Peru Remains a Dysfunctional and Polarized Country

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Peru was in the news this month. China’s President Xi Jinping attended the inauguration of the new China-backed Chancay megaport on the Peruvian coast, while he was at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The $3.5 billion project, built by China’s state-owned Cosco Shipping, has, we are told, turned a fishing town into a logistical powerhouse set to transform the country’s economy.

But we’ve seen such stories before, yet the country never gets out of the morass it’s in.

Peru was the last South American country to attain independence from Spain. Lima, the capital, was a royalist stronghold. After gaining independence, Peruvians struggled to agree on the most efficient form of government, resulting in unstable and short-lived constitutions. The country’s early years of independence saw political divisions, social inequality, and economic dependence lead to frequent military coups.

Society remained deeply unequal, with race and class determining social privilege and access to resources. A semi-feudal network of Creole landowners, known as “the forty families,” controlled vast areas of the countryside, creating one of the most skewed land distributions in Latin America.

This oligarchy, supported by powerful institutions like the military and the Catholic Church, prioritized their economic interests, which fueled political instability. Early on, military leaders, or “caudillos,” frequently clashed for power, using force as a common means of resolving political conflicts.

The resulting cycle of coups and economic ups and downs made military intervention routine. In the thirty years following colonial rule, there were a staggering twenty-four regime changes.

Peru remains a deeply polarized and fractured society, and between 1980 and 2000 experienced one of the most violent armed conflicts on the planet, waged between the Peruvian state and the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (TARM) groups.

Amnesty International documented widespread systematic violations of the fundamental rights of large sections of the population. These included forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, violations of due process and acts of torture and ill-treatment perpetrated by state officials, committed by the Maoist Shining Path and the TARM.

 

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established in 2001, these two decades produced 69,000 deaths, not counting 20,000 disappeared persons, of which the Shining Path Maoists were responsible for 54 per cent, state military forces 37 per cent, rural campesino self-defence groups seven per cent, and the TARM two per cent.

Even following the capture of Shining Path’s leader, Abimael Guzman, and the dismantling of the TARM, the country remains far from any meaningful reconciliation, despite the TRC’s collection of testimony from more than 17,000 individuals.

The guerrilla movements were finally defeated by President Alberto Fujimori, who governed Peru between 1990 and 2000 before being forced from office amid allegations of corruption. His time in office was marked by many dramatic twists and turns.

He was lauded for ushering in one of the most economically stable periods in Peru with his radical austerity measures, credited with putting the economy back on track and reining in skyrocketing inflation. It included selling off of hundreds of state-owned enterprises and replacing the country’s troubled currency. And his very tough stance against the insurgent movements, also won him plaudits from many.

But in 1992, two years after taking office, Fujimori shut down Congress, accusing lawmakers of preventing him from taking the measures the country needed. The move was denounced as undemocratic. His opponents called it a “self-coup.” His government also oversaw a campaign of forced sterilization that targeted women in the country’s poor and largely Indigenous rural areas.

The former president was convicted in 2009 on charges related to the murder of 25 people by government death squads during his tenure. He was released by a Peruvian court due to his age in December 2023 and died this past September. Many in the nation view him as a corrupt, authoritarian figure who weakened the country’s attempts at democracy.

His daughter Keiko was one of his most vocal defenders throughout his life and is also his political heir. She leads Peru’s conservative Popular Force party and has tried to follow in her father’s footsteps, running for president three times, while leading the country’s largest Congressional faction.

But she too is in legal trouble, accused of having led a criminal enterprise that laundered some $17 million to fund her presidential campaigns in 2011 and 2016. Prosecutors are asking that she be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. She has already spent time in pretrial detention between 2018 and 2020.

Being the president of Peru seems like a certain pathway to prison or worse. In October, a court in Peru sentenced former president Alejandro Toledo, who was in office between 2001 and 2006, to 20 years and six months in jail for corruption and money-laundering. Prosecutors charged him with taking $35 million in bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company which was awarded a contract to build a road in southern Peru.

In 2019, another former president, Alan Garcia, shot himself when police arrived at his home to arrest him over bribery allegations. Two other former Peruvian presidents, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Ollanta Humala, are also under investigation in the same Odebrecht case.

The current president, Dina Boluarte, succeeded Pedro Castillo in December 2022, after he was impeached for an abortive “self-coup” and detained for sedition and high treason.

 

Can Donald Trump “Fix” Higher Education in the United States?

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

When protests disrupted campuses nationwide in the United States last year celebrating the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, signs and chants demanded “Divest!” and “Cease-fire now!” This fall, much of the protest language has grown darker, echoing language used by Hamas, and declaring “Glory to the resistance!”

Some protesters now refer to them as the “al-Aqsa flood,” the name Hamas uses. “Oct. 7 IS FOREVER” has been spray-painted on walls at colleges. The shift is very apparent at Columbia University in New York, one of the main centres of the protests.

This new messaging has been noticed by Hillel chapters across the country, observed Adam Lehman, president and CEO of Hillel International. “The overall picture on campus,” he said, “has moved from a mass protest movement that embodied a diverse set of goals and rhetoric to this more concentrated and therefore more extreme and radical set of goals, tactics and rhetoric.”

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to crack down on these campus protests, and his allies expect the Department of Education to more aggressively investigate university responses to pro-Palestinian movements.

“If you get me re-elected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he told donors last May. Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. He praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campus at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now.”

In an Agenda47 policy video released last July, he asserted that “the time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.” Trump promised to axe federal support and accreditation for universities that fail to put an end to “antisemitic propaganda” and deport international students that are involved in violent anti-Israel campus protests. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”

At a recent antisemitism event in Washington DC, he pledged to protect Jewish students on American campuses. “Here is what I will do to defeat antisemitism and defend our Jewish citizens in America,” he declared. “My first week back in the Oval Office my Administration will inform every College president that if you do not end antisemitic propaganda they will lose their accreditation and federal support.”

He announced that he “will inform every educational institution in our land that if they permit violence, harassment or threats against Jewish students the schools will be held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.

“It’s very important Jewish Americans must have equal protection under the law and they’re going to get it. At the same time, my Administration will move swiftly to restore safety for Jewish students and Jewish people on American streets.”
When back in the White House, Trump announced that he would direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination “under the guise of equity” and will advance a measure to have schools that continue these illegal and unjust policies fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.

Citing Trump’s campaign pledge to push for significant reforms, the Stand Columbia Society, which is dedicated to restoring the university’s “excellence,” has identified a handful of ways in which the federal government could pull financial support from Columbia, or any other university. They estimate Columbia could lose out on $3.5 billion in federal funding should they face government retaliation. 

The most likely action, according to the group, would be for the government to slow down on issuing new research grants to the university, a move that would require no justification at all. The government could also squeeze the enrollment of international students by curbing issuance of student visas.

Columbia boasts upwards of 13,800 international students. Losing out on the cohort could cost them up to $800 million in tuition money. Neither one of these scenarios requires the administration to take legal action.

Moreover, the government could, additionally, push to withhold all federal funding should it determine that a university had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That statute bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, colour, or national origin. It was later clarified in 2004 by the then-assistant secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus, that Title VI also protected the rights of ethnic groups that shared a religious faith, such as Jews. 

Given the explosion of antisemitism that erupted on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack, it doesn’t appear it would take much to make the case that Columbia, and a whole host of other universities, violated Title VI. 

Columbia, for its part, already faces at least three Title VI lawsuits over campus antisemitism. (Among other major universities, Harvard faces two, and the University of California Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also on the list.) 

“These problems have existed for some time,” a contributing member of Stand Columbia, Alexandra Zubko, who is a Columbia graduate, contends. “This might be the moment that administrators look in the mirror and decide that they can’t let them continue.” 
 
 “All we need to do is listen to what President Trump has said during his campaign to understand that this administration will be serious about enforcing anti discrimination laws in ways that could be problematic to those institutions that have been getting a free pass for too long,” Marcus has said. 

With Trump promising to make higher education “great again” once he returns to office this coming January, American universities will face increasing pressure to comply with his administration, if they don’t want to lose billions in federal support.  

 

Winners and Losers as Trump Prepares to Take Power

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The American people have spoken, loud and clear. They gave Donald Trump a massive victory Nov. 5. How will his victory affect the rest of the world? Here are some winners and losers:

Winner: India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva ideology will find no opposition from Trump, who has no issues with ethno-religious nationalism.  Modi’s program to make India great again (MIGA?) suits Trump just fine. They are populists and kindred spirits. Hardliners in the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government will be delighted to have a man who has expressed pro-Hindu sentiments and has take a tough stand on Islamist fundamentalism.

Winner: Israel. Israelis trust Trump as the man who recognised Jerusalem as their capital, moved the U.S. embassy there, recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and said that settlement-building was not per se against international law.

This will strengthen Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has called Trump the “best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Israel will have more of a free hand dealing with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their paymaster, Iran. Netanyahu might even give in to the temptation to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. Trump probably won’t stop him.

Winner: Russia. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in a day.” When asked how, he suggested overseeing a deal, but has declined to give specifics. Meanwhile, a Russian push through the northern Donbas is gaining momentum and could eventually threaten the largely Russian-speaking Kharkiv.

The coming administration is tired of the Russo-Ukrainian and other endless wars. Russia, undefeated, will keep Crimea and the Russophone Luhansk and Donetsk areas in eastern Ukraine, thereby creating a partition that should have taken place in 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart. These were Communist-created borders, drawn up by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

Losers and Winner: Latin America. Poor Cuba, which is already in major economic and political trouble, knows that there will be no relaxation of American pressure. In fact, Trump threatened that the leadership in Cuba could “be changed” once he’s in power. The left-wing regimes in Brazil and Venezuela also can expect little love from Trump.

But Argentina’s far-right libertarian President Javier Milei, who shares a similar brash style with Trump, is a winner. He called Trump’s win “formidable,” and has pledged to carry out a foreign policy with only two nations, the U.S. and Israel.

Loser: Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky made a big mistake accompanying Kamala Harris to a munitions factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, in September, providing a boost to the Harris campaign, which riled Trump. Already a skeptic when it comes to the war, Trump won’t forget this. Zelensky also called Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance “too radical” and “dangerous.” The new administration will stop sending endless billions of dollars to Kyiv, forcing Ukraine to reach a deal with Vladimir Putin.

Loser: China. When he was in office, Trump labelled China a “strategic competitor” and imposed tariffs on some Chinese imports to the U.S. This sparked tit-for-tat tariffs by Beijing on American imports. There were efforts to de-escalate the trade dispute, but the pandemic wiped out this possibility, and relations got worse as the former president labelled COVID a “Chinese virus.”

Trump has said he would impose tariffs of 60 per cent or more on all Chinese imports to protect U.S. industry as he attempts to revive the domestic American economy.

Loser: Iran. There will certainly be no new nuclear deal with the theocracy. Trump stated during his campaign that President Joe Biden’s policy of not rigorously enforcing oil-export sanctions has weakened Washington and emboldened Tehran, allowing it to sell oil, accumulate cash and expand its nuclear pursuits and influence through armed militias.

A Trump administration return to a “maximum-pressure” campaign on Iran could lead to a major decrease in Iranian crude exports. Iranians are worried that Trump may give Israel a green light to attack their oil assets and other infrastructure.

Loser: Great Britain. Foreign secretary David Lammy in July 2018 wrote an article about Trump in Time magazine, referring to Trump as a “tyrant in a toupee” and a “neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath.” Also, last month Trump’s campaign filed a formal legal complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging illegal foreign election interference by the Labour Party.

The complaint cites a decision by Labour to send a hundred party activists to swing states to campaign for Kamala Harris. That puts Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the position of leader of a party Trump has accused of actively working against him.

Loser: Canada. Trump has no time for Justin Trudeau’s ideological “woke” foreign policy and thinks the prime minister is a fool. He will bear down on Canada’s “free ride” in NATO. Trump has long been a sceptic of the alliance, accusing Europe of free-riding on America’s promise of protection.  

He will demand Canada increase its defence spending, and quickly. He has also recently spoken about placing tariffs on Canadian imports, another issue that would be a sticking point with this country. Also in question is the future of United States-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. The three partners must decide in 2026 whether to extend it for another 16 years.

 Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride, now that Trump is back for a second act.