When Family Support Is No Longer Enough: The Alimony Agreement as a Legally Enforceable Solution to the Lack of Care for the Elderly in Peru

Aguirre-Lanegra A.J.; Seminario-Hurtado N. · Revista Juridica Austral (2026) · DOI: 10.26422/rja.2026.0701.agu

Resumen

The absence of a specific contractual instrument to channel the exchange between asset transfers and lifelong personal care stands as one of the most evident structural gaps in the Peruvian Civil Code of 1984. In response to this void, social practice has distorted the advance on inheritance as a functional substitute; however, its subjective limitation to forced heirs, its exclusively succession-based cause, and the belated activation of the revocation regime make it a structurally insufficient protective mechanism for the transferring older adult. The available alternatives, namely donation with usufruct reservation, modal donation, simulation, and life annuity, each address different dimensions of the problem without simultaneously satisfying the conditions required by the cedent’s situation of dependency. This article aims to demonstrate that the Civil Code of 1984 already contains the dogmatic resources necessary to construct, without legislative reform, an atypical food contract endowed with synallagmatic efficacy, automatic termination upon breach, and registral enforceability against third parties. The methodology combines systematic dogmatic analysis of Peruvian contract and registral law, critical examination of Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal case law, and comparative references from Spanish, Italian, and Latin American legal systems as targeted validation inputs. The results show that the articulation between the atypicality enabled by article 1353, the express termination clause of article 1430, and the registral inscription of article 2019, all of the Civil Code, forms a triadic architecture whose protective capacity exceeds that of available figures. The article concludes that express typification would provide additional registral certainty and facilitate regional convergence, but its absence does not compromise the immediate operability of the proposed instrument.

Instituciones: Universidad Científica del Sur; Universidad Privada del Norte