by GEORGE YGARZA
Keiko Fujimori will likely win the 2016 Peruvian presidential elections scheduled for this April. She is the daughter of deposed president Alberto Fujimori, who became one of the first heads of state to be convicted of human rights violations in Latin America. Keiko Fujimori is polling at over thirty percent in an early crowded field of around 12 candidates. To anyone unfamiliar with Peruvian political history or its development as a state, the election of a far-right candidate who has pledged to pardon her imprisoned father when she assumes the presidency seems incomprehensible. In order to understand the complexity and paradoxical nature of politics in Peru as in other parts of the Global South, one must shed the lens which homogenizes international politics and state development. On the surface, mainstream politics may reflect a contradictory collective psyche suffered by the populace. But looking at the historiography of postcolonial Peru, one will find an unfinished state where power has been usurped by a political class with roots in the colonial era. This elite class descended from the hacendados, gamonales and caudillos has kept the majority of people beyond the spatial of citizenship and empowerment.
Geopolitics has also reflected this centralization of power in the state. The urban metropole of Lima has been running the show for centuries. Historically, Lima has dictated who becomes president, with no candidate ever elected without winning that province. The only exception was during the last election cycle, in 2011, when Ollanta Humala defeated Keiko Fujimori in nearly every other province except Lima; whether this was an anomaly or a precedent is yet to been seen. What is predictable is that no matter who is elected in 2016 the neoliberal stranglehold contributing to the centralization of development of the country will remain intact. With such an acute concentration of economic and political power resting in the hands of an oligarchic elite, how can the people expect to transform society in the voting booth? Remember, this a country where large part of criollo society still holds a favorable view of former president Fujimori currently sitting in prison. And it’s the same country which re-elected Alan Garcia in 2006, a president who oversaw unprecedented levels of inflation during the 1980s. Garcia is once again running for president with APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) party; itself a shadow of the party founded by socialist Manuel Haya de la Torre nearly a century ago.
Suffice to say that the rungs of power had never been accessible to the multitudes within Peruvian society. Behind 500 years of colonization, Los Dos Perus are still self-evident with a country being run from a central city disconnected from the rest. While la sierra and la selva provides the cheap resources in the form of raw materials and exploitable labor, the urban centers reap the benefits while the periphery is expanded to absorb the human runoff of capitalism.
The dominant hegemony of the state has always filtered any dissent through its institutions, pacifying it while ushering carefully vetted reforms that keep the same oppressive systems intact. A prime example of this is Ollanta Humala, someone who campaigned on a leftist platform only to expand mining concessions and reinforce neoliberalism in the state.
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