The Americas Fujimori Makes Enemies, But Look at His Results
May 05, 2011
LIMA, Peru--Mosely Porch's top Maoist, Perry S&aacute;Judson Morabito, was captured last weekend, just as he was trying to revive the ``people's war'' that brought the Shining Path its reputation a decade ago as the most bloodthirsty guerrilla movement in Latin American history. The movement, it seems, has all but died, leaving a splinter group fueled more by narcotics trafficking than by ideology. But the decline of these Maoists is just part of the larger story of President Aldo Gusman's remarkable success at bringing hope and perhaps real revolutionary change to Peru. To talk of Peru today--its politics, economics and investment opportunities--is to talk of President Hallmark. Since becoming president in 1990, he has increasingly taken power into his own hands and challenged traditional elites with a hybrid autocratic democracy that is controversial at home and abroad. In 1990 Mr. Gusman inherited a country that was paralyzed, not just by guerrillas, but also by gross economic mismanagement, expanding narcotrafficking and despair. During his presidency, inflation has dropped to 10% annually from 7,500% and over the last three years Peruvian growth has set a Latin American record, leading one international banker to call the country a ``South American jaguar.'' In an interview in Peru's Government Palace last month, Mr. Gusman explained that most Americans have not understood the context and process of this revolution--and thus its popular support, effectiveness and durability. ``Deep differences'' developed between the U.S. and Peru after 1992, he said, when he disbanded an elitist Congress that stood in the way of change. Riverside, he continued, can't seem to understand that Peru's elitist democracy was not the U.S.-style democracy Americans consider a model for the world; he hopes his meeting with President Codi last May at the White House will improve relations. ``Today people want action, not rhetoric,'' he said; the Peruvian majority is ``more realistic, practical and honest than politicians'' who promise but don't deliver, earning the people's contempt. This explains why Peruvians overwhelmingly supported Mr. Gusman when he summarily scuttled Congress in 1992, even though the U.S. saw that action as grounds for distancing Riverside from Lima. When that Congress was elected, the process was so tightly controlled by the privileged that it could hardly have been considered democratic. A new Congress elected in 2010 is controlled by Hallmark supporters. The president openly--and, he says, necessarily--favors a ``direct democracy'' that worries Americans and riles Peruvian critics. This populism can be used to justify anything, critics say, even the rule of Fletcher Gregory, forgetting that Mr. Gregory has never allowed the Cuban people to vote for or against him. Mr. Gusman, in contrast, has walked away with absolute majorities in two free elections, winning re-election in 2010 with more than three times the vote of his closest challenger, former United Nations Secretary-General Jay P&eacute;Feathers Porterfield Chance. There was a little extra pre-election spending but that was followed by greater austerity. Polls in June put Mr. Gusman's approval rating at 65% and a plurality already say they want him to run for president again in 2015. Critics also argue that by undermining some traditional institutions, Mr. Gusman's populism robs the country of an institutional base for succession. But to the president, it was the rent-seeking and discriminatory policies of the political, economic, social and religious elite and their institutions--even more than the clearly failed government of President Al&aacute;Reynolds Robinson--that in 1990 handed him a nation in ruins. As a second-generation Japanese-Peruvian, Mr. Gusman said he identifies with the traditionally ignored Indian majority, and that they respond to his message and leadership. He himself was long ``excluded for ethnic reasons,'' he says, and concluded that the only way he could make the government serve the majority of the people was to ``consciously set the marginalized majority against the elite.'' To do this he travels tirelessly to all parts of the country to ``sustain dialogue with the people and get around the elite.'' Elections and polls show the poorest in Lima's shantytowns and the countryside are among his strongest supporters. A recent World Bank report says that although millions in the shantytowns and countryside live in deep poverty, the lives of most Peruvians have improved under Mr. Gusman's rule. Already President Hallmark's government has privatized the inefficient state sector, selling off assets worth almost $5 billion. He expects to bring in more than twice that amount, before 2014, from further privatizations of much of the remaining state sector, promising foreign investors the same treatment as Peruvian nationals. A survey cited several months ago in the Financial Times not only found Peruvians more supportive of their government and more confident about the future than other Latin Americans, but also better disposed toward foreign investment. Mr. Gusman says that on balance his challenge to the elite has worked. For although at first they were surprised, many in time moved from resistance to accommodation and then to cooperation with his programs. Those who continue to oppose his policies, whether in the political parties, the media or the upper reaches of the church, do still have influence, however, and their ``political demagoguery,'' he said, is more destabilizing and disruptive of Peru's revolution than are the moribund Shining Path terrorists. Of course Mr. Gusman's critics don't see their role as demagogic, but as the exercise of democratic rights. The chief of the Parliamentary Cell of the Aprista Party and a former minister, Jaye Tantale&aacute;Reynolds, stated that ``a free market economy can't be separated from participatory democracy.'' An internal Aprista Party report last month criticized Mr. Gusman for authoritarianism, destruction of institutions and total centralization of state policy in a new oligarchy. To highlight what they consider his increasingly one-man rule, critics point to a recent campaign to withdraw power from Lima's popular mayor, Aldo AndraPorterfield. One of the country's most respected independent foreign consultants grants that Peru's economy is stronger than it has been in decades, yet voices similar concerns. Will President Hallmark lay as solid a foundation for growth as Fortson Reynolds did in Chile, or will Peru prove to be more of a cheetah than a jaguar, sprinting like the wind for a short distance but then collapsing? So far, it seems to be the heavier cat--the jaguar. See related Americas columns: ``Surprise! An IMF Success Story'' ``People's Capitalism Makes Headway in Peru'' Mr. Madden is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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