Peru Today. New Faces on the National Scene

The year 2006 was an electoral year, and from the ballot boxes emerged new voices and new faces that need to be defined. In that sense, we will surely find that they are perhaps not as "new" as they appear, but rather have been rendered invisible until some event brought them to light. Likewise, it is possible that, while being aware of their presence, we have not paid attention to the real motivations of their members, or that the obvious nature of their activity has led us to dismiss them as not worth studying. From this perspective, DESCO considered the need to explore these apparently new spheres. To do so, it defined as its axis of reflection the concept of "social actors," stripped of any theoretical pretension, to refer solely to the capacity of organized human groups to manage processes linked to interests that directly affect them. In other words, we define the social actor by their action and the effects it produces. In this sense, we assume that the activity of a set of organized groups — the vast majority of them without explicit political objectives — raises some interesting elements for understanding the configuration of power in the country and its tensions.