Burying Fujimorismo
The successful movement against Keiko Fujimori’s
candidacy could be the basis for a growing left in Peru.
After two decades of drastic neoliberal reconfiguration, Peruvian
elites approached the April 2016 general election comforted by the fact that
ten of the twelve candidates shared — albeit with some minor differences — the
same economic strategy.
But against all
expectations, leftist Veronika (“Vero”) Mendoza’sthird-place
finish in the first round forced a ballotage between the favorite Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Pablo Kucynski, who
until then was considered a dark horse. Scheduled for early June, the
presidential runoff turned into the hardest-fought campaign in recent Peruvian
history.
Fujimori, daughter of
former president Alberto Fujimori, imprisoned for human right
abuses and embezzlement, was twenty points ahead of Kucynski — a former
investment banker, World Bank functionary, and state minister — in April. But
in a remarkable victory Kucynski won the June election by just 42,597 votes.
In April’s first-round
election, Kucynski was neck and neck with Mendoza, the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) candidate.
But a frantic last-minute media blitzkrieg against Mendoza — dubbed
by the right-wing media as the “last forty-eight hours to save Peru” — pushed
Kucynski into second place.
Public figures from the
political to the entertainment world — including first lady Nadine Heredia —
joined the attack. Some argued that Mendoza’s environmental stance would be
detrimental to mining investments. The archbishop of Arequipa — the second
largest city in the country — said it would be “a sin” to vote for a candidate
who favored abortion rights and same-sex civil unions. Others demonized the FA
candidate as a “radical leftist,” or worse as a terruca (the
Peruvian pejorative term for terrorist), whose ultimate goal was to turn the
country into a “chavista Venezuela” or a “communist Cuba.”
The assaults halted
Mendoza’s momentum. When the dust settled Kucynski got 21 percent of the valid
vote — ahead of Mendoza’s 19 percent but behind Fujimori’s 40 percent.
Kucynski’s newly formed
political party Peruanos Por el Kambio (a
play on its presidential candidate’s initials) won eighteen seats in the
130-seat legislature. Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular won seventy-three, and
the FA won twenty.
It was a victory for the
Peruvian right who celebrated the fact that two candidates, who the Washington
Post declared, differed only “in style,” would compete in June.
But while the media
smugly painted the Left as anachronistic in an age after “the end of
ideologies,” the FA would prove decisive in the presidential election. After
intense internal discussion, Mendoza appealed to her followers to vote for
Kucynski in order “to stop the advance of fujimorismo.” Without
the support of the seven southern regions — FA’s stronghold, where Mendoza won
the first round election with comfortable margins — Kucynski would have lost.
Mendoza’s reluctant
endorsement also let loose a floodwater of resentment against Fujimori’s
candidacy. The youth collective ¡No a Keiko! — No to
Keiko — planned massive demonstrations.
Established in 2009 as a
loose network of young people, human rights activists, mothers of the
disappeared, and daughters of the women sterilized during President Fujimori’s
1990–2000 rule, ¡No a Keiko! threw its support behind Kucynski in order “to
prevent a secondfujimorato … and to demonstrate that the majority
of Peruvians still have memory and dignity.”
¡No a Keiko! has played
an important role in keeping alive the memory of the abuses, deaths, and
corruption scandals that Alberto Fujimori’s ten-year reign brought to Peru.
Marching behind a large
banner inscribed with the slogan “No olvidamos, No perdonamos, No a Keiko”
(“We do not forget, We do not pardon, No to Keiko”), thousands of members of
labor unions, student federations, neighborhood associations, human rights
groups, women’s organizations, and LGBT collectives, as well as popular artists
and intellectuals overwhelmed downtown Lima four
days before the vote.
Coordinated actions also
took place in seventeen other cities across the country and in Europe and the
Americas, including New York, Madrid, Santiago, Berlin, and Florence. These
demonstrations and their wide social media coverage was considered pivotal in
convincing undecided voters and those leaning toward a protest vote to instead
cast a “critical vote” for Kucynski as the most effective way to stop afujimorista takeover
of the executive office.
Lesser of Two Evils
While many observers consider Kucynski and
Fujimori to be interchangeable for all intents and purposes, there are
differences between them.
Following in her
father’s footsteps, Fujimori espouses an authoritarian populism while Kucynski
favors liberal democratic practices. Campaign polls also showed that voters
considered Kucynski to be less deceitful and more straightforward than
Fujimori.
Whether this assessment
is accurate is debatable. The seventy-seven-year-old Oxford- and
Princeton-educated Kucynski has always been upfront about his orthodox neoliberal positions, boasting about
his credentials as a Wall Street investment banker and World Bank functionary.
But during the campaign
he downplayed his previous role in cutting taxes and deregulating labor and
environmental standards to entice multinational investment and the expansion of
extractive industries.
Moreover, Kucynski’s
professed respect for liberal principles and basic democratic rights and
liberties didn’t stop him from endorsing Fujimori in the 2011 presidential
election to avoid a “victory of chavismo” allegedly represented by Ollanta Humala’s centrist and nationalist
platform.
But in the end it
appears that voters were willing to look past these contradictions when faced
with Keiko Fujimori’s impending victory. Fujimori’s international team of media
consultants — paid for by the largest campaign fund of all the candidates — had
worked hard in the years following her failed 2011 presidential run to build
her a new, moderate image. At the same time, she invested time and money into
building a political organization based around her father’s old clientelistic
networks.
As the campaign heated
up, she attempted to establish a sharper difference with the other candidate,
turning her attention to corruption and the rampant criminality associated with
Peru’s drug economy and judicial system. She promised to lead with a “mano dura” — a “firm
hand” — against corrupt functionaries, to mobilize the army to keep streets
safe, and to impose the death penalty for those charged with violent crimes.
But her anti-corruption
stance was demolished when a news story, published a few days before the
election, revealed that the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was investigating Sergio Ramirez — her
party’s secretary-general and her campaign’s largest financial contributor —
for money laundering and close ties to drug trafficking.
The timely — no doubt
intentionally so — release of materials included a recorded phone conversation
between Ramirez and a US DEA informant, where Ramirez boasted that he had
laundered €13 million for Keiko Fujimori in 2011 and that he had several key
judges “in his pocket.”
Fujimori’s delayed
response to the scandal and Ramirez’s late resignation — three days after the
disclosure — reminded voters of her father’s administration’s darkest days,
when everything — government contracts, concessions to extractive industries,
arms deals, prison sentences, congressional votes, court decisions, newspaper
and media editorial lines, and campaigns against opponents — were negotiated in
backroom deals and paid for in wads of dollars by Vladimiro Montesinos,
chief of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) and Fujimori’s right
hand.
Terror, Corruption,
Privatization
Memories of corruption and violence fueled the anti-fujimorista forces,
fearful that the younger Fujimori would reproduce the politics of fear that
characterized her father’s ten-year reign.
Alberto Fujimori oversaw
one of the most pervasive and predatory neoliberal regimes in Latin America.
Facing a deep economic crisis, skyrocketing inflation, a mounting terrorist
offensive from the bloody and sectarian PCP-Sendero
Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla insurgency,
widespread social discontent, and popular mobilization, Fujimori adopted a
two-pronged strategy: an IMF-inspired “economic stabilization program” and a
counterinsurgency campaign informed by the Cold War “national security
doctrine.”
In a now-familiar
pattern that Naomi Klein has described as “disaster
capitalism,” Fujimori announced a severe austerity program — known as
“Fujishock” — a few days after taking office in early August 1990. The package
eliminated price subsidies and social spending while drastically raising
interest rates and taxes.
A majority of Peruvians
were thrown into absolute poverty, and only 8 percent of the adult population
remained fully employed. Farmers in the tropical valleys on the eastern slopes
of the Andes turned to growing coca as a way to survive.
Fujimori also introduced
new legislation that allowed employers to fire striking workers, eliminated job
security, and curtailed collective bargaining. Land reform was overturned,
paving the way for the establishment of massive new estates. A banking law
deregulated interest rates and opened the financial sector to foreign
investment. State-owned mining and oil companies, ports, railroads, airports,
power plants, and public airlines were slated for privatization.
The legislative
onslaught was coupled with an authoritarian turn. In rural areas, military “death caravans” raped, tortured, and executed
citizens; college professors and students disappeared from dormitories; peasant
villagers were corralled into strategic hamlets; thousands of citizens endured
daily police harassment and arbitrary detentions; journalists, lawyers, and
relatives of alleged subversives were executed, arrested, or disappeared.
In response the Shining
Path escalated its vindictive violence, turning on all those who would not
pledge allegiance to their “people’s war.” Car bombs and drive-by shootings —
meant to enforce the insurgency’s armed strikes — became a daily occurrence.
Fujimori’s government
attempted to rein in the insurgents by redefining terrorism as a special crime
subject to military jurisdiction.
Any perceived act of
“apology or support” for the Shining Path became prosecutable as a
terrorist act. Grassroots leaders and elected officials from the Izquierda Unida (United
Left) coalition — until the early 1990s the country’s second most important
electoral force — were prosecuted under these new laws.
Emboldened by the
retreat of popular opposition and the collapse of the institutional left,
Congress granted Fujimori extraordinary legislative powers to further
reorganize Peru’s state and economy.
Inspired by the
Southeast Asian “tigers,” Fujimori made more than seventy decrees relating to
economic reform: he eliminated all barriers to foreign investment, dismantled
the entire state sector, and privatized all public and social services,
including state enterprises, public services and facilities, the cooperative
sector, and pension funds.
All capital export
restrictions on foreign and multinational companies were removed, as well as
basic rights such as the eight-hour workday and job security.
Auto-Golpe
On April 5, 1992, Fujimori surprised everyone by
launching an auto-golpe (self-inflicted coup)
supported by the military. In a televised message to the nation, he announced
the establishment of an “emergency government of national reconstruction.”
Blaming “chaos and
corruption,” he dissolved Congress, dismantled twelve regional governments,
reorganized the judiciary, and suspended all articles of the constitution “not
compatible with government goals.”
The vast majority of
political leaders from left to right opposed the coup, but Fujimori had secured
the support of the country’s most important entrepreneur and industrialist
associations. Shortly after the coup he appointed the acting president of the
National Confederation of Business Institutions of Peru (CONFIEP) as minister
of industry and commerce.
Peruvians were exhausted
by the Shining Path’s violence and the country’s economic woes, giving
Fujimori broad leeway to overhaul Congress and the judiciary purportedly in
order to fight terrorism and corruption, and — more importantly — to provide
foreign companies with the economic efficiency they needed to invest in Peru’s
war-torn economy.
To achieve these goals
Fujimori formed SIN — a centralized system of intelligence gathering — and put
Vladimiro Montesinos, a former CIA collaborator and drug-connected lawyer, in
charge.
From his seat of power,
Montesinos founded a string of sensationalist tabloids designed to attack the
opposition through psychological warfare, blackmail, and control over the
country’s media.
To put a
liberal-democratic face on his neoliberal military dictatorship, Fujimori
called Constituent Assembly elections. The single eighty-member chamber,
subjected to presidential veto, was charged with writing a new constitution
subject to approval in a national plebiscite.
The main right-wing and centrist
opposition parties abstained from participating while the Left was disqualified
after failing to obtain the minimum 5 percent of the vote required in the
previous election.
Tailored to
institutionalize the authoritarian power Fujimori acquired in the auto-golpe,
the new constitution created a more centralized state, dominated by a powerful
executive branch that presided over a unicameral congress with few checks on
presidential authority. It also legalized secret military courts for
terrorism trials and authorized a presidential election, clearing the way for
Fujimori’s candidacy in 1995.
Despite these moves
Fujimori barely won in 1995. Undaunted, he pushed his congressional lackeys to
pass another law that enabled him to run for a third consecutive term —
contradicting the 1993 constitution he had drawn up.
But Peruvians had had
enough. When serious fraud allegations against the president came to light in
2000 widespread popular mobilizations pushed
both Fujimori and Montesinos to flee the country.
Normalizing the State of
Emergency
Aprovisional government, led by Valentin Paniagua, took over after Fujimori’s
fall. It repealed most of the anti-terrorist legislation, including the death
penalty and the secret military courts.
It also established the
Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission) to investigate “the facts and responsibilities” of the terrorist
insurgency, the paramilitary groups, and the state armed forces during the
internal war.
Panigua also oversaw the
dismissal of all military officials involved with or connected to Montesinos
and created a commission to supervise the reorganization of the judiciary
branch and to investigate — and discharge — corrupt functionaries and judges.
These were positive
measures to be sure. But the fundamental aspects of Fujimori’s constitution
remained intact. While rejecting its more antidemocratic aspects, all
subsequent Peruvian presidents — from the progressive-centrist Alejandro Toledo (2001–6), to the
social-democrat Alan García (2006–2011), to the most recent
nationalist Ollanta Humala (2011–present) — have embraced the neoliberal
foundations of the Peruvian state established by Fujimori.
More revealingly, all of
these leaders have fully accepted the permanent state of emergency. For both
liberal and authoritarian elites, the new constitution was the most convenient
instrument to legalize the predatory and exploitative measures demanded by the
expanding national and multinational corporate extractivist and financial
interests, while also criminalizing citizens’ democratic resistance to the loss
of their individual rights and freedoms, their communal and territorial
resources, and ultimately the sovereignty of their nation.
This continuity with,
rather than break from, Fujimori’s authoritarian neoliberal program complicates
the simplistic narrative of the 2016 presidential election — the narrative of a
country split betweenfujimoristas and anti-fujimoristas.
Peru’s map of socio-political and economic power has been shaped by two decades
of globalization, privatization, and financialization and remains complex and
unsettled.
Long before “Fujimori’s
economic coup” — in the words of Peruvian economist Francisco Durand — “wiped out the national
bourgeoisie,” the national-developmentalist legacy of General Juan Velasco Alvarado’s government
(1968–1975) — which called for land reform and nationalization to create an
economy based on state, cooperative, and private business sectors, favoring
local industrial development and the expansion of a national bourgeoisie — was
defunct.
Fujimori’s policies cemented
rising inequality and benefited various sectors of the Peruvian economy:
old-money elites continued to prosper, but so did a new bourgeoisie that
capitalized on foreign investment and the narcotics trade.
Privatization, free
trade, deregulation, and globalization de-nationalized and restructured the
Peruvian economy. The country’s twelve most powerful entrepreneurs centralized
their power by establishing their own banks and financial institutions, and by
diversifying investments in manufacturing, food processing, export crops, and
agro-industries.
Today multinational
corporations and foreign economic conglomerates (mostly Chilean) dominate the
upscale urban markets, using local entrepreneurs as junior partners.
Huge Brazilian
corporations have monopolized infrastructure projects, including highway,
pipeline, dam, and energy plant construction. Extractive industries,
particularly mining — the driving force behind the country’s macro-economic
growth — have come under the almost absolute control of multinational
corporations.
Rising demand for
services, construction, and mass consumer goods in the interior of the country
also created opportunities for a new layer of entrepreneurs. Unlike their peers
in the above-mentioned sectors — who are mostly male scions of old oligarchic
families or descendants of nineteenth-century European immigrants, born in Lima
or coastal cities and educated abroad — this emergent bourgeoisie comes from
humble origins, is often of Andean descendant, and includes many women.
The expansion of the
global narcotics and luxury consumer goods trade, coupled with financial,
labor, and environmental deregulation, prompted the unprecedented growth of
narcotic, tropical hardwoods,and alluvial gold exports. American-led
anti-narcotic campaigns in Colombia, Mexico, South Florida, and the Caribbean
transformed Peru from a producer and exporter of coca into a manufacturer of cocaine.
This industry is highly
destructive both to the environment and to Peruvian communities. But it is also
highly profitable and has become an important source of jobs and income.
Although officially illegal, the narcotics industry complements the operation
of the legal economy.
Sonia Medina, Peru’s
anti-drug public attorney, says Peru has a “narcotized economy (economía
narcotizada) to a degree that we don’t know which economic activity is
genuinely legal and which one is a cover for the narcotics industry.”
Resistance
For the subaltern classes, the intensification of
Peru as an “exporter of nature” has had cataclysmic consequences. The “new
mining” operations practice what David Harvey calls
“accumulation by dispossession,” a predatory form of appropriation sustained
through the blatant theft of rights, resources, and territories from the
poorest social groups.
Unlike older mining
developments, “new mining” uses massive open-pit extraction, employs a small,
unskilled labor force, and profits from large-scale exports that do not
aggregate value.
These extractivist
industries — mining in the highlands; oil, gas, and lumber in the Amazonian
jungle — have turned peasant and indigenous territories, ecological reserves,
communal and public lands, water, and biogenetic resources into commodities.
With vast sections of
their territories controlled by extractivist corporations, the highland and
Amazonian jungle provinces that host these operations are also the poorest in
the country. During recent years, conflicts over territory and natural
resources have become more frequent and militant.
The Observatory of Latin American Conflict Mining ranks
Peru as having one of the highest number of socio-environmental conflicts in
Latin America as well as the largest degree of militarized mining operations
and criminalized social protest.
Despite their
demonization in the right-wing media, these movements have effectively redrawn
the landscape of popular opposition. Socio-environmental movements have not
only resisted extractivism, but have also played a crucial role in
demonstrations against free-trade agreements and in defense of democratic
rights and national sovereignty.
And the labor movement
is gaining strength, too, despite massive setbacks. The working class is mostly
composed of self-employed workers, day laborers, and artisans who work in
family-owned micro- and small enterprises.
They make below the
minimum wage and have no — or in the best case, minimal — benefits. Even in the
formal sector, seven out of ten laborers work on temporary contracts. But
government efforts to further normalize precarious work have met with
unforeseen resistance.
In late 2014, claiming
they needed to make young people “more attractive” to business in order to
generate jobs, Congress approved a new package of laws called the Youth Labor Laws. This legislation would further
open Peru to extractive industries and make what little formal work remains in
the country more precarious.
After four months of
intense campaigning, including four huge demonstrations in Lima and other large
cities led by unemployed and underemployed youth and students, Congress
relented and repealed the legislation.
Empowered by their
success, the movement morphed into a national network of youth collectives
that, in alliance with similar grassroots groups and organizations, coalesced
into the ¡No a Keiko! movement.
¡No a Keiko!
Popular and citizens’ movements emerged as a
decisive factor in the recent presidential elections, and with two years until
municipal and regional elections, the stakes are high for FA, ¡No a Keiko!, and
the popular anti-fujimoristaopposition.
Peru’s dominant coastal
elites are likely to align themselves with thefujimorista crony
capitalists, illegal miners and loggers, and drug capitalists if faced with an
organized opposition resisting territorial and resource expropriation,
increasing labor precarity, human rights violations, and nationalistic defenses
of sovereignty.
But if the FA and
left-wing grassroots groups can figure out how to transform a heterogeneous
protest movement into a radical challenge to capital fitted to the realities of
twenty-first century they may be able to develop a serious left-wing
alternative, broadening the spectrum of possibility beyond saying “no” to fujimorismo.
