Opinion Peru's protests are a fight for democracy
By José Carlos Agüero
March 7, 2023 at 5:49 p.m. EST
Anti-government protesters in Lima, Peru, on Jan. 19. (Martin Mejia/AP Photo)
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Although many factors have contributed to it, the current crisis of Peruvian democracy is the result of more than three decades of entrenchment by a political ideology known as “Fujimorismo.”
The movement got its start in 1990, when Alberto Fujimori won the presidential election, defeating the novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. Fujimori presented himself as an outsider who was seeking to replace the battered traditional parties during one of the country’s most crisis-ridden historical periods. Peru was fighting the Maoist terrorist group Shining Path even as the country faced bankruptcy. Hyperinflation was ravaging the economy, measuring at 7,482 percent the year Fujimori triumphed.
Fujimori rolled out a package of neoliberal reforms, which included the privatization of companies and public assets, a tightening of monetary policy, a return to an export-led model that concentrated wealth among cartels, and the end of state participation in private activity. At the same time, he doubled down on a counterinsurgency strategy against the Shining Path.
In the face of strong political opposition in the legislature, Fujimori dissolved Congress and the judiciary in 1992 and assumed all power with support from the armed forces. To give his self-coup legitimacy, he encouraged the approval of a new constitution in 1993, which further limited the role of the state in the economy and reduced the legislature to a single chamber. Most fatefully for what was to come, he gave both the executive branch and the legislature the power to destroy each other: Congress could now remove the president by a qualified majority vote, and the president could dissolve Congress if it rejects his appointments twice.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/07/peru-protests-democracy-economy/
