Political Violence And The Authoritarian State In Peru

The Shining Path was one of the most brutal insurgencies ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru explores the devastating effects of insurgent violence and the state's brutal counterinsurgency methods on Peruvian civil society.

Between 1980 and 1994, Peru endured a bloody internal armed conflict, with some 69,000 people killed in clashes involving two insurgent movements, state forces, and local armed groups. In 2003, a government-sponsored “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” reported that the conflict lasted longer, affected broader swaths of the national territory, and inflicted higher costs, in both human and economic terms, than did any other conflict in Peru’s history. Of those killed, 75 percent were speakers of an indigenous language, and almost 40 percent were among the poorest and most rural members of Peruvian society. These unequal impacts of the violence on the Peruvian people revealed deep and historical disparities within the country. This collection of original essays by leading international experts on Peruvian politics, society, and institutions explores the political and institutional consequences of Peru’s internal armed conflict in the long 1980s. The essays are grouped into sections that cover the conflict itself in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives; its consequences for Peru’s political institutions; its effects on political parties across the ideological spectrum; and its impact on public opinion and civil society. This research provides the first systematic and nuanced investigation of the extent to which recent and contemporary Peruvian politics, civil society, and institutions have been shaped by the country’s 1980s violence.

Tamara Feinstein investigates the bloody Shining Path conflict’s effect on the legal Left in late-twentieth-century Peru, illustrating the catastrophic impact state and insurgent violence can have on the growth and resilience of democratic political actors during times of war. In this engaging historical study, Tamara Feinstein chronicles the late-twentieth-century Shining Path conflict and argues that it significantly contributed to the rupture and disintegration of the noninsurgent legal Left in Peru by deepening preexisting divisions and eradicating an entire generation of leaders. Using a combination of oral histories, archival documents, contemporary media accounts, and participant observation of commemorations, Feinstein maps the trajectory of the Peruvian Left’s rise and fall by analyzing two emblematic human rights cases that occurred at the Left’s zenith and nadir: the state-based violence of the 1986 Lima prison massacres and the 1992 Shining Path assassination of leftist shantytown leader María Elena Moyano. The lessons found in The Fate of Peruvian Democracy reach beyond Peru to connect with other Latin American countries. Peru’s story illustrates the difficulties of accumulating political force during times of violence, underscores how struggles for self-defense can complicate ideological stances on violence, and helps explain the unevenness of the resurgence of the Left (the so-called “pink tide”) in Latin America in the twenty-first century. The book contributes to debates on memory and human rights in Peru and Latin America where divisions over how to remember the war retraced the fault lines of earlier debates over democracy and violence.

In this paper Professor Conaghan reconstructs the last five years of Alberto Fujimori, drawing on Vladi-videos coming out on a weekly basis. It examines how the plan to re-elect President Alberto Fujimori deepened authoritarianism in Peru and how the opposition's struggle against re-election reshaped the political landscape and laid the groundwork for a surprising opening to to regime transition.

President Alberto Fujimori's sudden resignation in November 2000 brought an end to a highly controversial period in Peruvian history. His meteoric rise to power in 1990 fueled by widespread popular support, followed by his decision to dissolve Congress and rule by decree in 1992, has made his regime a focus of special attention by scholars trying to understand this complex and contradictory presidency. This book offers a comprehensive assessment of Fujimori's regime in the context of Latin America's struggle to consolidate democracy after years of authoritarian rule. Setting the regime conceptually in a discussion of alternative forms of government-delegative democracy, neopopulism, and electoral authoritarianism-the essays study it from two different perspectives: external (in its relations with political parties, Lima's mayors, public opinion, women, the U.S. government) and internal (examining economic policies as determined by governing coalitions, networks of corruption, and Fujimori's unsavory relationship with his security advisor Vladimiro Montesinos). Overall, The Fujimori Legacy helps illuminate the persistent obstacles that Latin American countries face in establishing democracy. In addition to the editor, Julio F. Carrin̤, contributors are Robert Barr, Maxwell Cameron, Catherine Conaghan, Henry Dietz, Philip Mauceri, Cynthia McClintock, David Scott Palmer, Kenneth Roberts, Gregory Schmidt, John Sheahan, Kurt Weyland, and Carol Wise.

Under what conditions is democracy stable? What forces undermine or reinforce democratic institutions in Latin America? This book suggests answers to these questions in the context of Peru. It identifies the micro and macro causes that explain the gradual breakdown of democracy in the period between the 1980 transition from authoritarian rule and the 1992 suspension of the Constitution and closure of Congress by President Alberto Fujimori. Similar self-coups were subsequently threatened in Bolivia, unsuccessfully attempted in Guatemala and actively considered in Brazil.

While leftist governments have been elected across Latin America, this ‘Pink Tide’ has so far failed to reach Peru. Instead, the corporate elite remains firmly entrenched, and the left continues to be marginalised. Peru therefore represents a particularly stark example of ‘state capture’, in which an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few corporations and pro-market technocrats has resulted in a monopoly on political power. Post the 2016 elections, John Crabtree and Francisco Durand look at the ways in which these elites have been able to consolidate their position at the expense of genuine democracy, with a particular focus on the role of mining and other extractive industries, where extensive privatization and deregulation has contributed to extreme disparities in wealth and power. In the process, Crabtree and Durand provide a unique case study of state development, by revealing the mechanisms used by elites to dominate political discussion and marginalize their opponents, as well as the role played by external actors such as international financial institutions and foreign investors. The significance of Crabtree’s findings therefore extends far beyond Peru, and illuminates the wider issue of why mineral-rich countries so often struggle to attain meaningful democracy.