The meaning of the coup in Peru

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SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1992 15 VANCOUVER, B.C.—One of the first targets of the April 5 coup d'état by President Alberto Fujimori and the Peruvian military was the country's political parties. Troops and tanks surrounded the headquarters of the parties and trade unions. Party leaders and elected members of the dissolved parliament were detained.

Barrera Bazan, a leftist who is chair of the Chamber of Deputies, is being held on a ship off the coast by the highly anti-Communist Peruvian navy.

Those leaders not arrested have gone into hiding. Security has been stepped up at airports to prevent them from leaving the country. The veteran revolutionary leader Hugo Blanco reportedly took refuge in the embassy of Mexico and is now in that country.

By a twist of fate, three central leaders of the Unified Mariateguista Party (PUM, named for an early Peruvian Marxist) were abroad at the time of the coup. One of these, Eduardo Caceres, secretary general of the PUM, came to Vancouver on the first stop of a cross-Canada tour to build urgently needed international solidarity against the military coup. At a press conference here on April 9, he offered some initial thoughts on the coup.

Caceres began by referring to Fujimori as "Citizen Fujimori." He said that when the president violates the constitution as Fujimori has done, he is considered removed from office.

Caceres pointed out that the existing Peruvian constitution grants a clear right of insurgency against the coup. Fujimori, having suspended the existing Peruvian constitution and its guarantees, plans to draft a new constitution within the next 18 months and have it approved by plebiscite.

In the 1990 presidential elections, Fujimori won popular support by campaigning against the free-market-shock policies of his opponent Vargas Llosa, which were inspired by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But on taking office, he implemented the full IMF shock treatment. The immediate result of these measures was a 400 percent rise in inflation in August 1990 alone.

The aim of this policy was to open up Peru for foreign investment. But it failed to attract much new capital. This was partly due to the international recession, and the very deep recession in Peru. But it also reflected a tumultuous social and political breakdown. The coup was, thus, a forceful attempt to impose order.

Moves toward a strong presidential-military state began well before the coup. The parliament gave the president authorization to enact legislation in certain areas. However, Fujimori chose to go far beyond what was authorized. He enacted over 100 decree-laws, intruding into many areas not authorized by parliament.

Many of these decrees involved so-called pacification in reality, a policy of extreme militarization—in effect, a piecemeal imposition of military dictatorship. The military was allowed to take control of regional governments.

A military-controlled National Intelligence Service was created. It was given power to go into every public office, ask for information, and jail those who refused to provide it. Caceres said this legislation was "more repressive than that of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile."

Fujimori's unconstitutional decree laws led to broader resistance in parliament than he expected, and this prompted him to stage the coup.

Washington's $30 million in military aid and $60 million in economic help was very far from what Fujimori needed. Caceres estimated that about $2 billion would have been necessary to stabilize the situation. Now in a post-cold-war world, Washington may have trouble openly giving massive aid to Fujimori and the Peruvian military.

The Peruvian military has a long record of violating human rights. Indeed, recently Peru topped the world in the number of people "disappeared." Now, Caceres warned, the military may be given a green light to launch a total offensive to annihilate the opposition.

This war will not just be waged against the Shining Path guerrillas. Their support is growing, given the hunger and misery caused by the goverment's free-enterprise policies, but they have a fringe base of support, perhaps 5 percent of the population.

In the current situation, Caceres expects the Peruvian military to follow the example of the Argentine military dictatorship's "dirty war" against the left in the 1970s and go after all opposition. In this situation, human-rights groups, trade unions, peasants' unions, and all manner of popular organizations and left parties are potentially in extreme danger.

In this context, the left faces a double challenge. It needs to join with all possible forces to oppose the military's war on democracy and to isolate it internationally. At the same time, it needs to help organize the mass movement to defend itself and begin to lay the basis for a working-class and popular alternative.

Here in Canada, we have simpler tasks. We need to get out the true story of Fujimori's coup, and condemn the violation of human rights in Peru. And we need to put pressure on the Canadian government to expressly condemn the coup, to cut aid to Fujimori, and to open our door to Peruvian refugees.

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Diego Guidice-AF

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SYGMA Patrick Chau