State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2014 - Peru

Around 80 per cent of Peru's 30 million inhabitants identify themselves as either Amerindian or mestizo (mixed). The relative centrality of mestizo and Andean indigenous culture has resulted in a number of significant social movements and even political ideologies. Although the white minority still holds a disproportionate share of political and economic power, Peru's Amerindian community has been able to benefit from the country's recent extraordinary economic growth.

The Afro-Peruvian minority is less fortunate. A 2013 study conducted by the United Nations Development Programme concluded that Afro-Peruvians have experienced economic stagnation, with no important reduction of poverty standards during the recent years of fast growth. The challenges facing Afro-descendants in Peru are heightened by their invisibility. For example, the name of the government office created in 2001 to safeguard the interests of minority and indigenous groups, the National Commission for Andean and Amazonian Communities, does not mention the Afro-descendant community despite this group being included in its remit. While the Constitution also contains a number of provisions for Amerindian communities, endowing them with legal status and rights to identity, autonomous administration of their land and communal work, no article of the Basic Law refers to Afro-Peruvians. There are in fact few specific references to Afro-Peruvians in the whole of Peru's legislation.

Many isolated indigenous groups also face ongoing insecurity and rights abuses relating to resource extraction on their ancestral lands. The government has announced plans to strengthen the protection of special reserves from encroachment, but photographs in an internal report reportedly documented extensive illegal clearings linked to gas concessions. In March, the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called for an immediate halt to the expansion of the Camisea gas project into Nahua-Nanti territory. Survival International also reported that seismic testing had been conducted by a Colombian-Canadian company in the north of the country in an area that is home to uncontacted indigenous people. The 2011 'prior consultation law', requiring government consultations with indigenous peoples before beginning development or extraction projects in their area, was also rolled back to exempt Quechua-speaking communities from its protections. A lawsuit was filed by a Peruvian rights organization in August against the Energy Minister and the company responsible for the Camisea project to halt work on the concession.

Minority and indigenous groups continue to experience discrimination. This was reflected in the results of the First National Survey on Human Rights, released by the Ministry of Justice in December 2013. The survey found that while on average 40 per cent of the people polled reported that their right not to be discriminated against was not usually respected, in the case of indigenous communities this perception rose to 57 per cent, while for the Afro-Peruvian population it reached as much as 64 per cent. There are a number of legal measures in place in Peru focusing specifically on discrimination in areas such as employment and education. In 2013, Peru also passed Law 30096 on Informatics Crimes, which in its Article 323 punishes anyone who, by themselves or through third parties, 'discriminates against one or more persons or group of persons or incites or promotes publicly discriminatory acts' motivated by racism, religion and other characteristics, via the internet. In addition, some measures are being consolidated at the local level: between 2011 and 2013, more than ten municipalities enacted regulations to counteract discriminatory offences. Given how recently they have come into force, there is little information available on their implementation.

According to the last Ombudsman Office's Report on the Fight against Discrimination, 52 complaints about discrimination were submitted in Peru in 2012, with a further 17 incidents recorded between January and March 2013. One example was a case that took place in 2012 involving an Afro-Peruvian student at a tertiary school in Callao city, who was subjected to constant verbal abuse by one of his teachers, with other students subsequently joining in. Discriminatory language also continued to feature in the media. Lundu, a renowned NGO that advocates for Afro-Peruvian rights, launched in 2013 its Observatory against Racism, an initiative to monitor discriminatory attitudes and hate speech in national media. For the first trimester alone, the Observatory found 400 violating news pieces, 80 per cent of them related to sports newscasts. Lundu was also involved in a legal case against a television station over a programme that mocked the Afro-Peruvian community. After three years of litigation, it won the case – the first time the Peruvian government has penalized a media outlet for racism.

During 2013, the national Ombudsman's Office also played an active role in the fight against discrimination and racism. Besides processing and resolving complaints, although it has no sanctioning power, it launched a number of initiatives. One example is the Race against Discrimination, with more than 6,000 participants. The Ministry of Culture also launched an online platform, Warning against Racism, aiming to provide information and to promote interaction on issues related to ethnic and racial discrimination. The website provides tools to empower citizens and generates updated statistics on acts of ethnic and racial discrimination that occur in Peru. The resulting information is intended to influence the formulation and design of public policies in the immediate future. The Ministry of Culture has implemented other initiatives, such as the translation of the Law on Water Resources into five indigenous languages and the release of a handbook for police stations in Quechua, the most widely spoken of indigenous languages. In December 2013, the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights also launched the National Commission against Discrimination, in collaboration with other ministries. The Commission monitors developments and advises the national executive branch on public policies on equality and non-discrimination. Initiatives such as these aim to address the different structural causes of discrimination in Peru.