Peru’s election of Pedro Castillo: from fragmentation to polarization—or perhaps centrist reform?

Photo by Cesar Gutierrez

BY JANE S. JAQUETTE and DR. ABRAHAM F. LOWENTHAL

On June 6, Peruvians went to the polls to choose between two candidates who represented extreme positions in the country’s second-round presidential runoff. Keiko Fujimori, a third-time contender for the presidency who nonetheless remained unpopular with a majority of Peruvians, ran on a platform of promises to wield a “hard fist” (mano dura) against crime and continued support for the neoliberal economic policies—spearheaded in the 1990s by her father, former President Alberto Fujimori—that many believe have been key to Peru’s recent economic successes. Her opponent was Pedro Castillo, a primary school teacher and leader of a faction of Peru’s radical teachers’ union (Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de la Educación del Perú, SUTEP), hailing from the impoverished northern province of Cajamarca. Castillo ran as the candidate of Perú Libre, a party whose leader—though not Castillo himself—is an avowed Marxist-Leninist. The party’s platform supports the nationalization of mines and calls for a constitutional convention aimed at expanding the role of the state to better address the needs of the marginalized and the poor. This polarizing choice—between the potentially authoritarian right (represented by Fujimori) and an empowered, socialist left (represented by Castillo)—led one analyst consulted for this piece to refer to the options available to Peruvians on June 6 as being akin to the “the precipice and the abyss.”

What is Castillo’s extremely narrow apparent victory-by a mere 0.42 percent of total votes cast-likely to mean for Peru?

How did this agonizing choice come about? And what is Castillo’s extremely narrow apparent victory—by a mere 0.42 percent of total votes cast—likely to mean for Peru?

The Fujimori-Castillo showdown did not emerge out of thin air; rather, it was years in the making. Over the past three decades, Peru has produced solid economic growth and achieved impressive reductions in poverty and inequality. Although its political system has been subject to occasional crises, since 2001 it has nevertheless remained firmly democratic, with regular free and fair elections; notably, presidents are constitutionally prohibited from immediate reelection (that is, a former president can only seek reelection once he or she has been out of office for a full five-year term). Its party system, however, has become extremely fragmented, with multiple established and newly created parties competing in each presidential and legislative election, making the relationship between the unicameral Congress of the Republic and the executive branch increasingly dysfunctional. Still, while its Andean neighbors Bolivia and Ecuador have in the past two decades fallen for radical, left-wing populism—under Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, respectively—Peru has maintained an open market economy, attracted foreign investment, and (until very recently) been seen as a regional success story. Has Peru’s modest, positive trajectory been brought to an end by Castillo’s apparent victory? Or is there a chance that the still-contested results of the June 6 elections could lead Peru toward a positive and prosperous future?

Alberto Fujimori: neoliberalism and fujimorismo

Peru’s twin currents of economic growth and political drift date back to the government of Alberto Fujimori (President of Peru from 1990 to 2000), who set the country firmly on a neoliberal path. A series of crises in the 1980s—including hyperinflation and rampant guerrilla violence—enabled Fujimori, Rector of the National Agrarian University (and like Castillo, an “outsider” candidate and political neophyte who had never held political office) to win a surprise victory over Nobel Prize-winning author and political centrist Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1990 presidential election.

The 1980s were traumatic for Peru, which had only recently undergone re-democratization following the fall of an ideologically ambiguous military dictatorship (which ruled the country from 1968 to 1975) led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado. Under Velasco, the military implemented an ambitious agrarian reform program, which broke the back of the traditional landowning oligarchy, and experimented with innovative modes of property ownership and political participation but ultimately failed to develop a sustainable economic or political model. The ailing Velasco was deposed in a palace coup in 1975; to manage the return to democracy, the military organized elections for a constitutional convention in 1978, in which leftist parties won nearly a third of the seats. Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the president ousted by the military in 1968, was again elected president in 1980. (For a concise overview of Peru’s recent political history, upon which this essay has drawn extensively, we recommend Cynthia McClintock’s entry in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.)

Peru’s propitious return to democracy coincided with the emergence of a Maoist-oriented insurgent movement, Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), which terrorized rural villages in the south-central Andean highlands before eventually threatening urban centers (including Lima). La década perdida, the decade-long debt crisis of the 1980s—highly destabilizing for all of Latin America—was particularly devastating for Peru, which suffered the region’s second-worst decline in GDP. In 1980, leftist parties won nearly a third of the seats in Congress, where they joined two established parties that held collectively nearly 70 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies (which was, at that point, the lower house of a bicameral Congress): APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) and Belaúnde’s Acción Popular.

A process that could have produced a conventional party system—that is, three major parties more or less spanning the political spectrum—was therefore driven off track. As the decade wore on, Peruvians were battered by Shining Path violence—Peru’s national Truth and Reconciliation Commission, convened in the early 2000s, attributed more than half of the nearly 70,000 deaths suffered during the Peruvian internal conflict to the guerrillas (the remaining casualties were deemed to have been largely inflicted by state security forces and state-allied paramilitaries)—and by the hyperinflation and economic collapse induced by the disastrous economic policies of aprista Alan García (President from 1985 to 1990) in response to the debt crisis.

Read the rest of this piece at The Global Americans

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Dr. Abraham F. Lowenthal is the founding Director of the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Inter-American Dialogue and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Latin America Program, is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California. 

Jane S. Jaquette is a Professor Emerita at Occidental College, conducted her doctoral research at Cornell in 1967-68 on the political economy of Peru; and has published widely on Peru, women’s movements in Latin America, women and development, and the reconciliation of feminism and liberalism. She served as president of the Latin American Studies Association from 1995-97.

This article was originally published by The Global Americans

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.