Manuel Alcántara - Presidents and Democracy in Latin America

PART I
Presidentialism and Political Capital in Latin America

Manuel Alcntara

Jean-Louis Thibault

Jean Blondel

Manuel Alcntara, Mlany Barragn and Francisco Snchez

PART II
Personal Power and Institutional Constraints: Case Studies

Marisol Reyes

Javier Duque

Martn Tanaka and Jorge Morel

Magna Incio

Mario D. Serrafero

Carlos Huneeus

We owe particular thanks to the Universidad de Salamanca, the Instituto de Iberoamerica and The Project of Parliamentary Elites in Latin America (PELA) Las elites parlamentarias y el consenso de las commodities en Amrica Latina, financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Ref: CSO201564773-Rand to Octavio Amorim Neto and the Fondacion Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro, to Miguel Jerez Mir and the Universidad de Granada, to Cristina Ares and the University of Santiago, and to Xavier Coller and the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla. Special thanks to Mlany Barragn for her patient editorial work.

Martn Tanaka and Jorge Morel

In this chapter, we analyze the singularity of Peruvian politics in recent decades, a course which is clearly distinguishable from that of other countries in the region. We focus on the study of the governments of former presidents Alan Garca (19851990 and 20062011) and Alberto Fujimori (19901995 and 19952000). We point out the way in which specific and unexpected decisions they made set the country on an unforeseen course that would distance it from trends that marked the region as a whole. At the beginning of the 1990s, Peru saw an early collapse of its party system and the implementation of market-oriented reforms under an authoritarian regime. In the region as a whole, those reforms, although they marked a significant mutation in party systems and gave rise to delegative ways of exercising power, were not accompanied by collapse or authoritarian forms of government. Those phenomena would occur in the following decade, as part of a re-emergence of populist and leftist ideas. Afterwards, in the first decade of the 2000s, the limitations of neoliberal policies caused a left turn throughout the region, which also brought Alan Garca to power in 2006 (and, subsequently, Ollanta Humala in 2011). Unexpectedly, however, Peru continued to follow market-oriented policies, the left lost relevance and the political climate was characterized by a clearly conservative discourse. We argue that the Peruvian singularity in the regional context is a consequence of unexpected decisions made and actions taken by Presidents Fujimori and Garca, for very particular reasons. We believe that analysis of their leadership and their decisions, the political agency, is very important for Peru, where structuralist reasoningwhich considers the course of politics to be predetermined by the economic and social sphereshas excessive influence (see Tanaka, 2001). From that viewpoint, political leaders would have little participation and would be impotent witnesses or mere reflections of structural conditions that essentially predetermine the path taken by their governments. In the early 1990s, however, amid a serious economic and political crisis, the most likely outcome for Alberto Fujimori, a novice politician with an improvised party and a minority in Congress, would have been a weak government unable to implement significant reforms and hobbled by the opposition. Instead, Fujimori showed exceptional and disconcerting political will and ability to build an authoritarian, personalistic regime, implement neoliberal reforms, minimize the opposition and consolidate power so he could remain in office throughout the 1990s. Later, dissatisfaction with the distributive results of those reforms would return Alan Garca to power (and, subsequently, Ollanta Humala), which might have brought back a national-popular discourse, as it did in other countries. But Garcas desire to reinvent himself as a politician and not expose himself to the criticism leveled at his first government explains why his second administration took a markedly conservative turn, and why he did not implement large-scale redistributive social policies to take advantage of the countrys economic boom, as occurred in neighboring countries that rode the wave of the political left turn.

In more general theoretical terms, we believe that the Peruvian case is highly illustrative of the importance of studying political elites and leadership: in this case, they constitute a key independent variable for understanding political dynamics and events.

We will quickly review the prevalent method of viewing the evolution of Peruvian politics in recent decades, which emphasizes structural factors in which political leaders reproduce, through their behaviors, certain balances of power estab lished in the economic and social spheres while appearing to lack initiative and impact. We will then analyze the first Alan Garca presidency (19851990), the decade of the two Alberto Fujimori administrations (19901995 and 19952000) and Garcas return to the presidency (20062011). We will examine the char acteristics of these presidents leadership, the circumstances in which they came to power and which surrounded their presidencies, and the institutional frameworks in which they governed, highlighting the specific role of leadership as a variable in defining the course of their governments. We will end with some general conclusions and implications that we believe can be drawn from this study.