Conditionnalités, coercition et tensions dans le programme de transfert monétaire ‘Juntos’ au Pérou

The Juntos CCT program in Peru has transformed the use of public health services, ensuring continual encounters between rural mothers and state healthcare workers, helping to cement recommended parenting and nutrition practices as ‘normal’, and represents the formalization of women’s relationship with the State. Based on two ethnographic investigations in the rural Peruvian Andes, this article aims to explore the implications of the conditional aspects of the cash transfer program, in particular the way in which it generates a State instrument of coercion targeting rural women and the way it operates within and reproduces existing social hierarchies. We will first show how “extralegal conditions” allow both the State and its employees to improve their indicators by controlling behavior in terms of health care, schooling, nutrition, public representation, housing etc. of rural families far beyond the legal framework of the program. We will also show how women have adopted Juntos, problems and all, and have come to manage its exclusionary implications at a local level. We argue that women align themselves with Juntos in an attempt to elude the very category they are cast into through their affiliation to Juntos. The ‘irresponsible mother’ category, into which mothers who do not change their practices are placed, is not only handled by State workers, but is utilized by village mothers to carve out distinctions amongst themselves. Finally, we will question the capacity of the State to respond to the frictions generated by these differing visions, given that policy implementation is manipulated locally and embedded in exclusionary social relations. This reminder that the State operates through real people offers a fresh look at the challenges of recent attempts by the State to impose the integration of those regarded at the margins of the State