The victory of Ollanta Humala in the second round of the presidential elections this past June has saved Peru from installing a dictatorship that, with the protection of an electoral majority, would have exonerated the regime of Fujimori and Montesinos (1990–2000) of the crimes and theft it committed, as well as the trampling of laws and the Constitution that marked that decade. And it would have given power back to the seventy-seven civilians and soldiers who, for crimes committed in those years, are in prison or on trial. In the most peaceful and civilized of ways—an electoral process—fascism would have been revived in Peru.
Fascism is a word that has been used so lightly by the left, more as an incantation or an insult against an adversary than as a precise political concept, that to many it will seem like a label without greater significance to designate a typical third-world dictatorship. It isn’t, rather, something deeper, more complex, and all-consuming than those traditional coups d’état in which a caudillo mobilizes the barracks, climbs to power, fills his pockets and those of his buddies, until, repelled by a country that has been overexploited to the point of ruin, he goes on the run.
The regime of Fujimori and Montesinos—it shames me to say it—was popular. It was backed by the solidarity of the business class because of their free-market policy and the bonanza brought by the increase in prices of raw materials, and by wide sectors of the middle class due to the blows delivered by Sendero Luminoso and the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, whose terrorist actions—blackouts, kidnappings, protection fees, bombs, murders—had them in a state of insecurity and panic. Rural and working-class sectors were won via paternalistic policies of distributions and handouts. Those who decried the abuses of human rights, torture, disappearances, and massive annihilation of peasants, workers, and students accused (falsely in the majority of cases) of collaborating with terrorism were persecuted and intimidated, and suffered all kinds of reprisals. Montesinos adopted the flowering of a foul tabloid press, whose raison d’être was drowning the opposition in opprobrium through invented scandals.
Communications media were bribed, extorted, and neutralized, such that the regime had only to contend with a minimal and muffled opposition, the sufficient amount to boast of respecting the freedom to criticize. Journalists and the owners of communications media were called by Montesinos to his dark cave in the Intelligence Services, where not only was their complicity paid for with bags of money, they were also secretly filmed so that there would be graphic evidence of their vileness. Businessmen, judges, politicians, soldiers, journalists, and representatives of the entire professional and social spectrum passed through there. They all came out with their gift under their arms, happy and despicable.
The Constitution and the laws were modified for the dictator’s needs, so that he and his accomplices in parliament could comfortably reelect themselves. There was no limit to the cunning, and they ended up breaking all records in Peru’s history of corruption. Illicit sales of weapons, businesses with narco-traffickers to whom the dictatorship opened wide the doors of the jungle so they could come with their small planes to take coca paste, elevated commissions for all major commercial and industrial operations, until they accumulated in ten years of impunity the amazing sum of about $6 billion, according to estimates by the general prosecutor who, with the restoration of democracy, investigated the illicit activities of that decade.
This is, to summarize, what would return to Peru with Peruvians’ votes if Madame Keiko Fujimori won the elections. In other words, fascism in the twenty-first century. This is no longer embodied by swastikas, an imperial salute, goose steps, and a hysterical commander in chief vomiting out racist insults from up on a platform. But rather, precisely, what it represented in Peru, from 1990 to 2000, with Fujimori’s government. A gang of the soulless and voracious who, allied with immoral businessmen, despicable journalists, gunmen, paid assassins, and the ignorance of wide sectors of society, established a regime of intimidation, brutality, demagoguery, bribery, and corruption that, under the guise of guaranteeing social peace, perpetuates itself in power.
The victory of Ollanta Humala has shown that there is still in Peru a majority that was not damaged by so many years of injustice and perverse civic values. That this was only the majority by three points is hair-raising, since it indicates that the underlying foundations of democracy are very weak and that almost half of voters in the country prefer to live under despotism than freedom. It is one of the great tasks now in the hands of Humala’s government. The moral and political regeneration of a nation that, through terrorism on the one hand and, on the other, through a comprehensive dictatorship, have led to such an ideological deviation that a good part of it now longs for the authoritarian regime it suffered under for ten years.
A particularly sad characteristic of this electoral campaign has been how aligned with the option of dictatorship the so-called A-listers—the most prosperous and best-educated people in Peru, who went through excellent schools where one learns English, who send their children to study in the United States, that “elite” which is convinced that culture comes down to two words: whiskey and Miami—have been. Terrified by the lies invented by their own newspapers, radio programs, and TV stations that Ollanta Humala would replicate in Peru the policy of nationalizations and economic interventionism that has ruined Venezuela, they unleashed a campaign of indescribable poisoning, slander, and infamy to block the path for the Gana Perú candidate that included, of course, dismissals of and threats to the most independent and capable journalists. That the latter, without allowing themselves to feel intimidated, resisted the threats and fought, putting their professional survival on the line, to make spaces in the media where the opponent could have a voice, has been one of the most dignified occurrences in this campaign. (For example, the work carried out by the digital publication La Mula stands out.) That is how one of the most indignant of roles was carried out by the archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Cipriani of Opus Dei, one of the pillars of the Fujimori-Montesinos dictatorship, who honored me by reading in the pulpits of Lima’s churches during the Sunday mass a pamphlet attacking me for having accused him of remaining silent when Fujimori forced the sterilization, under false pretenses, of almost three hundred thousand peasant women, many of whom died of hemorrhages from that villainous operation.
And now, what will happen? I am reading an editorial in El Comercio, the daily belonging to the group that overcame all manner of infamy in the campaign against Ollanta Humala, that is written with great moderation and, I would say, with enthusiasm, for the economic policy that the new president plans to apply, which has also been celebrated in a television program by board members of the Confederation of Business Leaders, one of whom stated, “In Peru, what we need is social policy.” What has happened for all of them to suddenly turn in favor of Humala? The new president has only repeated in these recent days what he said throughout his whole campaign: that he would respect businesses and market policies, that his model was not Venezuela, but rather Brazil, since he knew very well that development had to continue so that the fight against poverty and exclusion would be efficient. Naturally it is preferable for those nostalgic for the dictatorship to now hide their fangs and purr, affectionately, at the doors of the new government. But you don’t have to take them seriously. Their vision is small, petty, and self-interested, as they showed in these last few months. And above all, you don’t have to believe them when they talk about freedom and democracy, words to which they resort only when they feel threatened. The system of free-market business is worth more than they are, and that is why the new government should maintain it and perfect it, opening it to new business leaders who finally understand that economic freedom cannot be separated from political freedom and from social freedom, and that equality of opportunity is an inalienable principle in all genuinely democratic systems. If Ollanta Humala’s government understands it thus and proceeds accordingly, we will at last have, as in Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, a left that is genuinely democratic and liberal, and Peru will not again run the risk it has run in these last few months, of going back to being mired in the backwardness and barbarism of a dictatorship.
Madrid, June 2011