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where after the orgy
we awake face down
murdered by the infamous hatred
of their (so much) shamed manhood
where where they denied our names
those who scream for justice,
for so many lives taken,
goes the funeral march and its smell
of shot flesh.
— Germa Machuca, “Sudario”
On February 13, 2023, trans women all over Lima woke up to a video of the torture and murder of Ruby Ferrer, a trans woman who had migrated to the capital from Iquitos. The video was sent to her Whatsapp contacts by her captors as a promise fulfilled of the death threats that had been plaguing them. Days later, similar news would arrive about the death of Priscila Aguado. Both women were sex workers who had been extorted by mafias to whom they refused to pay their dues. To date, both cases have remained unresolved and without justice.
As I write these lines, trans and travesti collectives are joining a series of national protests and strikes called by transportation and trade unions who denounce the state’s inaction in the face of mounting insecurity in Peru. Many of them, organized through sex workers’ associations, have condemned the growing rates of extortion, bribery, transfemicides, and murders that have, in some instances, overwhelmed the Central Morgue of Lima with corpses. According to the Crime and Violence Observatory, extortions have increased from 2,618 cases in 2019 to 17,426 cases in 2023. Likewise, the number of homicides and attempted homicides rose by 38 percent between 2021 and 2024. Violence against the trans community specifically suffers from underreporting; state neglect and invisibility mean there is no official statistic that can account for the actual magnitude and scale of this violence.
Meanwhile, the government of Dina Boluarte, the least popular head of state in Latin America, proposes laws that are vastly insufficient to protect those most impacted. Law 32108, for example, enacted in August 2024, facilitates impunity in the face of organized crime. And the so-called “urban terrorism law,” currently under debate in Congress, seeks to modify the Penal Code in order to take advantage of the underlying fear still prevalent in Peruvian society since the internal armed conflict, under the guise of addressing the country’s crisis of insecurity.
Beyond widespread insecurity, Peru has no formal protections for the LGBTIQ community. There are no laws on gender identity, marriage equality, hate crimes, or trans labor inclusion. Even the precarious public program that provides HIV/AIDS care and treatment has seen generalized medication shortages under the authoritarian government of Boluarte. In May of last year, her administration issued a decree categorizing trans identities as mental health disorders.
Far from isolating and allowing themselves to be cast in opposition to the situation the country is going through, trans and travesti Peruvians are a part of the oppressed peoples who raise their voices against the widespread violence the country is being exposed to under the “Fujidinista” political pact. The performance “Cuerpx en Vela” or “Body in Vigil” by travesti artist Germa Machuca highlights the necropolitical connections that underpin anti-trans and anti-Indigenous violence in Peru in service of the interests of the same political class that seeks the disappearance of these voices and bodies in struggle.
El Terruqueo
Talking about terrorism in Peru is still an extremely difficult and polarizing topic. The period known as the internal armed conflict took place between 1980 and 2000 and was marked primarily by war between the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), campesino self-defense patrols, and state agents. The latter suspended the rule of law, giving rise to a systematic policy of human rights violations in the name of their counter-subversion efforts, leaving a toll of nearly 69,000 dead and disappeared. During this period, not only were armed groups called terrorists, but also any force opposed to the government in power, an issue that worsened with the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990 – 2000). As political scientist Jo-Marie Burt explains, the Fujimorato (Fujimori regime) instrumentalized the fear derived from the internal armed conflict for its own political purposes: the disarticulation and fragmentation of civil society, the silencing of discourse opposing the regime, and the justification of mano dura authoritarian policies that would bring “order” to the country. Anyone accused of being a terrorist could be arrested and, in many cases, disappeared. As indicated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), anti-terrorist efforts resulted in kidnappings, massacres, and extrajudicial executions, as in the emblematic cases of La Cantuta and Barrios Altos, in Lima and Los Cabitos in Ayacucho in which hundreds of people were systematically disappeared. In this context of terror and extreme violence, the citizenry was weakened and broad sectors of the population supported Fujimori’s authoritarian measures that were grounded in fear of the other and social divisions based on ethnic and class differences.
Thus arises terruqueo: the phenomenon characterized by naming the “other” as a terrorist, or more precisely, as a “terruco.” As historian Carlos Aguirre points out, the term is used to refer to real or supposed members of armed groups and to discredit human rights organizations, people with progressive or leftist political positions, and Indigenous communities. It is this last association that would gain the most strength in the racialized context of Peru, appearing as a single category—that of “terruco Indian.” On them would fall not only the responsibility for political violence, but also the justification of the violation of the rights of racialized protesters who claim their rights before a political class that does not see them as citizens but as enemies of “progress.”
In this way, the term centralizes contemptible characteristics as seen by the country’s elites, as pointed out by the cultural scholar Oswaldo Bolo Varela, which are not limited to criminal actions but also include reprehensible political behavior (such as rebelling against the state); the ethnic category of being Indigenous, speaking Quechua, and being poor; and the moral quality attributed to such ethnicity, that of being irrational subjects who act under ideological fanaticism. Terruqueo is, therefore, a political strategy that reinforces the neoliberal consensus, the same one that is cross-dressed as democracy and justice to justify itself.
Bodies that Produce Terror
While Peru was shaken by political violence, the 1980s were also the scene of another internal war for marica and travesti bodies: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The arrival of the disease in Peru in 1983, where it was considered a “plague,” also produced terror. Especially before it was possible to access drugs that could treat the virus, bodies sick with AIDS embodied terror not only because of the disease itself, but also because of the perception of the disease as a consequence of a pathologized sexual act historically criminalized by laws with a colonial heritage.
To this is added the fear of contagion: gay and travesti bodies, in their association with HIV/AIDS, became dangerous bodies—untouchable and dehumanized in their agony. Associated with death, they were condemned in life to the same destiny as bodies marked by terruqueo: disappearance. There was no official policy that kept data on their existence, and their deaths could not be claimed by their own, so it was not uncommon for them to be thrown in mass graves, disappeared, without justice. In this sense, the necropolitical fate of people who are put to death by terruqueo and travesti individuals—murdered, abandoned by their families, HIV-positive—is the same.
They are united by the demand for dignity in the face of death.
Germa Machuca and Travesti Art
“El travestismo is always an act of infiltration and sabotage,” Germa Machuca reminds me when I interview her at her home in Lima, although it’s not the first time she’s said this to me. Germafrodita, as she calls herself, is a transdisciplinary travesti artist who was born in Lima in 1970 into a militantly leftist family. With an Andean father and a Chalaca mother (born in Callao), she calls herself mestiza of all mestizaje and non-binary of all binarism. She also tells me that she does not really enunciate herself from a place of mestizaje, at least not the kind that romanticizes the displacement of Indigenous cultures, but as a bastard and unacknowledged daughter of the kind of constructions that seek the violent whitening and acculturation of our country. Nor does she really name herself as non-binary, but, as she says, binarixima. She understands the traps that are laid by politics that are tied to identity, and so she sees herself as an anarchic travesti whose strategies belong more to underground punk than to the formal art world.
She is an artist of the body because the body is the quintessential resource in the face of scarcity. The plaza is her stage because, as she says, public space proposes a horizontality far from the spectacularity of art: without announcement, without cost, and without mediation. Plazas are also the spaces of popular political dispute par excellence, where the population mobilizes its unpostponable demands. These are precisely the spaces where monuments to the ideals of democracy, justice, motherland, and freedom are erected. In the Global South, these sculptures are part of the colonial architecture of our cities, and in every great mobilization against the government, they are stained with the blood of the people who struggle against the forces of order that insist on using terror as an argument to justify the lethal use of force that they monopolize.
At the end of 2022, they were once again bathed in the blood of 49 people who were murdered across the country during the lethal repression of mass mobilizations against the incipient government of Dina Boluarte and the Congress of the Republic.
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Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
Malú Machuca Rose is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, where they are pursuing a doctoral dissertation thanks to the support of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Sexualities Program (SPAN), and the Graduate School Research Award (TGS).