"Fujipopulism" and the liberal state in Peru, 1990-1995

A few weeks before the April 1995 elections, President Alberto Fujimori paid yet another visit to Puno, the southernmost department in Peru's highlands. On the agenda of this visit, the 20th trip that the president had scheduled to this region in less than a year, was a series of events designed to remind skeptical Punenos of the tremendous scope and variety of public works and infrastructural projects which the Presidential Ministry was coordinating throughout the department. By this time, every corner of the department had witnessed the construction of a new school or clinic, the repair of some strip of highway, or the renovation of some municipal park. Evidence of new construction was everywhere, along with the black-and-orange signs announcing each project as another initiative sponsored by the main social development agencies linked to the Presidential Ministry. During the visit, the president would inaugurate a few large-scale projects for good measure: a hydroelectric dam, a social security hospital, an ambitious scheme to pipe drinking water from Lake Titicaca, and a project, in partnership with Russian investors, for extracting the region's untapped oil reserves.

Fujimori's preoccupation with a region that national politicians usually ignored was understandable. Just 15 months earlier, the voters of Puno had rejected, by a 4-to-1 margin, the very constitution which now permitted his reelection to a second 5-year term. His stinging defeat here and elsewhere in the Andes was widely interpreted as an expression of voter disenchantment with an economic policy which had demanded great sacrifices but had failed to generate any new employment thus far or, for that matter, to show any concern for the plight of those adversely affected by the policy. Now, flush with cash, the president was determined to turn public opinion around before the elections. The Puno visit was typical of the Fujimori trademark style of campaigning in the Andes: with a poncho draped over his dark business suit and a chullo (knitted Andean hat) on his head, the president would face the television cameras and regale the (mainly peasant) crowds at each ribbon-cutting or ground-breaking ceremony with his vision of "direct democracy, without parties," as spectators spontaneously burst into chants of "Chino, Chino, el pueblo esta contigo!"1

The spectacle of a former university rector, of Japanese descent, bonding with the highland peasants of Peru is, at once, both bizarre and paradoxical. It suggests a new style of populism in an era in which populism is considered not only passe, but also a practical and ideological contradiction, given the redistributive limitations of the liberal state. Populism and economic liberalism are not supposed to coexist in the same political space-time, at least not in the way the two phenomena have been experienced. Past populist movements were joined to demands for economic nationalism, expansion of the state, the implementation of import-substituting industrialization (ISI), and to economic redistribution favoring the working classes (Coniff 1982). In contrast, this new style of populism -- which I label "Fujipopulism" is tied to the retreat of the state from the economy, the expansion of control of private (mainly foreign) capital, and the elimination of many governmental redistributive and allocative functions that favor the working classes.2 If classical populism relied upon largesse from an interventionist state, "Fujipopulism" seems to depend on executive philanthropy bankrolled by a liberal state.

Despite these differences, Fujipopulism is remarkably similar to its forerunners. It is anti-elitist and anti-ideological in its orientation, multiclass in composition, autocratic in its style of management. Like its classical prototype, populism of the "Fuji" kind bypasses, and weakens, intermediary institutions and creates new institutions that permit the president to establish a direct, personalistic relationship with the masses. With his "apolitical" emphasis on efficiency and technocratic approach to governance, Fujimori may not fit the classic stereotype of a populist, but he has employed populist strategies and rhetoric as successfully as any of his more traditionally "populist" predecessors.

What accounts for the resurgence of populist politics in the neoliberal context? Is it an historical aberration? A symptom of "authoritarian values" which refuse to go away? An expression of cultural affinities between a charismatic leader and social "outsider" and the popular sectors which feel excluded from power? Or is the phenomenon somehow related to changes in the capacity and structure of the state resulting from recent economic reforms? These questions are of theoretical and practical relevance, as they relate to the broader concern over whether new democracies undergoing economic restructuring will survive the millennium or relapse into new forms of authoritarianism.

Peru is an exceptional case. Of the Latin American countries which have recently undergone democratic transitions, Peru is one of only two (Guatemala is the other) to have experienced a "disruption" in its constitutional order: the autogolpe (president's self-oup) of April 1992. It is also unique in the severity of its economic crisis and in the intensity of the violence which plagued its civilian regime during the 1980s. With the exception of Colombia, no country in the Hemisphere has suffered such a profound disintegration of its civil society and in the rule of law. Yet Peru bears a resemblance to other countries who have had regimes characterized by increasingly overpowering executives and submissive legislatures, by weak parties, and by the ascendancy of a new breed of politicians skilled at exploiting institutional weaknesses to expand their own bases of support: Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia; Carlos Menem in Argentina; and Joaquin Balaguer in the Dominican Republic (Cavarozzi 1994; Ducatenzeiler, et al., 1990; O'Donnell, 1994a and 1994b; Weyland 1994).