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The
1990 Elections or The Unexpected Candidate
The
elections in 1990 proved to be a turning point for Peru. In the run-up
to them there were
four
main candidates: the popular and internationally renowned author
Mario
Vargas Llosa, with his new right-wing coalition (“Fredemo”);
Luís
Alva Castro, general secretary of APRA (and minister in charge of
the economy under Garcia);
Alfonso
Barrantes in control of a new left-wing grouping (“Acuerdo
Socialista”) and
Henry
Peace of the United Left.
Vargas
Llosa was the easy favourite as the poll approached, although he had
blotted his copybook somewhat during 1989, when he had briefly bowed out
of the electoral process, accusing his fellow leaders within
“Fredemo” (which was essentially an alliance between Acción Popular
and the Popular Christian Party) of making it impossible for him to
carry on as a candidate. Still, by the time of the election he was back
and firmly in charge. APRA, having had five pretty disastrous years in
power, were given virtually no chance of getting Alva Castro elected,
and the left were severely split. Barrantes was by far the most popular
candidate on that side. However, in creating “Acuerdo Socialista,”
and thereby taking away half of the United Left's vote, he effectively
spoilt both their chances.
Who
is Alberto Fujimori?
In the event, the real surprise came
with lightning speed from a totally unexpected
quarter in the guise of an
entirely new party – “Cambio 90” (Change 90), formed only months
before the election - led by a young university professor of Japanese
descent, Alberto Fujimori. Fujimori came a very close second to Vargas Llosa
in the March 1990 election, with 31 percent of the total against Vargas
Llosa's 35 percent. Since a successful candidate must gain half the
votes to become president, a second
round was scheduled for June.
Once
the initial shock of the result had been absorbed, Fujimori rapidly
became favourite to win the second poll, on the grounds that electors
who had voted for left-wing parties would switch their allegiance to him.
While Vargas Llosa offered a Thatcherite, monetarist economic shock for
Peru, Fujimori recommended protecting all public industries of strategic
importance – the oil industry being one of the most important. Vargas
Llosa was for selling such companies off to the private sector and
exposing them to the full power of world market forces.
However, ordinary Peruvians were clearly worried that such policies
would bring them the kind of hardships that had beset Brazilians or
Argentineans, and Fujimori swept into power in the second round of
voting, almost immediately adopting many of Vargas Llosa's policies -
overnight the price of many basics such as flour and fuel trebled.
Fujimori did, however, manage to turn the nation around and gain an
international confidence in Peru reflected in a stock exchange that was
one of the
fastest
growing and most active in the Americas.
The
Capture of Abimael Guzman
However, the real turning point, economically and politically, was the capture of
Sendero's leader Abimael Guzman in September 1992. Captured at his Lima
hideout (a dance school), by General Vidal's secret anti-terrorist
police DINCOTE, even Fujimori had not known about the raid until it had
been successfully completed. With Guzman in jail, and presented very
publicly on TV as the defeated man, the political tide shifted. The
international press no longer described Peru as a country where
terrorists looked poised to take over, and Fujimori went from strength
to strength while Sendero's activities were reduced to little more than
the occasional car bomb in Lima as they were hounded by the military in
their remote hideouts along the eastern edges of the Peruvian Andes.
A massive boost to Fujimori's popularity, in the elections of 1995 he
gained over sixty percent of the vote. Perhaps it was recognition too,
that his strong policies had paid off as far as the economy was
concerned - inflation dipped from a record rate of 2777 percent in 1989
to ten percent in 1996.
The mid-1990s also became the time for the MRTA
(Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) terrorists to battle with Fujimori
and his government. First, in 1995, there was the capture of a major
Lima cell after a 24-hour siege in the suburb of La Molina Vieja. A 26-year-old
North American woman, Lori Helen Berenson Mejia, was arrested with the
MRTA in the house and is now serving a life sentence in a women's prison
in Peru. Then, on 17 December 1996, the MRTA really hit the headlines
when they infiltrated the Japanese Ambassor's residence, which they held
siege for 126 days, with over 300 hostages. Some of these were released
after negotiation, but Fujimori refused to give in to their demands for
the freedom of hundreds of jailed MRTA comrades, and in March 1997, the
affair ended in the storming of the building by Peruvian forces as the
terrorists were playing football inside the residence. All the
terrorists, many of them teenagers, were massacred,
with only one hostage perishing in the skirmish. Fujimori's reputation
as a hard man and a successful leader shot to new heights.
To
War with Ecuador
Fujimori continued to grow in
popularity, despite Peru going to war
with Ecuador briefly in January 1995, May 1997 and more seriously in
1998. The Ecuadorian army, which was accused of starting the skirmish,
imposed significant losses on the Peruvian forces. This dispute has been
inflamed by the presence of large
oil fields in the region, currently on what the Peruvians claim is
their side of the border, a claim the Ecuadorians bitterly dispute:
Ecuadorian maps continue to show the border much further south than
Peruvian maps. The war is not over yet, although the fighting has
stopped and at the start of 2000, relations between the two countries
appeared better than they had been for decades.
In economic terms, Fujimori also seemed to be just about holding his own.
Despite many aid organisations confirming widespread poverty and
unemployment in Peru, and despite the nation being hit hard by the El
Niño of 1998, the economy had stayed buoyant. Helped to a large
extent by a growth in fishing output and a firm hand on inflation, which
looked set to drop from its 1999 rate of seven percent to the projected
two percent between 2000 and 2002, economic growth had remained steady
at around three percent, and in the late 1990s Spain, the US and the UK
were the biggest foreign investors in Peruvian communications, energy
and mining.
Politically, too, Fujimori gained substantially in July 1999, when he
appeared on TV, live from Huancayo, announcing the imminent capture of Oscar
Ramirez Durand, alias Comrade Feliciano, Guzman's number two and the
then relatively new leader of “Sendero Luminoso.” An army battalion
had already been sent to the Huancayo region in 1997 to destroy
Sendero's stronghold; it took them two years, but they managed to
achieve a result just in time for the start of the electoral
campaign. At the end of the twentieth century, Sendero were left
with only a few scattered remnants in one or two parts of the
“sierra” and “ceja de selva,” and just one active cell in the
cocaine-producing region of the Huallaga valley.
Rural
Exodus
At the close of the twentieth century,
apart from the rise and fall of Sendero Luminoso, the most impressive
social phenomenon of the last hundred years had been the massive
movement from rural to
urban
living. This was particularly true of Lima, which had, for several
hundred years, grown fat on the back of the rich hinterlands of the
Andes and, to a lesser extent, the Amazon regions.
From the 1960s onwards the migration to Lima from the Andes was heavy
and incessant, with people seeking a better living under its bright
lights, and it grew in a rapid and disorganised fashion, doubling
in size and population between 1976 and 1999. In 1940 just 35 percent of
Peruvians lived in cities; by 1993 this had risen to over 70 percent.
Conversely, so much of the jungle had been destroyed
to make way for coca production that the environmental aspects of the
situation became at least as critical as the associated law-and-order
problems, though in the late 1990s, US airmen were patrolling the skies
between Colombia and Peru, shooting down planes which did not respond to
their calls for identification. Whether this helped or not is unsure,
but by the end of 1999, cocaine production in Peru was on the decline.
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