Thread by @ParkSlopeFlngsm

Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America by Charles Kenney

This is going to be a very long book thread about Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe in Peru.

Autogolpe means self-coup in Spanish, an occurrence common enough in Latin America that they have a neologism for it. It’s when a regime that’s already in power ends democracy to consolidate its own power

Fujimori, while president, dissolved the legislature with the military’s backing and became a de facto dictator

Most of this thread is going to be about the history preceding the coup. It’s a typical Latam shitshow

In 1968, there was a military coup in Peru. By the late 70s, they decided to yield power and transition back to a democratic regime via an election in 1980

Presidential terms were for 5 years. From 1980-90 Peru suffered back-to-back disastrous democratically-elected administrations

The 1980 election was won by Fernando Belaunde of the Accion Popular

Tangent: we need to go over Peru’s political parties for context

Disclaimer: I haven’t had time to do a deep dive on the policies of each party—probably never will, I was curious about Fujimori’s coup but Peru isn’t important enough for me to spend weeks studying it

Kenney, as an academic rather than a think tanker or an economist, is light on partisan policy analysis; he only gives the high-level dynamics

I’m going to give you my wikipedia/LLM level understanding of each party, but take it with a grain of salt

Accion Popular (Popular Action). This was the party of Fernando Belaunde

We have to go back yet a little further in Peruvian history for a moment: Belaunde’s father was a minister under Jose Bustamente, a president who was victim to a *different* coup in 1948

Belaunde launched his party in 1956 as opposition to the entrenched interests of the military and the right wing oligarchy in the country. At the time, that made it left-leaning

Belaunde won the presidency in the 1963 election after the 1948 coup had transitioned back to democracy. However, he had weak support in the legislature, his admin was ineffective, and *he* was the one couped towards the end of his term in 1968

He came back to win the 1980 election. Like I said, a shitshow

In the context of a democracy, Accion Popular was more center/center-right. Belaunde’s man priority seems to have been infrastructure and modernization. The economy experienced heavy inflation, however

The APRA was the mainstream left wing party. This is pretty far to the left by US standards: price controls, nationalization of major industries, subsidies for basic goods, deficit spending, limits on foreign debt service

The IU, the Izquierda Unida (United Left), was a disparate coalition of hard left constituencies. One blessing Peru had was that—despite the party name—the extremist left were not at all unified; they were riven by constant infighting

The PPC was for affluent Catholic conservatives. Kenney doesn’t touch on race much, but my guess is that this was the party for right wing creoles (Europeans). Probably closest to Reagan Republicans. They were too right wing to be popular

Later on, Libertad and FREDEMO became the classical liberal/economically right wing party. Change ‘90, Fujimori’s party, was the centrist antiestablishment party. We’ll get to that. Back to the chronology

Complicating the political landscape was a vicious far-left insurgency known as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso in Spanish). Despite this happening in the midst of the Cold War, Shining Path didn’t seem to have much affiliation with the USSR; ideologically they were Maoist

It was led by a man named Abimael Guzman, who become a radical Marxist at university and travelled to China for indoctrination. Apparently he was present for the Cultural Revolution and it made a positive impression on him

He seems like a total commie freak, absolute scum of the earth. Shining Path was a Marxist terrorist guerilla insurgency that incited a low-level civil war in Peru for the duration of the 80s

Bear this in mind as we get to Fujimori’s autogolpe

Shining Path initiated their terrorist activities in 1980 around the time of the election. The relationship between the civilian government and the military was still tender given the transition of power, therefore they struggled to respond cohesively early on

The military sometimes failed to respond, and at other times was let loose to commit human rights abuses

Belaunde’s popularity cratered by the end of his term due to a flagging economy and the security problems

Alan Garcia of the ARPA came into power. After some initial success, he ended up worse than Belaunde on the two main fronts: Shining Path was closer to destabilizing the country than ever, and the country went into egregious hyperinflation. Garcia ended up just as unpopular as Belaunde

Garcia’s most brazen act was to try to unanticipatedly nationalize the financial industry in 1987

What follows are some charts to give you a sense of the state of things

Here’s the popularity of the two figures

Belaunade: 75% approval -> 25%
Garcia: 90% -> 20%

Real GDP per capita was markedly lower in 1990 than 1975

Garcia had three consecutive years of inflation over 1000% and it was accelerating

Peru was suffering thousands of deaths from political violence in most years

Simply put, Peru was in shambles. The political legitimacy of the establishment had collapsed. The center would not hold

I haven’t had time to research the manner in which the economy was mismanaged so badly—Kenney gives little detail—but it was. Their finance ministry and central bank must have been a debacle

Into this situation stepped a remarkable personage: the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa demands a thread unto himself tbh, but let me be brief

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Here’s a side thread on a novel of his about Shining Path

Vargas Llosa attended a military academy as a teen at his father’s behest but rejected a military career and became a Marxist in his younger days. Initially supportive of Fidel Castro, Castro’s imprisonment of poet Heberto Padilla in 1971 for heterodox writings seems to have been the last straw: Vargas Llosa moved towards anti-authoritarian, center-right classical liberalism for the rest of his life

Vargas Llosa formed a party of his own called Libertad (Liberty) and was able to assemble a tenuous coalition of all the right wing elements in the country under an umbrella label, FREDEMO

The main thrust of the movement seems to have been neoliberal economic reforms that would improve the economy’s regulatory burden, the government’s fiscal situation, and its international standing with debt markets and supranational financial orgs

This threatened domestic interests such as businesses and unions who received subsidies and tariff protections, and also individual consumers who benefited from govt gibs

Javier Milei seems to be a good analogue (Vargas Llosa, before he passed away last year, publicly supported Milei)

FREDEMO for the better part of a year hovered just shy of 50% in the polls of the multiparty contest, clear favorites to win the 1990 election. Here’s a chart

In early 1990 the drama gets tangled

Enter Fujimori. Fujimori was not a prominent political figure, almost a complete unknown on the national stage. He had been offered a ministerial role in Garcia’s administration but declined it

He was an engineer by trade, and presented himself as a non-ideological, pragmatic problem solver, who approached politics and governance, according to him, as an engineering problem that could be solved scientifically

Here’s where truth gets stranger than fiction. It appears the outgoing incumbent, Garcia, may have attempted to boost Fujimori’s candidacy as a third party spoiler to Vargas Llosa.

One man Garcia lent was Vladimiro Montesinos, a member of the SIN, Peru’s intelligence agency, who became a consigliere to Fujimori. Fujimori was facing questions about tax evasion in his personal finances (many major figures faced corruption accusations and many of them were guilty)

Montesinos was the fixer on the tax evasion imbroglio and he would remain Fujimori’s right-hand man throughout the 90s. I have to digress and share some bizarre details about him

He came from a family of ardent communists—his name, Vladimiros, is an homage to Vladimir Lenin. That’s how hardcore the family was

He ended up being a deep state guy, however.

He attended an American military school, the School of the Americas in Panama, now relocated to Fort Benning in Georgia and called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

After that, Montesinos spent a year at a military school in Peru

He developed strong ties with the American deep state and was eventually convicted of espionage for providing documents to the US

Some favors were called in and he only did two years in prison for an offense that could have been considered capital treason

Lastly, his cousin, Oscar Ramirez Durand, was a senior member of Shining Path arrested in the late 90s

A bizarre and complex character. Back to Fujimori

Take another look at the polls. Fujimori wasn’t even in the conversation at the end of 1989 for an election that was to take place in April

Consider this remarkable fact pattern: events were so bad in the country that the military had created a contingency plan for a coup in the event that Garcia and the ARPA retained power

Vargas Llosa was considered an acceptable option and the military would forbear their coup if he won. Fujimori was *not even mentioned* in the military’s assessment six months beforehand

In what must be one of the great electoral surprises in world history, Fujimori, having been at 9% two weeks earlier, won 25% of the vote in the first round to go to a head-to-head runoff, and the momentum reversal sent Vargas Llosa and FREDEMO into a tailspin

Vargas Llosa and his Catholic base apparently leaned into social issues and identity politics—Fujimori’s parents were Japanese immigrants and he was friendly to Protestants. It backfired. They lost the runoff

FREDEMO was seen as an upper class party by 65% of the electorate, compared to only 18% for Fujimori’s Change ‘90, which a 43% plurality viewed as middle class

The electorate was also wary of Vargas Llosa’s preannounced economic shock treatment

Inauspiciously, Fujimori did not have a strong party apparatus and they won less than 25% of seats in the legislature, leaving him unable to form a governing coalition

Once in office, Fujimori made expansive use of something called the constitutional decree authority—which allowed him to bypass the legislature—to pass many neoliberal reforms of the economy

Irony: the very policies that made voters leery of Vargas Llosa and delivered victory to Fujimori ended up being implemented by Fujimori through a tensile use of constitutional power

During the transition, Fujimori moved into a military base under threat—perhaps exaggerated by the military—of assassination. Was this a maneuver by Monetesinos and the deep state to bolster Fujimori’s ties to the military? Very possibly. Whatever the true cause, it did so

Two years of fragility between Fujimori and the legislature ensued.

By constitutional right, Fujimori could dissolve the lower house at any time and call for a new election, but it was unlikely to deliver him a majority in the lower house, to say nothing of the untouched upper house

His power was tenuous.

This is Kenney’s main thesis in the book, btw: situations where a leader lacks legislative support are inherently unstable and this often causes the breakdown of democracy

Kenney is a political scientist; he runs some stats and appends a qualitative analysis of different coups around Latin America at the end of the book. I was primarily interested in Peru’s story, though.

Fujimori and the legislature were essentially in a game of chicken. Fujimori was trying to implement as much of his agenda as he could in defiance of the legislature; the legislature always had the threat of impeachment if he went too far

A vital factor: Fujimori’s economic agenda was working. Growth had returned and inflation was coming down. Fujimori was far more popular than the legislature

Kenney notes that Fujimori’s popularity had a strong correlation with reductions in monthly inflation

Business elites were fully behind Fujimori. He had 95% support in a survey of a prestigious conference (CADE in the table below)

Rhetoric and tensions escalated. The judiciary was giving short sentences to Shining Path or letting them off entirely (sound familiar?), making it difficult for Peru’s security forces to maintain order

In a speech, Fujimori disavowed that he would try to become a dictator, but used vaguely ominous language in that direction

“Of course, the depth of the pit and the complication of the taboos are so big in Peru that perhaps it would be best that there be an emperor [laughter]. And that he take at least ten years resolving problems. Of course I will not be that emperor, because I am very respectful of the Constitution, but in addition I suggest the following: just as there is no immediate reelection for the president, neither should there be immediate reelection to be a member of parliament”

A couple points of clarification: his use of “emperor” here is tongue in cheek. Some of his opponents had used it as a pejorative due to his Japanese ancestry. “Immediate election” seems to refer to consecutive terms, although I’m not positive on that one

The legislature then overstepped. The constitution delineated four specific cases where Congress could impeach the president. It required the lower house to hold a hearing, the upper house to ratify it, and then a judicial review

The process would take months and the judiciary was unpredictable. On December 3, 1991, only a few days before Congress pulled their fateful maneuver, the previous president, Alan Garcia, had gotten off of corruption charges during a judicial review

An Article in the constitution allowed for vacating the presidency under a few conditions, including “Moral incapacity or permanent physical incapacity declared by Congress.” This article seems intended for cases where the president can no longer perform the job, but “moral incapacity” is an ambiguity

Declaring vacancy required only a simple majority in each house. Given the impeachment conditions laid out in another article of the constitution, it would have been a gross overinterpretation of power to vacate the presidency simply because of controversial statements made using the bully pulpit

On December 6th, the senate passed a motion that denounced the president’s “unjustified and provocative expressions” that “morally disqualify their author.” There seems to have been debate in the legislature over whether this explicitly triggered the power to vacate

Nevertheless, cooler heads prevailed in the Chamber of Deputies (lower house), where it was voted down 51 to 60 with 12 abstentions

Flipping 5 votes could have removed Fujimori from office

At that point, the die was probably cast. In the spring of 1992, Fujimori’s allies were working with the Congress on the possibility of judiciary reform, but it was abortive

Fujimori considered the security situation to be intertwined with the economy. Business confidence would not resume without suppressing Shining Path

Here is a table with just one week of violent incidents in 1991

On Friday, April 3, 1992, Fujimori summoned military leaders and they decided on an autogolpe. The military declared martial law in Lima on Sunday night April 5th and Fujimori announced that the legislature was suspended, with promises to hold new elections at a later date

An ostensible contradiction appeared in the polling: a majority still supported democracy in principle, but a majority also supported Fujimori. They seemed to accept his actions as a necessary evil if they took the form of a transitional regime

A new constitution was approved and Fujimori won an election in 1995, although he was eventually dogged from office by corruption scandals, fleeing to Japan and resigning from there in 2000

Overall verdict on Fujimori: based to quite based

What’s that you say? He was later convicted of crimes against humanity? That little guy? I wouldn’t worry about that little guy

Do commies really qualify as human?