Seven Years, Seven Days
From my desk across the bay, I can clearly make out the two islands—San Lorenzo and El Frontón—and the spur of La Punta cleaving the waters of the Pacific. It is a glorious day, unusual in the middle of May, by which time Lima is usually already draped in the white veil that made Melville call it a “ghostly city.” Beneath the midday sun, the sea blazes, bombarded by seagulls who let themselves fall from on high, wings folded, in pursuit of submarine delicacies.
At a naval base near those whitish isles, Abimael Guzmán and Víctor Polay languish under tight lockup in underground cells. Their crimes as the top leaders of the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), respectively, and the insecurity and indignation they aroused among Peruvians were decisive factors in the crumbling of democracy and in providing justification for the regime that has governed Peru since April 5, 1992.
The MRTA’s seizure of the Japanese embassy made the outside world believe terrorism was on the rise. The attack was, rather, its swan song. Leaderless and hit hard by government repression, the Shining Path and the MRTA, although they show sporadic signs of life, no longer figure significantly in Peruvian daily existence. In the seven days I’ve spent here, not a single person has mentioned them to me. The violence everyone talks about is criminal, not political: houses robbed, watches and bracelets snatched from drivers, people kidnapped as they go about their daily business. Where terrorism is concerned, and especially after the successful rescue of the hostages at the Japanese embassy, the regime may pride itself on its achievements.
And the economic successes it boasts of? In 1990, when I left for Europe, Peru seemed to be falling apart, worn down by terrorism and the populist politics of Alan García. Hyperinflation, a sharp drop in salaries, one bankruptcy after another, the disappearance of savings and any kind of investment, the country quarantined by the international financial community, an enormous, inefficient, and corrupt public sector consuming the meager resources of the state: the outlook was grim. All that is now in the past, and to my astonishment its lessons seem to have been well learned. This week, I haven’t seen the smallest sign that anyone misses García’s politics, which impoverished the country more than all the wars in its history. The newspaper La República, spearhead of the opposition, denounces human rights abuses, the constant violations of the law, and corruption, but it takes care not to request a return to statism and interventionism.
In this realm, too, the changes are unmistakable. The economy has righted itself, and a minority segment of the population is plainly benefiting from privatization, the opening of borders, and the creation of markets. There is an explosion in the construction of apartment buildings for the upper classes, and Lima is full of supermarkets, department stores, malls, North American fast-food chains (McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken), video stores, modern movie theaters, and restaurants; under the auspices of the brand-new Telefónica, new users get telephone service in just a few days (I had to wait nine years for mine). One hundred television channels reach the homes of those able to pay for cable, and several grand luxury hotels have been built. At the one where the model Claudia Schiffer recently stayed, the suite she occupied cost fifteen hundred dollars a day (this was related to me with patriotic pride). These hotels have a large and cosmopolitan clientele, since every week more Spanish, Canadian, American, Japanese, and Korean investors arrive in search of projects: “Peru,” I am assured by a credible friend, “has become a very attractive country for international capitalism.” Congratulations: I always said it was possible, when few believed it was and our government did its best to keep it from being so.
Modernization has also come, though more uncertainly, to some pockets in the interior. On the pampas of Ica, there has been a proliferation of small and medium-size businesses that employ drip irrigation and other up-to-the-minute technologies to grow tomatoes, asparagus, flowers, and other products for export; mining investments in the central and northern Andes are considerable.
All of this is wonderful, of course, but to deduce from these signs that Peru is caught up in a process of sustained and unstoppable development, like Chile’s, would be a mistake. The truth is, the economic developments still only affect a tiny fraction of the population, the top sliver of society, while the sacrifices demanded of the majority are enormous. The opening of borders raised prices to international heights, while salaries remain at underdevelopment levels, and hundreds of thousands of families go hungry or barely get by. The rates of infant mortality, malnutrition, tuberculosis, illiteracy, and delinquency are still horrifying. And practically nothing has changed for the poorest of the poor—the peasants of the Sierra—who are still the “nation apart” of which José María Arguedas spoke. This deep fissure between the sector of society that is becoming steadily more prosperous and the majority, for whom modernization comes in dribs and drabs if at all, is not, as the new ideological mantra repeats, the inevitable result of “neoliberalism.” On the contrary, the problem is that many of the reforms were scarcely liberal or not liberal at all. A good example is the privatization process, which only transferred state monopolies into private hands and did not take advantage of its mandate to massively increase the number of landowners among the poor, as was done in England or is being done now in Poland, the Czech Republic, and other central European countries.
In any case, defective and insufficient as they may be, the economic reforms instituted by Fujimori’s authoritarian regime are a step in the right direction, and the democratic government that will someday replace Fujimori should extend and perfect them, certainly not retreat. It is a notable sign of progress that the state has unburdened itself of useless public businesses, that the country has entered world markets, and that the responsibility for creating wealth falls increasingly on civil society and not on the bureaucrats. There is no other way to escape underdevelopment.
These economic advances, however, contrast ominously with what is happening in the country’s political life. Instead of making progress toward a freer and more democratic society, Peru has retreated into its most sinister past. Contrary to what I supposed, the regime is barely keeping up appearances, instead shamelessly flaunting its authoritarian character and an arrogance based on military force. The Congress is laughable: its obsequiousness and corruption surpass even those displayed under Manuel Odría’s dictatorship. The desperate efforts of the small minority of members of the opposition—whose courage and good intentions I don’t doubt—only serve to make their impotence more pathetic in the face of a regimented majority which unquestioningly and unswervingly (as one is taught in the army) obeys its sad duty to lend a veneer of legality to all the excesses, and sometimes crimes, of the regime. Over the course of these seven days, it has been preparing to unseat the Constitutional Court, because four of its magistrates have dared to oppose reelecting Fujimori in the year 2000.
If Congress is a farce, the Ministry of Justice is a debilitated and mistreated institution that has lost a good deal of its power to the boundless jurisdiction of the military, in whose tribunals (secret, elusive, and masked) the true law is laid down. Not just “subversives” are claimed by the army judiciary, but also those involved in cases in which the state’s interests and secrets are at stake. For example, the assassins and torturers of the Colina Group, the regime’s death squad, which has been credited with deeds like the massacre at Barrios Altos, the assassination of students and professors at La Cantuta University, and the very recent dismembering of one National Intelligence Service agent and the torturing of another in the cellars of the General Headquarters (both had talked too much). Drug traffickers who inconvenience the government may also be pulled out of the civil justice system and turned over to the Supreme Counsel of Military Justice, as happened to “Vaticano,” a mafia leader who revealed that for years he had had high military officials on his payroll receiving bribes, among them the notorious Vladimiro Montesinos, presidential adviser, CIA lackey, and strongman of the dictatorship, who (it has just been revealed) last year mysteriously made more than a million dollars.
The absolute (and barely disguised) preponderance of the military over the civilian in public life is the main obstacle Peru must overcome if it is to restore democracy one day. The military is now the backbone of power, and civil institutions are frills, to be reconceived and refashioned at will. The National Intelligence Service—the eyes, ears, and muscle of the regime, born out of the coup it planned itself and executed on April 5, 1992—makes all the important decisions, manipulates and misinforms the public, and hatches plans to discredit (and sometimes financially ruin or even liquidate) dissidents and members of the opposition. Purged of its most professional and principled officers, who have been dismissed or removed from any important posts, the armed forces, under the direction of Montesinos and General Nicolás de Bari Hermosa, have once more become, as in the era of the dictators Juan Velasco and Odría, the ruling party, the supreme arbiters of national political life, although for the moment it retains a civilian puppet as president in order to placate international opinion, which no longer accepts gorillas in berets and gold braid at the helms of Latin American governments.
To reverse this state of affairs it is not enough for Fujimori to lose ground in the polls or for more and more Peruvians to confess in whispers to trusted confidants (heaven forbid the government should send them to SUNAT for an investigation of their tax statements) that they are embarrassed and concerned about the future because they’ve realized that no matter how solid it seems now, in the long run nothing creates more instability and chaos than dictatorship. It would require a multiparty and popular mobilization like the one that confronted Pinochet’s regime in Chile, a mobilization capable of resisting the authorities’ infinite forms of intimidation and blackmail, to rally national and international public opinion to the cause of democracy, stripping away the blindfolds that still prevent the nation and the world from glimpsing the true face of the Peruvian regime. This mobilization is nowhere near taking place. As hardworking and idealistic as it may be (and this week I’ve witnessed how thoroughly hardworking and idealistic it is), the democratic opposition—in Congress, the limited free press, and the small civil spaces where public expression is possible—is still very weak and fragmented. It lacks leadership and any alternative proposal that can persuade most Peruvians of the advantages of freedom and legality over brute force and deception and, at the same time, guarantee that the needed process of democratization will in no way signify the smallest backward step away from what has already been gained through modernization and the establishment of economic order.
So long as this mobilization fails to occur—and in the joy of these seven days spent among friends, many of whom I was seeing for the first time in seven years, the only melancholy note has been the realization that the failure persists—Fujimori, Montesinos, Bari Hermosa, and the army of soldiers and civilians at their command will live as calmly and unconcernedly as the blithe white seagulls which, just a few meters from my desk, fish this morning in the Pacific in the pearly light of day.