A DUAL COUNTRY

 

A DUAL COUNTRY

Short-term orientation, distrust of institutions, the centrality of informal networks, and ambivalence toward legality can no longer be understood as cultural traits specific to marginalized sectors. Above all, they are rational responses to a fragmented social order, now widespread across much of Peruvian society.

The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the very structure of the country. Peru increasingly functions as a dual system, where a formal State—legal, institutional, and often ineffective—coexists with a network of de facto powers that organize economic and social life across vast territories. In this context, informality ceases to be an anomaly and becomes the norm, while illegality emerges as an organic component of economic accumulation.

Distrust of the State can no longer be interpreted as a mere cultural prejudice, but rather as the result of repeated experiences of corruption, neglect, and arbitrariness. Community networks, in turn, perform a dual function: they sustain everyday life in the absence of effective public policies, but they can also serve as a support structure for informal or illegal economic circuits.

This shift in meaning is crucial. We are not dealing with an isolated subculture, but with the concrete form that social reproduction takes within a mode of production deeply shaped by informality and illegality. In this context, behaviors once attributed to poverty appear integrated into a broader system that not only tolerates them but, in many cases, actually depends on them.

Understanding this articulation is essential for analyzing the country’s current political degradation. For where the State becomes fragmented and the economy increasingly informalized, it is not only the rules of the economic game that change: social life itself, as well as the very ways of doing politics, undergo profound transformation.

Silvio Dragunsky G.

Lima, April 7, 2026

Silviodragunsky.blogspot.com

sdragunsky@gmail.com

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