The Peruvian Civil Code, Property and Plunder. Time For a Latin American Alliance to Resist the Neo Liberal Order.

Abstract

In Latin America as elsewhere, legal institutions imported from the capitalistic center have legitimized and covered up a process of economic and political domination. Traditional civilian legal culture first, and U.S. dominated rhetoric of the rule of law later, have provided a degree of intellectual legitimization. By looking at global economic transformations in the lifetime of the Code, this paper attempts to show that the real issues crucial to property law in Peru: resource distribution, social inequality and ethnic segregation, as elsewhere in Latin America, have not been tackled and truly discussed by legal scholars. Legal scholars have become prisoners of the myth of political neutrality first by civilian private law and later by the technocratic ideology of American inspired law and economics in development. They should rather unite to develop a new social constitution of Property, perhaps in the form of a Pan Latin American Code, granting to the historically exploited a right to International debt default. This paper was presented at the Catholic University of Lima for the 20 year Anniversary of the Peruvian Civil Code at an International Conference held in Lima, Peru on November 12, 2003.