Digging in the archives: The promise and perils of primary documents

Politics and Society

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 75-100

  Leiby, Michele ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO   (United States)

Author keywords

Archives; Peru; Rape; Sexual violence; War

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949092272     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329208329754     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. See Jeffrey Burds, "Sexual Violence in World War II, 1939-1945," Politics & Society 37, no. 1 (2009);
2. Dara Cohen, "Evaluating the Causes of Sexual Violence by Insurgents during Civil War: Cross-national Evidence (1980-1999)" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 28-31, 2008);
3. Elisabeth Wood, "Variation in Sexual Violence during War," Politics & Society 34, no. 3 (2006): 307-41;
4. and Elisabeth Wood, "Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?" Politics & Society 37, no. 1 (2009).
5. However flawed the democratic system may have been, between 1980 and 1992 the country held free local and national elections and enjoyed freedom of the press. The Shining Path never intended to inject itself into the existing political system, but rather to destroy it and create a new government in which Abimael Guzmán would exercise supreme authority. In addition to the Shining Path, the state faced a second opposition organization, the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA; Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement). The MRTA initiated its armed struggle against the state in. 1984. The MRTA is responsible for less than 2 percent of human rights violations documented by the CVR, including its most famous act of violence, in which insurgents stormed the Japanese Embassy and held dozens of people hostage for months.
6. The police were the first sent in to respond to the security threat. Under the state of emergency, the police were subordinated to the armed forces and particularly to the political-military commands. As such, officers answered to military commanders and not to civilian authorities.
7. Ernesto de la Jara Basombrío, Memoria y Batallas en Nombre de los Inocentes: Peru 1992-2001 (Lima, Peru: Instituto de Defensa Legal, 2001);
8. Comisión para la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), Hatun Willakuy: Versión Abreviada del Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Lima, Peru: Comisión de Entrega de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2004).
9. CVR, Hatun Willakuy.
10. Comments made by Salomón Lerner, chair of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at the public release of the Commission's final report. Comisión para la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), Informe Final y Los Anexos de la Comisión para la Verdad y Reconciliació n (Lima, Peru: Comisión de Entrega de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003), http://www.cverdad.org.pe.
11. Among others, states in transition may offer reparations to the victims and their families; try those responsible for criminal acts in the national court system or establish a special war crimes tribunal; remove individuals, including members of the armed forces, judges, or political leaders, from their posts or offices; and may issue a formal national apology to those who suffered.
12. Valentín Paniagua, "Creación de la Comisión de la Verdad en el Perú," Decreto Supremo No. 065-2001-PCM (Lima, Peru, June 2, 2001).
13. Daniel Manrique and David Sulmont, "Preguntas y Críticas Frecuentemente Formuladas sobre las Estadísticas de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación del Perú" (2007), http://cifrascvr.wikidot.com.
14. The truth commissions in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay have been criticized for restricting their investigations to deaths (either extrajudicial executions or torture that results in death) and forced disappearances, a choice which underestimates the level and potentially mischaracterizes the nature of violence. In Uruguay, for example, the truth commission did not investigate illegal detentions, which was later discovered to be the most frequently experienced human rights violation. Conversely, the significant role of public hearings in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission led to their inclusion in the Peruvian model (a first for Latin American truth commissions). For a list of recent truth commissions and a critical overview of their structure and efficacy, see Priscilla Hayner, "Truth Commissions: A Schematic Overview," International Review of the Red Cross 88 no. 862 (2006): 295-310.
15. Alejandro Toledo, "Creación de la Comisión de la Verdad en el Perú" Decreto Supremo No. 101-201-PCM (Lima, Peru, August 31, 2001).
16. Hayner, "Truth Commissions: A Schematic Overview."
17. The Commission opened twenty-six regional offices. Each department had at least one office; Apurímac and Cusco each had two. The number of testimonies collected in each department are as follows: 5,313 Ayacucho; 1,444 Apurimac; 1,154 Huancavelica; 316 Cusco; 2,441 Huánuco; 209 Ucayali; 735 San Martín; 579 Puno; 2,308 Junin-Pasco; 1,174 Lima-Callao; 1,295 Other;
18. see CVR, Informe Final, 382. Photographs were donated by individuals, community and social organizations, churches, and various state agencies. More than two hundred of these photographs are on display at the Museo de la Nación in Peru. The exhibition, entitled Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar, will be on display until 2011.
19. CVR, Hatun Willakuy, 17.
20. Ibid., 21-23.
21. Ibid., 18.
22. See CVR, Informe Final, chap. 2 and 6;
23. Narda Ayín Henríquez, Cuestiones de Género y Poder en el Conflicto Armado en el Perú (Lima, Peru: Concejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, 2006).
24. In particular, the absence of a gender-sensitive approach within the national reparations program has been noted (for further discussion of the role of the gender unit within the CVR, see Henríquez, Cuestiones de Género).
25. CVR, Informe Final.
26. Ibid.
27. State security agents include the armed forces, police, civil defense organizations, and paramilitary groups. The Dirección Nacional Contra El Terrorismo and Sinchis counterterrorism forces within the National Police were singled out as particularly frequent perpetrators of sexual violence. Although sexual violence was prohibited by both the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the Commission found that both groups (the MRTA to a lesser degree) participated in the sexual victimization of the civilian population.
28. Ibid.
29. David Sulmont, "Evaluación del Trabajo de Testimonios," internal document of the Comisión Para la Verdad y Reconciliación, Document No. 140306 (Lima, Peru: Centro de Información para la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, 2002).
30. J. Luisa Li de Fernandez and Carmen Wurst, "Sexual Violence against Women: Psycho-juridical Approach," Clinical Knowledge 17, no. 2 (2007): 171.
31. Jennifer Green, Collective Rape: A Cross-national Study of the Incidence and Perpetrators of Mass Political Sexual Violence, 1980-2003 (PhD diss., Department of Sociology, Ohio University, 2006);
32. Michele Leiby, "Wartime Sexual Violence in Guatemala and Peru," International Studies Quarterly (forthcoming). This finding is not universal - in both Sierra Leone and Bosnia, it was nonstate armed actors who more frequently perpetrated sexual violence. Green's study relies on media reports to measure the level and patterns of wartime sexual violence
33. (see Christian Davenport and Patrick Ball, "Views to a Kill: Exploring the Implications of Source Selection in the Case of Guatemalan Terror, 1977-1995," Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 3 (2002): 427-50, for a discussion of the limitations of news sources for information on human rights violations). Leiby's study is based on truth commission and human rights organizations' reports, but covers only two countries in Latin America.
34. CVR, Informe Final, testimony 300578; italics are mine.
35. Patricia D. Rozée, "Forbidden or Forgiven? Rape in Cross-cultural Perspective," Psychology of Women Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1993): 499-514.
36. In their 1980 study based on the United States, Skelton and Burkhart found that the most significant determinant of a victim's likelihood of reporting sexual abuse was whether he or she understood what happened to be a criminal offense, an issue complicated by changing cultural norms and legal statutes on violence against women; see Carol Skelton and Barry Burkhart, "Sexual Assault," Criminal Justice and Behavior 7, no. 2 (1980): 229-36.
37. Lucero B. Merino, Matrimonio y Violación: El Debate del Artículo 178 del Código Penal Peruano (Lima, Peru: Movimiento Manuela Ramos, 1997).
38. Even after the law was repealed, Congress maintained that criminal charges would be dropped if the issue was resolved "privately"; see Lisa Sharlach, Sexual Violence as Political Terror (PhD diss., Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, 2001).
39. Jelke Boesten, "Marrying Your Rapist: Domesticating War Crimes in Ayacucho, Peru," in Gendered Peace: Women's Search for Post-war Justice and Reconciliation, ed. Donna Pankhurst (London: Routledge, 2007).
40. Rosalia is the pseudonym used in Boesten, "Marrying Your Rapist."
41. Ibid., 10.
42. The underreporting of male sexual violence may be further compounded in ethnonationalist conflicts in which the power of the state is symbolically linked to images of the virility, power, and heterosexuality of its men. For instance, despite evidence of rape and castration of men in rape camps in the former Yugoslavia, the Croatian media reported only one story of male sexual violence -the rape of a Muslim man. There was no mention of Croatian men either having suffered sexual violence or having perpetrated it during the conflict; see Dubrakva Zarkov, "Sexual Violence and War in the Former Yugoslavia" (speech made at the Cordaid Debate on Gender-based War Crimes: A Future after Humiliation, January 11, 2005), http://www.cordaid.nl/Overice/ Extra-pop-up/Index.aspx?mid=9593&sid=292. The image of a powerful and righteous state is defended through the denial or suppression of stories of Croatian men having been the object or perpetrator of sexual assault.
43. Other studies have found that in Liberia and Sierra Leone, men were also subjected to sexual violence; see Kirsten Johnston, Jana Asher, Stephanie Rosborough, Amisha Raja, Rajesh Panjabi, Charles Beadling, and Lynn Lawry, "Association of Combatant Status and Sexual Violence with Health and Mental Health Outcomes in Postconflict Liberia," Journal of the American Medical Association 300, no. 6 (2008): 676-90;
44. and Dara Cohen, "Explaining Sexual Violence during Civil War: Evidence from Sierra Leone (1991-2002)" (paper presented at the Yale University Workshop on Wartime Sexual Violence, New Haven, CT, November 2-4, 2007).
45. Leiby, "Wartime Sexual Violence in Guatemala and Peru." This 2008 study was conducted using the published annexes of the truth commission. They are available on the CVR's Web site at http://www.cverdad.org.pe. The annexes provide very brief descriptions of cases presented to the Commission. I read each summary and collected data on events of sexual violence. An "event" can include multiple victims and multiple violations, and multiple perpetrators. I recorded 695 events of sexual violence, and 913 individual sexual violations. Of the 695 events, 30 percent included male victims (25 percent of these included only male victims and 5 percent of events included both male and female victims).
46. Individual testimonies can be matched to observations in the data set according to the testimony number, the event number, and the victim ID number.
47. CVR, Informe Final, testimony 201443.
48. Cohen, "Evaluating the Causes of Sexual Violence by Insurgents"; Green, Collective Rape 2006; and Sharlach, Sexual Violence as Political Terror.
49. Green, Collective Rape, ii.
50. Sharlach, Sexual Violence as Political Terror, 11.
51. Ibid., 7-8.
52. The International Criminal Court (ICC) defines rape as the invasion of "the body of a person by conduct resulting in penetration, however, slight, of any part of the body of the victim or of the perpetrator with a sexual organ, or of the anal or genital opening of the victim with any object or any other part of the body." See ICC, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Part 2: Jurisdiction, Admissibility and Applicable Law, Article 8(2) (e) (vi) (2000), http://www.un.org/law/icc/statute/99-corr/2.htm.
53. Ibid. Sexual slavery is defined as "when women and girls are kidnapped against their will and converted into the property of one or more people who demand sexual services from them, and often other forms of domestic service as well." Forced marriage can take many different forms, including when fathers or other guardians give a woman to be married without her consent or ability to refuse. See Agnés Callamard, Documentar las;Violaciones de Derechos Humanos por los Agentes del Estado: Violencia Sexual (Montreal, Canada: Centro Internacional de Derechos Humanos y Desarrollo Democrático, 2002).
54. It is beyond the scope of this article to address the program of forced sterilization of predominantly poor indigenous women from rural areas implemented during Alberto Fujimori's governments. Some of the same causal processes - such as a disdain for women and a societal-level disregard for their rights - could explain both armed groups' willingness to perpetrate rape and other forms of sexual violence on the "battlefield" and that of health care professionals, policy makers, and others in the health care community to sterilize women. Others - such as how these social norms are imbedded and transmitted through military institutions, and how state armed forces frame their national security and react to threats to it - are distinct and require separate analysis.
55. This is a hypothesis that requires empirical testing. Indeed, it may be the case that even those forms of sexual violence recognized by the ICC - rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and mutilation - occur under different behavioral constraints and institutional contexts. Similarly, groups that engage in one or more of these abusive practices may not use them all.
56. Leiby, "Wartime Sexual Violence in Guatemala and Peru."
57. CVR, Informe Final, case 1012572.
58. United Nations, United Nations Document UN E/CN.4/1992/SR.21 (New York: United Nations, 1999).
59. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Informe N 5/96 Case 10.970 Fernando y Raquel Mejía vs. Peru (Washington, DC: IACHR, 1999).
60. United Nations, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (New York: United Nations, 1994), http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html.
61. State security agents have been reported to beat pregnant women's abdomens in order to induce labor or forcibly abort the fetus or otherwise damage the woman's reproductive organs.
62. CVR, Informe Final.
63. Leiby, "Wartime Sexual Violence in Guatemala and Peru."
64. Publicity is not a characteristic unique to sexual mutilation. Rape and gang rape, sexual humiliation, and even sexual torture may, and often are, committed in public settings. In such cases, these other forms of sexual violence may also be used to terrorize entire families or communities, making their distinction from sexual mutilation less clear.
65. CVR, Informe Final, testimony 700021.
66. Anonymous, "Victim Interview," CVR testimony No. 201549 (2002).
67. Patrick Ball, Who Did What to Whom? (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1996).
68. Jose Coronel, "Victim Interview," CVR testimony No. 200012 (2002).
69. Audre Lourde, Homophobia and Education (New York: Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1983).
70. CVR, Informe Final, testimony 205316.
71. CVR, Informe Final, testimony 700225.
72. Duncan Pedersen, Jacques Tremblay, Consuelo Errazuriz, and Jeffrey Gamarra, "The Sequelae of Political Violence: Assessing Trauma, Suffering and Dislocation in the Peruvian Highlands," Social Science and Medicine (April 2008): 1-13.
73. Felicita C., "Victim Interview," CVR testimony No. 201476 (2002).
74. CVR, Informe Final, testimony 700906.
75. See Amelia Hoover, "Sexual Violence and 'Variation in Covariation'" (paper presented at the Yale University Workshop on Wartime Sexual Violence, New Haven, CT, November 2-4, 2007), for a discussion of the possibilities of using multiple systems estimation for nonlethal acts of violence, including sexual violence.
76. Note that the unit of analysis in the CVR's final report and in the analysis of the primary documents is the victim-violation. In other words, a "case" is an observation of one human rights violation against one victim. In Leiby, "Wartime Sexual Violence in Guatemala and Peru," the unit of analysis is a violent event. An event may include more than one victim, more than one type of violation, and more than one perpetrator.
77. The Centro de Información para la Memoria Colectiva y los Derechos Humanos is open to the public Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM. Access to the documents, particularly those that are confidential, is granted on an individual basis and at the discretion of the director and center staff.
78. Some of these materials are available in digital format only.