In February 2017, in a working-class district of Arequipa, Peru, a municipal official knocked on a door to survey a household. Inside, a young woman lived in one room with her two daughters. She had come to the office because a hospital told her that her free health insurance was about to lapse. Halfway through the form, the official warned her that answering it might cost her that insurance — and then advised her to abandon the process entirely.
Diego Cerna-Aragon spent months following officials like her. Peru classifies its citizens as extremely poor, poor, or not poor using a centralised system that decides who can receive welfare. It was built partly to keep local officials out of the decision. What Cerna-Aragon found is that it only works because those same officials improvise — inventing income figures, drawing maps, quietly bending deadlines. This is a conversation about what happens when a government turns a life into a form, and who is really doing the judging.
