In the 1990s, after years of civil war against Shining Path, and an all-time economic crisis, Peruvian public health officials vowed to modernise from debris not only the health system of country, but also its most excluded and poor indigenous populations.
In this quest, the Ministry of Health backed by international organisations developed an epidemiological profile for the country which overlapped indigenous peoples’ racial and ethno-linguistic characteristics with the prevalence of ‘infectious’ diseases and chronic poverty proper of ‘non-modern nations’. Drawing on this diagnosis, public officials started to openly mention that indigenous peoples were responsible for the country’s backwardness mostly because their lack of means for fostering their children and their limited access to information which restricted their freedom of choice mostly in part because of their large fecundity rates.
To overcome such problem, public officials thus expanded a previously inexistent health system to rural and indigenous territories, while also introduced a performance management system that prized physicians for sterilising indigenous peoples. Results, official sources mention, account for a total of 300 thousand forced sterilisation cases in Peru.
In the meantime, the neighbouring country, Ecuador, followed a completely different path. In the early 1990s, indigenous peoples managed to construe one of the most important social movements in Latin America (CONAIE). Said movement blocked the governmental adoption of harsh neoliberal reforms and played a central role in the formulation of the country’s most progressive constitutions (1998 and 2008), which incorporated indigenous peoples’ right to ‘ancestral medicine’.
Drawing on divergent Peruvian and Ecuadorian cases, my book seeks to respond to some fundamental and still understudied questions in public administration: What roles does expert knowledge plays in the making of (health) policies in postcolonial contexts? How do notions of race and gender influence the decision-making of public officials in these countries leading them to implement policy instruments that suppress indigenous peoples' life? Under what circumstances can vulnerable and minority populations achieve successful policy change –this is to say, when can ‘they have a voice’?
My book responds to these questions by drawing on a situated (in the postcolonial context) Foucauldian approach: It is generally argued that racialised/gendered rationalities in postcolonial contexts influence the construction of (biopolitical) policy instruments that govern vulnerable (indigenous) populations thereby rendering them unworthy of governmental control meanwhile actively seeking to transform them into subjects amenable of governmental pastorship. In such process, my book sustains, indigenous people become able to articulate resistance and formulate emancipatory and knowledge based alternative policy schemes (such as interculturality and Sumaq Kawsay) to overcome racialised and gendered formulations.
My book thus proposes a comprehension of the state, the bureaucracy, and the policymaking as spaces of epistemological confrontation. It is sustained that expert knowledge is politically utilised by public officers to engineer policies to racially transform the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, in such contexts, indigenous peoples are also able, under certain circumstances, to ‘have a voice’ on defining their own forms of ‘not being governed to much’ by predominant racialised/gendered rationalities.
Copyright © 2024 Diego A Salazar Morales – Alle Rechte vorbehalten.