From LARB, Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno writes about the similarities between Peru in the 90's and the US now:
When Fujimori was first elected, the country had been embroiled in an internal war with the Maoist Shining Path insurgency for over a decade, and tens of thousands — mostly poor indigenous people — had died or disappeared at the hands of either the guerrillas or the military. Lima, the capital, where I lived, had largely escaped the violence, but in the early 1990s, we were increasingly experiencing blackouts due to Shining Path’s bombings of electric towers.
The country was also in a deep economic crisis, with runaway “hyperinflation” that drove prices up, while the value of earnings and employment dropped precipitously.
The crises combined with general dysfunction: long lines to pay bills, rampant tax evasion, routine requests for bribes from police officers and other officials, not to mention poverty, lack of access to basic services, and deeply entrenched inequality. All of that had fueled widespread cynicism about government.
Fujimori presented himself as an outsider who was shaking things up, a strong leader who would impose order. Congress, he said, was obstructing him; the courts were no good either. Many Peruvians wanted to believe him — or at least hoped he would be better than the ineffective alternative.
So when, in 1992, tanks rolled into Lima and Fujimori announced on TV he was shutting down Congress, with military backing, many citizens supported him. I was appalled at the news. But within a few months, I started to come around.
One night in September 1992, I glanced out the window and saw the sky light up a reddish orange, before I heard and felt the boom of a car bomb set by Shining Path on Tarata Street, in a residential area. Twenty-five people died and about 150 were injured. My parents had been on that street just a few hours earlier. It was one of several Shining Path attacks in Lima that added to the sense of chaos and fear, and played in Fujimori’s favor.
That December, Fujimori appeared on television with a heavy-set bearded man in a striped prison suit, in a cage. It was Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader, whom police had finally tracked to a safe house in Lima and arrested. In the following weeks and months, the insurgency — which had an unusually top-down structure — largely fell apart as police arrested additional leaders.
When Fujimori held new elections for Congress in 1993, his party got a majority. He also put a new constitution in place.
In 1995, the economy seemed to have stabilized, though many suffered from the government’s harsh austerity measures, and the Shining Path seemed to be done with. Going along with the mood of many people around me, I credited Fujimori for the progress and voted for him. I looked away from his contempt for democratic institutions and paid little heed to news reports about killings of civilians and death squads.
That was a grave mistake. Fujimori had already taken apart the country’s system of checks and balances — he had a Congress and courts, but knew that he didn’t have to respect them. In the following years, when the Constitutional Court held that he could not run for a third term, he removed the justices who were in his way. It was a simple action that revealed the truly autocratic nature of a regime that claimed to be democratic. And when he started to lose control of Congress through elections, his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, paid members piles of cash to vote with him.
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