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.
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