A possible Peru
Asking the impossible – getting blood from a stone

by Andrés Alsina

Rome.- The headquarters of the political party of the current President of Peru’s, People’s Action (AP), has opened up its halls, empty and decaying for fifteen years since the end of Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s second term of office of in 1985. In the last elections, held in the year 2000, in which Alberto Fujimori was reelected for the third time, AP got 2% of the votes in what appeared to be a grim end. The night before Valentin Paniagua (his last name means “bread and water” in Spanish – perhaps an omen) was sworn in as interim President of Peru, AP was crowded with political figures in search of a place in the new image of officialdom. This opportunism, which has the speed and scent of a greyhound, explains why Congress, which had been downtrodden by the former administration, voted with no further ado in favor of Fujimori’s permanent disqualification from holding office.

Public opinion is being encouraged to see Fujimori, or at least Fujimori and a small inner circle, as being exclusively responsibility for the intolerable phenomenon of corruption, authoritarianism and abuse, while the rest of those who collaborated with the deposed regime in exchange for benefits approach the newly triumphant to try to regain positions of privilege.

Behind this is the almost complete disappearance of political parties and the anemic weakness of the remaining ones, the absence of mechanisms which can compensate compensate for their failings by providing systematic ongoing contributions from civil society. Ethical values, always separate from politics, are shattered.

The observer assessing part and parcel of Peru’s formidable political and social degradation is a man who seems younger than his sixty-five years. That is until you hear him talk, precisely and cautiously, and then he seems to have at least a century’s experience. He does not turn his gaze away, nor are his eyes swollen with the remains of everything that has been lost, as his fellow Peruvian Cesar Vallejo once said. Without forgetting, Héctor Béjar’s lively eyes only look forward, and if they do linger, it is only to take stock of the new shape adopted by the old challenge.

“Fujimorism is part of society, with its exchange of favors for payments and postponement of scruples. It is embedded in society and cuts across all social classes. One should not forget that Fujimori had his greatest support from the poorest sectors of society. That does not mean that they did not know what was going on, but that they chose not to see it. One of the virtues of Peru is that there is a lot of information available, so that the problem is not ignorance but interpretation. There were moral rules that could be degraded. And this is what happened (relentlessly, Béjar’s thoughts spread out in concentric circles) with Shining Path. It is no coincidence that the grandmothers of (Vladimiro) Montesinos and (Abimael) Guzmán were sisters. There are family traditions that demonstrate exploitation and a terrible lack of scruples. A psychologist would say that today in Peru it is not the streets but the home that is dangerous”. History always shows its logic in roots buried in times long past when it is recounted by a man like Béjar, who is so... experienced.

Montesinos was one of the radical captains in the army at the time of Velasco Alvarado, one of those whose positions were always to the left of the generals. Twenty years later, he was opportunistically managing the new generalsas he wished. “Something happened in the meantime.” The coup d’état in which Juan Velasco was overthrown by his commanding general the Army and Prime Minister, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, on 29 August 1975, started the destruction of the Armed Forces as a decisive national force. The process, launched in 1950, of updating, training and giving a comprehensive vision of the army as a national force, with independent development as its objective in a country split by geography, culture and conquest, began to go into reverse. This new process had been crystallized in Velasco and his coup d’état, to achieve a radical change in structures.

What was left of those armed forces, destroyed long ago as a national force, defenselessly witnessed the end of Fujimori’s feast. “This is not a matter of one person or of one day, but of a lengthy evolution. Let us recognize it, otherwise we will not build anything. It is the regime that we have to change.”

Béjar does not say it, but from his words and his attitudes one can see that for him the counterrevolution launched in 1975 – then called structural adjustment and now globalization - may have come full circle, or at least exhausted itself. Even if the Minister of the Economy is, premeditatedly, the same one as then, as if so many years were nothing, there is a force at play that has picked up the fallen flag of real democracy – civil society.

The real forces became clear with the fall of Alberto Fujimori at the beginning of his third term of authoritarian government, and they are not the politicians who crowded AP headquarters. During the conversation, Béjar mentioned two of them, perhaps there are more. First, the United States State Department “in an ambiguous, complex role, in which it needed Peru as one of the pawns to enable it to intervene on a large scale in Colombia (with the so-called Colombia Plan to eradicate coca plantations), and which we therefore have to judge in the context of Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Panama. A friend said this to me and it is perfectly possible. But also, Fujimori has broken all the rules, for example, by selling arms to the FARC, and so there comes a time when you have to (the State Department has to) allow him to fall, even if it leaves a void. You have to be open to events as they occur.”

The other push, without which who knows if the possibility of overthrowing Fujimori would have been accepted, came from social activists “mainly Human Rights organizations, who bravely risked their lives in the streets time and time again, and the activity of all the social movements – women, children, old people – in defense of specific claims. The women have been in the streets every day. One day I was in downtown Lima, near that imitation of the Capitol with its flights of stairs – the Palace of Justice. The judges were sitting on the stairs, looking formal and watching a procession of Our Lord of the Miracles. On the other side of the street, in the square, some 200 women were waving flags saying “Democracy” and ”Down with dictatorship”. The scene would have been the envy of an Italian film director. That has been Peru in recent times.”

At the end of the conversation, Héctor Béjar realises that he paints utopias he believes are possible. “Over all these years, I have discovered what I really want to see as a possibility. I do not see any other way of overcoming the situation in my country.” This implies doing two things at once: transforming the unpunished decadence of those who thrive on political power into ethical responsibility, and reversing the social situation. Up to 80% of children under five in the Andean region suffer from chronic malnutrition. “Before, we called that hunger,” says Béjar. In 400 districts, 18% of the total population of the country, 25 million, and between 60% and 70% of the children are undernourished. He says that “hunger in a food producing country is intolerable.” The same problem arose during the Velasco regime, when urban development was undertaken on fertile lands, while the government wasted efforts in fertilizing barren lands.

However, today the situation is more serious. The Fujimori government added 1,000 million dollars per year to the already existing external debt, and payment of the debt service in the year 2001 will be 2,500 million dollars, an average of 100 dollars per inhabitant, “a terrible drain.”

External debt is back on the agenda of political priorities, not in the same terms as non-payment was debated in the eighties, but in those proposed by Pope John Paul II: that it should not be collected. “The Peruvian church is one of those most warmly welcoming the proposal, and our organization, together with many others, and with the support of the Episcopal Commission for Social Action, carried out a campaign in favor of this non-collection and collected 1,800,000 signatures, quite a feat. We got those signatures at churches and parishes, with the simple argument that a poor country like Peru cannot pay. That enormous economic burden made it clear that external debt is a problem, and that it can be renegotiated.”

This accumulation of forces, adding grains of sand to make a mountain of signatures did not come about by parthenogenesis, nor are they the work of a single organization, but instead “that of a very plural movement in which work has been done in a very special way.” What was happening in Peru was not independent from what was happening in other countries, and was reflected in the social situation and the real or supposed policies to improve them.

This state of opinion led to the United Nations World Conference on Social Development, held in Copenhagen from 6 to 12 March, 1995, with the participation of 117 governments, the biggest summit in history. During this meeting governments agreed to a declaration and program of political, social and economic action to eradicate poverty. Some 20,000 people from 180 countries also participated, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) played a crucial role in preparing the summit. This has meant that the Conference was not only a landmark at official level but also in the relationship between the UN and organizations of civil society.

However, the ultimate significance of the summit meeting was not that it was held, but in following up on the commitments made by the governments. This gave rise to Social Watch, a network which enables civil society to monitor the Copenhagen agreements through its organizations involved in the struggle against poverty and to measure progress made towards agreed objectives. “We covered the whole process of Copenhagen from 1995 in a very active and enthusiastic way, because it enabled us to follow up government policies and to analyze the local situation at grassroots level in relation to the Copenhagen standards,” in areas such as reduction of illiteracy, child mortality, discrimination against women, etc.

This gave the work of Cedep and other Peruvian civil society organizations a consistency at three very different levels: local, national and international. In Peru, the agreements were quickly used as a reference point in order to organize.

“For the past five years, since 1996, many organizations have joined forces at an annual Conference on social development, Conades. The fifth was held in October 2000, with the participation of 400 social organizations and 1200 delegates discussing issues for three days in Lima, preceded by 8 regional conferences. Every year, there is a theme for debate: the Peru we want, the analysis of poverty and its causes. From this last discussion arose a debate about whether, if according to the liberal perspective, external debt should be paid, it is consistent to demand payment of the internal debt, and therefore to discuss what can be done about this. Local governments in Peru were also examined, and there was a proposal to reformulate the budget in order to decentralize resources, given that today 2000 local governments manage 3.7% of the national government, while the President’s ministry, directed by one of Fujimori’s men, manages 20%.

Mobilization and proposals, but for what? “What we want is to develop a movement of Peruvian citizens and to build up a ‘social citizenship,’ people who defend their social rights in a country that knows how to respect them. We believe that this is possible, and we are constructing proposals aimed at enabling this to happen. In Peru we have only had incomplete political citizenship, a “sub-citizenship”, I would say. This would be the key to an alternative to that endemic disease of the political system, rooted in the corruption amongst powerful families that he has mentioned. However, a piece of key is missing to open the door.

“What would be ideal would be for civil society to be heard, since they are carrying out serious studies on the situation. But we all know that the ideal is not fulfilled. No mechanisms exist to impose a modern conception of the State, which not only has to represent the government but must also embrace civil society, with coordination between the two at all levels, from the local to the Cabinet. This is the modern state that we want for Peru. It is a utopia, but it is possible.”

“But, sooner or later, this will lead to civil society organizations becoming integrated into the political system.”

“Not at all. For this to happen, we have to be able to convince people to participate in the preparation of the agenda and in the political world without becoming political agents and without subscribing to the logic of power, which is something else again. Moreover, governments, as they become aware of this trend, have to know and see for themselves that it is to their advantage, insofar as people can mobilize to endorse these proposals. Those who govern reason from a political standpoint, which is that of power, and not from an ethical standpoint. It should not be that way, but this is the reality, not only in Peru but in much of Latin America, and we must act within this reality.