Peru - A Country in Crisis - Part Three

In a new series, Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio examines the roots of Peru's current crisis, with its impeachments, demonstrations, and states of emergencies. Part 3/4. 2000 to 2020 - the inescapable legacy of Alberto Fujimori. 

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Transcript

Peru - A Country in Crisis - Part Three

Hi everyone. Well, in Part Two we traced the decade of Alberto Fujimori, through the nineties, and in many ways how he set up what was to come. And then in the special extra episode we brought the story right back to the present day and diplomatic conflict between Peru and Mexico. 

Well, since then, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has been declared Persona Non Grata by the Peruvian Government, and new interim President Jose Jerí has hit the ground running with an approval rating of 56%. The two are related, as Jeri has come into power with a fixation on playing the hardliner - no-nonsense, tough-on-crime, and playing to patriotism and religion as a baseline. And, and, no way to ignore this, a masterful use of social media. 

It’s been noted that Latin America currently has 4 millennial leaders - Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Gabriel Boric in Chile (soon to leave office) and Jose Jerí in Peru. Of these, the three that are likely to hang around for at least the next few months share a sensibility, Bukele’s sensibility - if you look like a criminal, then you are a criminal, and we have punitive maximum-security prisons where you can ride out your days. 

Jerí, in fact, chose to pose with high-ranking members of the military for his first official photographs, visit the country’s most notorious prisons, and ape Bukele’s rhetoric on what was coming next for the country. He has stated - emphatically - that he is going on the attack against crime. 

I say it apes Bukele’s rhetoric. I mean, it does. But for anyone who remembers back over a generation in Peru, it’s also the language of Fujimori, and the despite the abuses during his term in power, the only reason some people still remember him fondly is because if you succeed in bringing safety to a society, then people don’t much care what collateral damage there is on the way to achieving that end. Fujimori’s presidency was a wild experiment in ruling by decree, in finding loopholes, in throwing received practice out of the window. It was - undoubtedly - both unconstitutional and illegal, but it was also successful, at least where crime, violence and disorder was concerned. 

And this is the great existential question that still plagues Peru - and in most of Latin America - today. The binary proposal is that you can have either democracy, human rights and disorder, or a strong man, no checks and balances, widespread abuses, but safety on the streets. 

Latin America has a thing for strongmen, a predisposition to them, because everyone is sick to the hind teeth of just not being able to live in peace, and security. Of course, generally speaking, a strongman simply undertakes harm to the other half of the population: activists; indigenous groups; dissidents; poets and so on. But unless you are one of them, you don’t see yourself in that group. These are the expendables, the troublemakers, the boat-rockers. 

And Jerí’s 56% wilfully forgets, at least for the moment, that he belongs to the same political class that is generationally part of the culture which inherits power across the region, as we outlined in a previous episode, and that all structural abuses, the great underscore of this repeating mess, comes from that. 

Yes, that’s all very present day, I hear you say, and what happened to the year 2000, where we left off at the end of part two? Well, bear with me, because it is relevant, because in 2000 people were stunned by what had happened under Fujimori, but they also saw results, results which they were unused to seeing. And over the next 20 years in Peru, across the presidencies of the likes of Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia, Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski etc, what people saw were just as many downs as ups, a rollercoaster of them, and little improvement in security and quality of life. While many people loathed Fujimori, for many others he was like the sportsman who manages to enhance his reputation by not turning out to bat at all. His absence strengthened the perception of his policies and his legacy. Everybody who followed him, caught in the Catch-22 of his legacy, was doomed because they were dealt a bad hand and also were simply not strong enough to reinitiate Peru’s political project. Becoming leader in Peru was an impossible role - you were forced to swim in the excrement, and then blamed for having shat in the water yourself. 

There were regular leadership changes, ongoing corruption scandals, impeachments, imprisonments, strikes, unrest, peaks and troughs of economic development - the peaks really only thanks to Peru’s vast wealth in natural resources - and then, who would have wished this upon Peru of all places, COVID. 

And in the middle of this, perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of Latin America: Oderbrecht. 

Oderbrecht was a Brazilian construction giant which made itself famous by undertaking vast infrastructure projects across the region. Argentina built a new rail system, Brazil new football arenas, Cuba a huge new deepwater port. Lima, for its part, expanded its metro line.

The only problem was that across almost all of these projects, the political process which led to the awards of these contracts was based on a quid pro quo. We give you the tender, you support us and our political parties and campaigns with unprecedented amounts of money. 

There was nowhere the scandal did not reach. It is hard to think of another company in the world - and certainly not in Latin America - which had so many high-level political connections in so many countries for such a long period of time.

But Peru, arguably, is probably where it has caused the most severe crisis, where four former presidents were all implicated in scandals related to Odebrecht. The scandal discredited virtually the entire political elite of the country, no-one was spared. 

Well, I say no-one… Alberto Fujimori, his actions, and his legacy, were sat on the bench. The bench may have been in prison, where he had been sentenced to 25 years in 2009 for human rights abuses, including responsibility for ordering killings by death squads - and he may have been the figure who started off this whole chain of events anyway, but, at least he did it well, and achieved results.

Politics is a funny thing, and sometimes, doing the wrong thing, but doing it efficiently, and doing it first, sets you apart. 

Fujimori, from prison, was - and remains - like it or not - unquestionably the father of modern Peru. His is a very long shadow.

Next time, for the final episode in this mini-series, we’ll start with COVID, and bring events right up to the present day, and the crisis which saw President Dina Boluarte - she of the Rolexes and the 3% approval rating - finally impeached and deposed, allowing for the entrance, stage right, of Jose Jerí. 

Irrelevant really, because even having died in 2024, Alberto Fujimori never really left the stage. 

Goodnight!