.
In past research, I found it important to keep a geographical orientation in case studies. I have carried out field work in Puno-Cusco (June, 1989) and Cajamarca (July-August, 1989). Since I had visited both sites previously, the field work was especially propitious in leading me to crucial areas of analysis. I drew source material on Ayacucho from three trips to the city before the consulting work.
The broader analysis about Peruvian belligerent groups was made possible by a research and writing grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Program on Peace and International Cooperation. The investigation was carried out from mid-1987 to mid-1989. This research provided field experience in Ayacucho, Cajamarca, Puno and Cusco.
I wish to thank Marcial Rubio, Elmer Galván and Luis Román for having suffered through the reading of a preliminary and confused draft of this report. The hours spent talking about my errors and misunderstandings helped clarify key concepts. They broadened my perspective at a crucial point in the investigation by giving me feedback from their professional experience in rural development. They turned the report into a more professional product. Naturally, any remaining mistakes or misconceptions lie in my hard-headed benightedness and the vexing complexities of Peruvian reality, rural development and political violence.
I would also like to thank Manuel Iguiñez, Ricardo Vega, Tiziano Zanelli, Steven Judd, Alfredo Stecher, Enrique Moya, Vera Gianotten and Ton DeWit for much insight into the challenges of rural development in Peru. Many other sources, including local partners in promotion programs, will remain unmentioned for security reasons.
