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Objective/context: In the early twentieth century, Peru rejected legal pluralism and, once again, selected a highly European-inflected penal code, undergirded by the prevailing tenets of legal positivism. In doing so, criminal courts became a particularly contested site, where indigenous and mestizas (mixed-race) women shaped and negotiated racial sentiments constructed around their sexuality. In also shaping the meaning of the law itself, I contend that virginity—or lack thereof—patterned legal positivism in Peru. I first detail the historical impact of legal positivism on Peru’s judiciary. I then showcase women’s courtroom narratives (alongside other juridical testimonies) that reveal their struggle for political inclusion. Methodology: This article is built from an analysis of primary and original archival data and is the synthesis of 55 cases of alleged sexual transgressions occurring in the region of Cuzco from 1924 to 1949. Originality: This paper is significant because it is one of only a few that examine the history of legal positivism and rape prosecution in the early twentieth century by incorporating primary archival data to show how women were protagonists in shaping Peru’s unique legal, political and cultural history. Conclusions: Expanding the arguments of imminent Andean scholars of postcolonialism, I argue that the ‘coloniality of law’ in Peru is illuminated by the collusion of legal positivism and fin de siècle racial ideologies that created a new subjectivity for women. In addition to refashioning repressive honor codes (literally embodied in ideas about morality and chastity), the new penal code also broadened a gap where indigenous and mestizo women argued their juridical humanity in criminal courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a decade of low TFP --factorial total productivity-- in Latin America, the paper shows evidence of the low level of TFP due to the degree of technical inefficiency of companies in the Peruvian productive sector case. For this, the technical efficiency indices of 116 875 companies (83 271 formal and 33 604 informal) distributed in 25 regions and ten productive sectors (agriculture, livestock, agriculture, mining, fishing, manufacturing, construction, commerce, hotels and restaurants, and the rest are non-governmental services). The estimates yielded a general average efficiency index for the regions and sectors of Peru of 37.94 --in other words, the total product of the companies would multiply by 2.6 without requiring additional productive factors--. This figure suggests that government or company interventions that induce technically efficient behaviors in production can contribute to increasing the TFP of the economy, probably at lower cost and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Peruvian internal armed conflict, military bases were installed in the communities of Manta and Vilca in order to maintain order in the area. However, soldiers began raping women on a daily and repeated basis. The purpose of this article is to reflect on how women survivors of sexual violence have come to understand these experiences. In the article, I examine the discourse contained in the testimonies given by women from the communities of Manta and Vilca to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR). I then analyze the in-depth conversations I had with six of the nine women survivors of rape from the Manta community who are plaintiffs in the judicial process underway since 2016 against fourteen military personnel accused of being their aggressors. These conversations are part of my ethnographic work conducted in 2018 and 2019. By way of conclusion, I note that the meanings that women survivors have given to their experiences reflect subjectivities related to the historical context, but above all to the socio-cultural context. In turn, these subjectivities vary over time, resulting in resignifications of the experiences. This paper is also intended to capture women's voices through the use of the notion of rape survivor, which theoretically and methodologically seeks to highlight the agency and creativity of the women who are subjected to such experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]