The 'Karate Kid' meets the Shining Path
Vogel, Tom Jr.
THE'KARATE KID' MEETS THE SHINING PATH STRUGGLING TO SAVE PERU TOM VOGEL, JR. nigmatic. Stem. Inarticulate. Terse. Alone. All these terms fit Alberto Fujimori, a fifty-two-yearold agronomist...
...He reads in staccato bursts from prepared texts while shaking his finger, and rarely extemporizes...
...Though Fujimori has said on many occasions how important it is to defend human rights, his contemporaries in the government and the armed forces are sending a different message altogether...
...Thus far Fujimori seems to be succeeding at the macroeconomic level with inflation down to 5.9 percent a month for November--it had averaged over 40 percent monthly since January of 1990---and progress with international lenders such as the IMF and the World Bank in paying off some of Peru's staggering $2 billion in arrears out of a total foreign debt of over $20 billion...
...He has called for the elimination of "lazy bureaucrats who spend their time reading newspapers and doing crossword puzzles...
...impromptu speeches from the balcony of the presidential palace that attracted thousands in the early and more popular years of his term, Fujimori limits his communications to official pronouncements at planned events...
...PES was programmed to feed 7 million Peruvians in extreme poverty through December with a fund of $415 million...
...Its main character, host of a radio talk show, offers desperate callers calming advice to keep fighting in life, never to lose their sense of dignity and hope...
...Before August 8, those who earned a minimum wage (less than $50 a month in November) were spending 64 percent of their income on food...
...At least one human rights group has been threatened by Shining Path for denouncing human rights violations perpetrated by the terrorists...
...Unlike his predecessor, Alan Garcia, who was given to making TOM VOGEL, JR., is a free-lance correspondent with Knight-Ridder Financial News in Lima, Peru...
...Buisson, who says he has received thirty reports of disappearances in the past three months in the area around Pucallpa, decided to conduct an investigation through the Episcopal Social Action Commission (CEAS), a churchsponsored human rights group...
...By early December, only $132 million in aid had come through, while the number of Peruvians in extreme poverty had increased to nearly 13 million, thanks to the economic shock program...
...He has taken on labor unions by threatening to fire workers out on strike...
...Of the $215 million the Peruvian government had promised, only $32 million ever materialized, according to economist Alejandro Toledo, even though Peru's international reserves were estimated to be over $700 million at the end of November...
...The fruit pickers found five other bodies nearby...
...Another quarter was to come from other nations, and the remainder, $215 million, from the Peruvian government...
...In February and March of 1990, shortly after Peruvian activists participated in a United Nations session on human rights, a number of human rights workers in Peru were threatened with death, one was kidnapped and never seen again, and organization offices, including that of Amnesty International in Lima, were bombed...
...Now let's see who you are going to save...
...Terrified, the two men fled the marsh and soon after reported what they had seen to the bishop of Pucallpa, Monsefior Juan Luis Martin Buisson...
...Like the campesinos of the Peruvian Andes, human rights groups have been getting it from both sides...
...New legislation for prosecuting terrorists will help expedite trials and also help to prevent human rights organizations from obstructing the activities of the police and armed forces in the affected zones," says Peru's minister of justice, Augusto Antonioli...
...llJanuary1991:ll...
...The outcome of Fujimori's campaign was an astonishment...
...Mothers with children in tow wander about in old and ill-fitting clothing...
...Peru has lacked a coherent counter-subversion strategy since the Shining Path insurrection began, ever since a smaller group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), followed suit in the mid- 1980s...
...A leading Peruvian journalist, Mariela Balbi, blames Fujimori: "The worst thing [he] is doing is not paying any attention to the antisubversion battle...he is closing his eyes to reality...
...According to one human rights activist, nearly a thousand Peruvians died because of political violence in the first three months of the Fujimori government...
...They heard splashes as if something were being dropped into the water...
...Another word for Fujimori might be "beleaguered," though it describes his situation rather than his personality...
...The whole emergency aid program is scheduled to end by January and at this writing no plans to renew it have been announced...
...Though the economic shock program is more brutal than even llJanuary1991:9 what the Intemational Monetary Fund (IMF) would have advised, most Peruvians think that it is necessary to bring Peru's runaway inflation, pegged at 7,864 percent for the twelve months previous to November 9, under control...
...They found the body of a thirty-year-old man, hands and legs bound, with no identification documents...
...According to several church experts, the evangelical threat to the Catholic church was exaggerated and the unusual involvement of some church figures in the campaign only confused and angered the majority of Catholics, who voted for Fujimori anyway...
...Mother Augustina had endured long Shining Path lectures on their complex Marxist-Maoist ideologies before and took her time in coming by...
...She was accused of helping distribute emergency food, diverting campesinos from the "revolution," working with jungle natives hostile to Shining Path, speaking of peace, distracting children with candies, and cooperating with the local agency of the state development corporation...
...through July of 1990, the number was 144...
...Some believe Fujimori's shrewd choice of right-wing economist Juan Hurtado Miller as his first minister and his association with Hernando de Soto as an adviser for Peru's negotiations with the United States on antidrug policy and discussions on foreign debt are the telling factors...
...more than a month later, he has yet to issue a report...
...The rest of Mother Augustina's order abandoned the mission in La Florida immediately after her murder...
...Fujimori won the confidence of voters with his slogan, "Honesty, Technology, and Work," helped by the perception of Vargas Llosa as backed by high-powered conservatives...
...In the small jungle town of La Florida, more than 200 kilometers east of Lima, Mother Augustina Rios Lopez, seventy, was making lemon candies for local children on the morning of September 27 when a sixteen-year-old girl, a Shining Path terrorist armed with an automatic weapon, burst into her room at the center house for the Good Shepherd Congregation and ordered her to a meeting in the town's central plaza...
...He has rankled the church's hierarchy with a program to provide artificial birth control devices below cost to anyone who wants them...
...Despite his criticisms, Alejandro Toledo has hope for the president-for an unusual reason...
...In contrast to Garcia and the sophisticated Vargas Llosa, his language is unadorned, his style laconic...
...Economist Alejandro Toledo explains that "the vote for Fujimori was a vote of protest...for a country in the process of social metamorphosis.., and looking for a new type of politician...
...When her turn came they ordered her to kneel but, being old, she stumbled a bit in doing so...
...Many neighborhood streets are amazingly free of litter...
...now they are spending more than 86 percent, according to Toledo...
...More than 300 were detained and "disappeared" by security and terrorist groups in 1989...
...The terrorists shot and killed, one by one, each of the six others...
...he violence of Peru is even more dismaying, if that is possible, than its poverty...
...some had been destroyed with dynamite charges...
...From 1987-1989, Peru occupied first place in the world for detained and disappeared people, according to United Nations compilations...
...Fujimori, he warns, "is playing with fire...
...since 1980, when the Shining Path (SP), Peru's principal human rights violator, took up arms, the number of victims is put at 18,743...
...Hurtado Miller currently enjoys a 95 percent approval rate from Peru's top businessmen...
...When she arrived at the plaza Mother Augustina was pushed against a wall with six other people from the area and told that she would be punished for delaying...
...The challenges he faces include an economy in shambles, endemic poverty, isolation from the international financial community, cruel violence mounted by the Shining Path guerrillas, a military of questionable loyalty with low regard for human rights, and pressures from the United States to adopt a more repressive antidrug policy...
...yet, PES-funded work programs have not materialized~ either...
...the remainder must come from the community...
...SP has been threatening missionaries in conflictive zones of Peru for years, he says, but the church has been slow to report these incidents...
...Economic damage caused by ten years of political violence exceeds $17 billion, nearly equal to Peru's foreign debt...
...Tomorrow we will kill your god...
...But the "Karate Kid" has done little about Peru's two other major challenges: poverty and political violence...
...In all of 1989, there were 2,919 deaths from political violence...
...In a speech at a forum on human rights in November, Brigadier General Alberto Arciniega said that human rights groups were being used by the terrorists to sow discontent and insecurity in the armed forces through investigations into reports of violations...
...But, in the film's shattering finale~ he fails to dissuade a young woman from throwing herself offa cliff...
...Alberto Fujimori is destined to succeed," he says, "because there is no room for failure...
...But homes stand with parts of the first or second floor uncompleted...
...The soup kitchen serves more than 150 people a day, but Betty says the government provides only enough money to feed a quarter of them at forty cents per ration...
...his program has alienated some constituencies and imposed new levels of suffering on the poor...
...He ends each program by reminding listeners that, in the end, "you are your destiny...
...Visiting World Bank experts criticized the government's "incapacity" to run PES and suggested that an autonomous fund be created to make distribution more efficient and gain the confidence of potential foreign donors...
...But his actions as president have earned him the title "Karate Kid" for his swift and pugnacious approach to the problems that beset the country...
...he depth and extent of Peruvian poverty become vivid for a visitor to San Juan de Lurigancho, a huge shantytown fifteen kilometers from the center of Lima...
...The lack of strategy has led to confusion on a grand scale and the attendant human rights violations...
...Because he is the son of immigrants and a political outsider, Peru's poor majority believe Fujimori won't forget them as traditional power brokers have always done before...
...More than 80 percent QfLurigancho's residents rely on the government's Social Emergency Program (PES) for one meal a day...
...But Pablo Rojas, president of the Human Rights Commission, disagrees...
...More than half were campesinos but police officers, soldiers, businessmen, a judge, and farmers were also victimized...
...The shock was necessary to begin a return to economic stability, but the social costs are unevenly distributed...
...This government," Betty complains, "has done a pantomime of a social emergency program...
...About a quarter of this fund was to come from aid programs already in place, such as Caritas...
...With a population of one million people, many of them refugees from Shining Path violence and military repression in the Andes, Lurigancho has one paved road and no garbage collection or sewage services to speak of...
...In a Lurigancho soup kitchen run by the Mothers' Club, an organization formed by shantytown mothers in the early 1980s, Betty, the local Mothers' Club coordinator, guts fish in preparation for the day's meal...
...Peruvians have their backs against the wall...
...Albart from maldistribution of aid, the program has hurt the poor through dramatic price increases for telephone service and electricity and a heavy tax on gasoline...
...The military commander in Pucallpa promised an immediate investigation...
...All these terms fit Alberto Fujimori, a fifty-two-yearold agronomist and son of Japanese immigrants, who last spring surprised Peru by becoming its president, defeating the heavily favored novelist Mario Vargas Llosa...
...Gustavo Gorritti, Peru's best-known expert on the Shining Path, says that "the [religious] habit affords a bit of protection as long as they [the clergy] do not work directly against SE" He does not believe the guerrillas have a systematic strategy to attack the church...
...Until a week before the first round of the presidential elections on April 8, he was a virtual unknown outside academia (he was once dean of Peru's Agrarian University...
...Each time Mother Augustina begged for their lives...
...A list of charges against the nun were read off...
...There was a bullet hole in his head and his body showed signs of torture...
...The sixteen-year-old terrorist ran over and shouted: "Now we are killing you...
...In the process he has made it clear that he has few binding allegiances...
...Then she shot Mother Augustina in the head...
...The church is the only infrastructure left in many areas of Peru," says Rojas...
...Rios says that Caritas had already run out of funds for many areas by the first week of December...
...And most of Peru's poor are unemployed and thus receive much less than the minimum wage...
...The film seems to ask, "Peru, what is your destiny...
...Despite all this, Fujimori enjoys a 59 percent approval rate, according to a poll released in early November...
...his opponent was famous even outside Peru...
...He has even alienated his own political party, Cambio 90 (Change 90), by breaking his campaign promises not to apply an economic shock program...
...He has criticized Peru's congress for being "sterile...
...One specialist on the issue said that the Peruvian military does "sloppy detective work and has little intelligence" and spends less time protecting the population from SP than trying to protect itself...
...some of the splashes were followed by explosions...
...Thus far, his efforts to cope with this dismaying agenda have brought some success on the inflation front but little or no diminution of political violence...
...Peru and Colombia accounted for 70 percent of the world's total number of detained and disappeared people last year...
...Juan" and "Alberto," curious, rowed over to take a look...
...He ran on a shoestring budget that was dwarfed by Vargas Lllosa's multimillion-dollar war chest...
...The dusty streets are bursting with children, dogs, and smokebelching buses...
...I want to know where all the money is going...
...Toledo says the poor have survived thus far on dollars ferreted away in cookie jars or under mattresses but come February this economic cushion will be exhausted...
...He says the Mother Augustina killing, the second officially confirmed murder of a religious by Shining Path, is highly significant...
...International donations never materialized because of a lack of confidence in the Peruvian government's ability to channel the funds, says Mario Rios, general secretary of Caritas in Peru...
...What is ironic, says Toledo, "is that if Vargas Llosa had instituted the same program, this whole country would be Shining Path now...
...In mid-October 1989, two fruit pickers, I shall call them "Juan" 10: Commonweal and "Alberto," were rowing their canoe through a marsh area outside the jungle town Pucallpa, more than 400 kilometers northeast of Lima, when they saw a military helicopter fly overhead and hover nearby...
...Toledo contends that true economic recovery will be impossible without creating jobs for poor Peruvians...
...And, though Fujimori is a Catholic and Vargas Llosa an atheist, powerful members of the church hierarchy openly favored the novelist, this out of the perceived danger to the church of Fujimori's electoral alliance with Peru's National Evangelical Council, representing some seventy-seven evangelical groups...
...Rightwing paramilitary groups were blamed for the attacks...
...Even before the economic shock, according to another expert, more than seventy thousand children died in Peru each year before reaching their twelfth birthdays, most from malnutrition or easily preventable illnesses...
...Hernando de Soto is well-thought of both within Peru and abroad for his book The Other Path on Peru's informal economy and his work at the innovative economic and political think-tank Institute of Liberty and Democracy (ILD...
...CEAS investigators returned to the site a week later and took photos of eleven bodies in varying stages of decomposition...
...Another cryptic message is offered by the acclaimed Peruvian film Caidos del Cielo ("Fallen from Heaven"), directed by Francisco Lombardi...
...He sacked several high-ranking police, army, and navy officers for coup-mongering and corruption when he took office July 28...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 1
