PERU: CAN THIS NATION SAVE ITSELF?
Oviedo, José Miguel
LIMA Pru is a country that has undergone dramatic changes in the last twenty years, and some of these have taken a sad toll on both social and political institutions. Basically, the country was...
...And to the observer the economic condition seems like that of a gravely ill person who at least is not getting worse...
...There are now thousands of victims, but almost never is anyone found responsible...
...Something had to be done to avoid collective suicide...
...The "revolutionary" message had by now lost all its charm, and democracy, which the military had rejected as the cause of all the country's evils, once again excited the hopes of the electorate...
...The Peruvian Andes are filled with unmarked graves of mutilated and tortured bodies whose murderers are on both sides of the "popular war" unleashed by terrorism...
...But now the party speaks with the unmistakable voice of Alan Garcia, who has committed himself to the political alignment of the party...
...After suffering expropriation during the Velasco Alvarado era, the Mira Quesadas face the fact of an Aprista government with the conviction that they cannot "go on imposing a family problem on their readers and on the country," as El Comercio editor Alejandro Mira Quesada has acknowledged...
...He is a man who believes as much in 177 symbolic gestures as in concrete actions...
...Gentlemanly, honest, enlightened, scrupulously respectful of other people's ideas, a dreamer entranced with the physical grandeur of his country, his vision of it is "positivist...
...Because of his comparative youth, the new president seems unconnected to the ins and outs of the party's shadiest eras...
...Luis Bedoya Reyes, mayor twice before, was the candidate of the right-of-center Popular Christian Party...
...IT IS ONE OF HISTORY'S ironic lessons that an anti-imperialist party founded in the 1920s must face the urgent demands of a global economy dominated by the laws of capitalism and the play of interests of the great powers...
...The situation is certainly not good, but the vertical plunge has become a somewhat slower downward slide...
...What surprises the visitor to the Peru now led by President Alan Garcia Perez and his APRA party (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana), is that people are slightly more optimistic than they were, a state of affairs unimaginable only two years ago...
...An Aprista president was almost an invitation to a military coup...
...The government's strongest temptation is to believe it has already found the solution and snatched the country from the brink...
...At the same time it seemed impossible that Belafinde, whose government had foundered on political indecision and administrative inefficiency, could ever regain his popular appeal...
...Maybe with this in mind, the great poet Cesar Vallejo wrote in 1918: "I was born on a day when God was very, very sick...
...In accordance with ideas developed by the Institute of Liberty and Democracy, a private organization under the direction of Hernando de Soto (who has just published a book, entitled The Other Path, on the hidden reality of Peru's underground economy), a decree was issued authorizing municipalities to grant titles within 120 days...
...we both have understood...
...During the first months of 1985 Peru was assigning from 20 to 25 percent of the income from exports to pay off this debt...
...Alan Garcia emerged as one of the new breed of Apristas, able to renew the party structure while respecting democratic give and take...
...he is more acceptable to the army than the leaders of the Aprista "old guard," and he is less displeasing to many non-Aprista voters who have always feared the party's demagogic tendencies...
...They have more to do with Rasputin and Nostradamus than with Marxism-Leninism...
...The problem is that, in the opinion of financial technicians and government staff, projections of the growth of the foreign sector during the next few years suggest that in 1987 Peru will not be able to pay even this 10 percent...
...with victims who were mistaken for their aggressors, and with local hatreds that found an outlet under the cover of the antisubversive campaign...
...The result is a huge economic problem: since there are no titles, improvements, investments and all economic activity based on real estate are at a standstill...
...This is the worst crisis Peru has had to navigate in all its history...
...E the person in the street this agreement, accepted by the industry, has meant slightly higher salaries and relatively stable prices, which have increased consumption in almost all sectors, especially food and textiles...
...Foreign Debt THIS GROUP AND OTHERS like it have given technical endorsement to what is in fact the most daring formula suggested by a Latin American leader to pay off foreign debt, namely to liquidate only the 10 percent of this debt that is balanced by exports...
...Military Rule and Democracy THE CHANGE MAY BE MORE PSYCHOLOGICAL than real, and it may be only transitory, but it is clearly perceptible...
...On July 28th, 1985, after his inauguration as president, Alan Garcia revealed a plan of economic recuperation the key points of which were: first, foreign enterprises would not repatriate profits for two years...
...With the support of these expectations he can renew the broken bond between the country and its government, but they cannot wait for fulfillment indefinitely, and may indeed rebound tragically...
...Peru was seeking geographically distant allies and forgetting her immediate neighbors...
...Belafinde had taken over the leadership in 1963, but his political career stemmed from the 1950s, when he opposed another military dictatorship, the eightyear old regime of General Manuel A. Odria...
...his last few months at the helm were a time of obvious disintegration...
...A more recent phenomenon than Shining Path is the even more obscure and mysterious group called Revolutionary Movement Tupac Amaru...
...Guerrilla Violence PERU'S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL problems are made even worse by another factor, terrorist violence...
...The young government of Alan Garcia must not become conceited over its partial successes...
...Amnesty International has publicized and condemned these atrocities...
...The new Aprista government marks the culmination of a process of reconciliation and a healing of old national wounds...
...The United States contributes 26 percent...
...TRANSLATED BY RACHEL PHILLIPS BELASH 178...
...And within the party it had a negative effect on the formation of qualified people: for three or four generations we had had no experience in government...
...It could be said that there is a social democratic APRA, but that there are also other APRAs, currently dormant, but waiting for the moment when the president's leadership ceases to be viable or wears itself out...
...The terrible warning of the closing line of Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude may be applied to Peru: it will not have "a second opportunity on earth...
...If the government (this one or any other) cannot protect the peasants from the brutality of both sides, Peru will soon be (if it is not already) a society shattered into irreconcilable fragments by ritualistic vendettas...
...Peru's tough choice is either not to pay back the debt at all (a step the government has resisted up to this point) or to pay only a small portion...
...A significant case is that of Carlos Franco, who was part of the SINAMOS (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilizacibn Social) team in charge of social mobilization during the military regime, and who now works with a group of technocrats studying and analyzing for the president economic and social questions of major importance...
...It is hardly necessary to point out how much popular support a measure like this must have won for the government...
...He canceled the purchase of a warship (it was really a navy relic discarded by NATO) that had been reconstructed and fitted out for 240 million dollars in a Dutch shipyard...
...At the beginning of the campaign, Barrantes's 173 victory seemed inevitable, so much so that running against him was seen as an undesirable "sacrifice...
...A similar negotiation is under way with Ecuador and another with Brazil, with the goal of economic integration...
...More than a party, it is a movement with pluralistic social origins, a vague ideology, and contradictory strategies...
...Sometimes, especially when he is abroad, he gives in to the temptation to "steal the show...
...To explain this, some recapitulation of recent history is needed...
...The real basis of the power he enjoys lies in the many dispossessed people whose expectations he himself has stimulated...
...Shining Path is a thorn piercing the national consciousness...
...On the domestic front this corresponds to another, even tougher, choice: to reactivate the economy or to let it founder and collapse completely...
...The result of the 1980 elections was a perfect example of the swing of the pendulum: the belittled and now elderly Belaünde returned to power...
...One of the conditions for an agreement was that national industry use domestic raw material...
...a born leader, truly liked by the people, who aspires to continental leadership...
...In the grip of circumstances it could not control, and of economic forces far greater than those of its government, the country seemed to be heading towards apocalypse...
...ideologically, they follow the teachings of Mao and the now infamous "Gang of Four," but tactically they are closer to Pol Pot and his visceral hatred of progress and the city as manifestations of bourgeois decadence...
...Changes are noticeable also in those remote villages in the mountains, where the wretched conditions people are used to are now made worse by the barbarous demands of the armed gangs that descend on them touting either revolution or order...
...Belaünde is an exemplary nineteenthcentury democrat...
...During his campaign the candidate presented himself insistently as a civilized, modern reformer, a true Latin American social democrat, modeling himself closely on Felipe Gonzalez in post-Franco Spain...
...Everything is in a state of crisis in Peru, including the judiciary system and the police and military forces, generally poorly trained, corrupt, and also understandably terrified...
...According to Franco the group represents different degrees of leftist thought which "it would be difficult to identify with any party inside or outside the country," even APRA...
...His second government (1980-1985) was impeccably democratic in form, but regressive and insensitive to the needs of a society that had evolved more rapidly than he...
...This was the opinion of Francisco Igartua, editor of Oiga, the journal most bitterly opposed to APRA...
...in a world economy unfavorable to the country's interests because of the notorious decline of the international price of metals, this imposed a burden that the national economy could bear only with considerable difficulty...
...it appears in the country and in the city as a force bent on avenging grievances never 176 attended to, But it also vents its blind ferocity on poor country dwellers, and sacrifices them unhesitatingly in the name of the sanctity of its doctrine...
...the changes and upsets going on around them are received with a sort of ironic indifference, a sort of "Things are bad, but they could get worse" reaction...
...The sect comes with no solutions: it simply wants to destroy and to rule over the void it creates...
...The Army-APRA quarrel has continued, with variations, since the 1930s, and effectively ensured a "veto" against any Aprista candidate for the presidency...
...second, the payments made by Peruvian capitalists against the debts they had contracted previously were to be regulated...
...This outflow of some 600 million dollars annually conveys a sense of the country's distressing economic hemorrhage...
...It is a small secret society made up of fanatics and deluded prophets who worship their own archaic theories and apocalyptic actions...
...174 Thus far, the emergency plan seems adequate...
...Even APRA's most bitter civilian enemies, the Mira Quesada family, which owns El Cornerdo, the country's oldest and most prestigious newspaper, have brought to an end a history of mutual misunderstandings and hatreds worthy of the Montagues and Capulets, all of which originated in the political crime of Antonio Mira Quesada de la Guerra in the 1930s that was attributed to a militant Aprista...
...Shining Path haabsolutely no possibility of gaining power and converting Peru into a communist republic along the lines of Cambodia, but its activities cause a constant seepage of lives, money, and forces that further delays the country's recovery...
...This forced the treasury to replace the sol with the inti (inti means sol [sun] in Quechua) as a new monetary unit...
...Organized within CEDEP (Center for Studies of Development and Participation), with financial backing from European groups dedicated to social change, they publish studies that have a limited circulation but influence specialists...
...It was an overwhelming triumph, which forced the military into the most uncomfortable situation of all—that of handing over the presidential sash to the very man it had ousted eleven years before...
...It has no ties with Shining Path (in fact, they seem to be rivals), and it is run by leaders whom no one knows well...
...One can convey a sense of the importance of APRA by saying that the party's internal history has been decisive in the political history of contemporary Peru—a history of frustrations and deferred promises...
...At that time the first municipal elections under an Aprista government were held...
...Despite much publicity and many intense campaigns, the cells of Shining Path and Tupac Amaru are still alive and causing considerable damage that worsens the current economic situation...
...Later, the field began to even out, thanks to the pull of Bedoya, the most experienced of the three...
...In fact we were visited by an assessment commission of private banks (after Peru had made a payment of 34 million dollars) that saw what the real situation of the country is...
...But a new factor has unexpectedly appeared, and has given heart to the collective illusions: a young man (thirty-six years old when he came to power), charming and charismatic, daring and dynamic, who uses a different political vocabulary and who likes to act without intermediaries...
...After two months and many disputes, the Electoral Court declared Del Castillo the winner...
...Because of the large number of voters, the Lima election was crucial...
...and third, all these savings would constitute part of the 10 percent to pay off the foreign debt...
...Sanchez recognizes that the president's tone was somewhat strident when he presented the idea for the first time and that anti-IMF rhetoric has its dangers...
...On the other hand, repression by the army has produced undeniable excesses and, worse yet, deliberate killings to avenge their own losses or out of sheer frustration at a tough task that has been going on for six years...
...Other dramatic moves have been devised to assure the international banking institutions that the will exists to bring about a general reordering of public spending...
...The three candidates in this race represented clearly defined constituencies...
...Between 1980 and 1985 the gross national product dipped to —14 percent, inflation exceeded 150 percent, and wages lost between 40 percent and 65 percent of their buying power...
...Alan Garcia threw all his political weight behind Del Castillo, thus producing great consternation among the other parties' supporters, who contrasted his attitude with BelaUnde's impartiality during his presidency...
...These groups keep alive a climate of violence with its painful consequences, but they also pose a moral problem: how can one fight them effectively without falling into the extremes of Argentina's "dirty war...
...It is paradoxical that this new figure belongs to APRA, the oldest political party in Peru (founded in 1924 by Victor Raid Haya de la Torre), which only six years ago was close to schism and even dissolution...
...The ship was leaking everywhere, and people were thinking in terms of mere survival, while the threat of repayment of the foreign debt (14 billion dollars) and the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loomed on the horizon...
...The growth of production and consumption has no doubt been reinforced by a program of social assistance, PAIT, that creates sources of temporary and emergency work...
...they are messianic cadres who kill and die singing revolutionary hymns...
...And that is what he did...
...But now," he says, "there is no aggressive rhetoric...
...In 1986, for which a growth of 6 percent had been forecast, Peruvian industry grew almost 10 percent, which is a record...
...The collective wisdom of a people that has maintained its sense of resignation and tenacity in so many harsh situations keeps alive a saying that is ironic but consoling: "God is Peruvian...
...Despite its vaguely socialistic bias, Velasco Alvarado's leadership soon turned into typical militaristic bossism, intolerant and scornful of civilian society, and eventually suffocated in corruption and provincial nationalism...
...One hundred and forty thousand new jobs have been created in this way in Lima and 175 four hundred thousand in the country as a whole, for people who otherwise would have had to resort to delinquency or begging...
...In order to survive periods of persecution, APRA had recourse to a variety of maneuvers, including alliances with its natural enemies, the oligarchic sectors...
...Peruvians have lived for so long on the razor's edge that they have learned resignation, and a certain amount of suspicion...
...Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, is one of the oddest subversive groups to . be found in today's world...
...For a period of two years, PAIT allows workers to be taken on without job security and at minimum wage...
...it operates mainly in Lima and other cities rather than in the countryside...
...The fact that Alan Garcia could survive as a candidate, win the election with 53 percent of the votes, and actually take power, indicates a significant change in the relationship of Peru's political forces, and an obvious loss of prestige for the preaching of the military after its doubtful "revolutionary" adventure of 1968...
...The country cannot be destroyed by the violence of Shining Path, but it may well be destroyed through lack of realism and selfcriticism if this last lesson of history is ignored...
...A short while before the elections, it was thought in some circles that the president had "burned" Del Castillo by taking him under his wing: the voters would reject the kind of "totalitarian" control the government would then have in the capital...
...They are the most acute symptom of the ills of a society that has not been able to really modernize itself, and in this sense they are part of the reality of a country that basically ignored the cries of its peasant, Indian culture...
...Jorge del Castillo was APRA's candidate...
...Terror breeds terror and in the crossfire the innocent fall along with the guilty, leftist students with proven terrorists...
...The sad thing," Sanchez comments philosophically, "is that the instinctive opposition to APRA caused us to lose valuable time in consolidating a democratic way of life...
...A description of this kind may perhaps fit more than one twentieth-century Latin American nation, but in Peru these internal contradictions have become acute, almost catastrophic...
...another implied a change in the pricing structure: the profit margin had to be figured into the volume of the product, not into its price...
...The country's political compass seems also to point in his direction, which explains the president's personal success...
...They are not guerrillas, as is usually assumed...
...Velasco Alvarado was removed from power by his own military men, and was replaced by Francisco Morales Bermüdez, whose stated mission was to "continue the revolution," but who in fact ran the government purely in order to survive until he could find an "honorable" way back to the barracks...
...It was a close but meaningful victory...
...November 1986 provided a case in point...
...As a movement APRA has always spoken with many voices at once (there are even two Hayas, two theorists engaged in a mutual debate running according to the historical period one looks at...
...The expectations that have grown up around Alan Garcia have won him the interest and support of technocrats, social researchers, and political scientists who are not Apristas, including, and this is quite surprising, some of the people who advised (and committed themselves to) Velasco Alvarado's government...
...After he had been in power for a year, Alan Garcia decided to meet with the leaders of industry and lay the choices before them: either their sector and the government could reach an agreement, or they would be expropriated...
...another had to do with the regulation of the foreign currency to avoid the inflationary spiral that had taken the country, in little more than ten years, from 50 soles to 14,500 soles to the dollar...
...Something of this tendency can be seen in Alan Garcia, fomented by his youth, his enthusiasm, and his innate ambition...
...As a result of squatting or of never-resolved law suits, hundreds of thousands of people in Lima live on lots or in property with no titles...
...But neither should one overstate the case: Alan Garcia's easy victory shows only that Peru has become "Alanista" rather than "Aprista...
...On the one hand military repression has been unproductive...
...Shultz in Bogota...
...In the last year of his stewardship, the technical shortcomings of his party's bureaucrats (Acción Popular), and the incoherence and weakness of its economic policies led to a general feeling of hopeless disarray and total national paralysis...
...Very soon people will begin to demand results which, if not forthcoming, will again generate the cycle of frustrations and lost illusions...
...The very numbers of the dead make it easy to forget them and do nothing...
...So the APRA now in power is a party whose experience of power was almost nonexistent: it represented approximately a third of the voting population, but for half a century its opponents had managed to block its path...
...In six months this office received some three hundred thousand complaints about property titles...
...the "socialist" dream turned into an authoritarian nightmare, and reality proved more complex than the grandiose plans the regime had thought up to control it...
...For them the issue is simply the survival of a culture whose ancestral norms and strong communal interests (neither rightist nor leftist) have been deeply shaken by the bullets...
...In the case of Shining Path the striking thing is that there is no proof of any tactical or economic support from any known foreign source: it is a movement that is totally indigenous in origin and opposed to almost all the revolutionary regimes in the world...
...As a result, there are now some 100,000 people with titles, not by any means perfect, but adequate for all practical purposes such as sale, transfer, or inheritance...
...I explained these things to him and received a favorable response that has since been confirmed both on a private and an official level...
...This indicates that there is hope, that our creditors are starting to understand...
...It could be said that these desolate lines, with such clear echoes of Nietzsche, provide the best description of the current situation—closer to total abandonment than to the miraculous panaceas in which poltiicians frequently indulge...
...IT WOULD BE A GROSS EXAGGERATION IO imply that this panorama has disappeared, since the facts and figures still imply danger...
...it is both archaic and modern, capitalistic and communitarian (in name at least), aristocratic and populist, Western and Indian, violent and peaceful...
...These are people trying to bring about profound political change in the country, more profound even than anything presented by APRA during the electoral campaign...
...Running the risk of affecting the interests of the military (which for an Aprista is not to be recommended on principle) and of creating a problem for himself with some European countries, Alan Garcia decided to reduce a purchase of French Mirage airplanes, which had been negotiated by the previous government, from twenty-six planes to twelve...
...The government introduced an innovation— the establishment in the attorney general's office of an ombudsman to take care of claims and complaints specifically related to realty...
...People suspect something very shady in its background, perhaps former police bosses allied with renegade revolutionaries financed by the drug traffic...
...like Argentinian Peronism it is a sort of nationalistic populism with right and left wings between which power swings depending on how the wind blows and how Haya de la Torre's theses are interpreted at any given time...
...The reality produced by so much improvisation has an incoherent quality...
...The last and most serious was the killing of some 260 prisoners (some Shining Path members, others only suspects) in a prison in Lima where they had started a protest strike...
...agricultural production, which had been close to 0 percent, also showed a modest increase...
...They saw a greater danger in the Aprista movement than in communism, or perhaps its most sinister ally...
...In contrast to the "modernizing" thrust and the aggressively populist language of the military (especially in the regime's early days), Belafinde represented the past, old Peru ready for burial...
...One was aware of an all-pervasive despair, felt by the shantytown dweller and the formerly prosperous industrial entrepreneur alike...
...Basically, the country was not prepared for such changes, and as a result the very fabric of Peruvian society has been weakened to an extent that can be considered dangerous, perhaps explosive...
...For the peasants in Ayacucho and other emergency zones, the theme of the foreign debt is utterly Byzantine...
...According to Sanchez himself, an important change has taken place in Peru's international politics: In contrast to the Third World policies of Velasco Alvarado, who looked for allies in the Arab world and in Africa, ours is a Latin American, specifically a South American policy, based on the reality of a common destiny...
...Several times over the past twenty years or so the recurring (and regressive) feature of Peruvian politics has been confirmed: changes have taken place with a circularity that seems to diminish their effect...
...The 10 percent thesis has clearly politicized the matter of the debt beyond the point at which creditors want to discuss the issue, which for them is strictly financial...
...But these improvements are threatened by the shortage of foreign currency to pay for imports, necessary if the nation's industry is to turn itself around and resolve the problem of the lack of raw material and capital goods...
...The most obscure and least known was, in fact, Del Castillo, who furthermore had to overcome the stigma of being the "official" candidate...
...On the other hand, domestic investment is inhibited by the very insecurity of the industrialists vis-à-vis the new government and its credit politics...
...A serious illness first curtailed and then obliterated the enormous power Velasco Alvarado had amassed...
...Unexpectedly Del Castillo won, showing that Alan Garcia could use his popularity to endorse a candidate without alienating public opinion...
...At first it was unclear if the 10 percent referred to the whole of the Peruvian debt, but it was later determined that it referred specifically to mediumand long-term debt...
...What has happened in the housing sector is very interesting...
...in this sense the dependency of the industrial apparatus is almost total...
...The candidate of the United Front, a somewhat unstable coalition of the Marxist left, was Alfonso Barrantes Lingan, the incumbent mayor and a person with strong backing in working-class sectors...
...One concrete example of the change in direction is that we are negotiating with Chile to bring about a reciprocal reduction in arms and military spending...
...When we calculated the net flow of foreign currency, or the rate of what comes in and what goes out, we found that Peru would have been exporting capital for three years," Franco observes...
...the new ingredient is Alan Garcia, known by his followers as "Alan," and as "Crazy Horse" by his detractors...
...Shining Path feels the same hatred towards the landowner and the wretched peasant who pays it no attention and tries to organize a cooperative or to provide machinery for a farm...
...For the Aprista leader to show support was not technically illegal, though it could be considered unsporting...
...There is hardly ever any room for hope, but they never become hopeless...
...According to Luis Alberto Sanchez, vice president of the Republic and the best known intellectual in the party, decisions like these have helped the United States to better understand Peru's position: "Recently," says Sanchez, "I had a profitable conversation that lasted forty-eight minutes with Dr...
...When the military regime took over in 1968, with General Velasco Alvarado at its head, the country saw another manifestation of the law that moves Peruvian politics from the pole of military rule to that of timid experiments in civil democracy...
...he symbolized this phase of an APRA brought to heel by the hard lessons of the past and present...
...Between 1968 and 1980 Peru was ruled by a "revolutionary" military government that had forcibly removed from power the then president, Fernando Belafinde Terry...
...Peru was adrift in a tense, somber atmosphere that bespoke real catastrophe...
...And he adds, "Despite the sanctions of the IMF, we still belong to the organization and provide it with 0.33 percent of its capital...
...Today's illusions may also be lost unless things are managed prudently and lucidly— with the help of a series of fortunate circumstances...
...Perhaps the outcome of the profound crisis in which the whole continent finds itself will depend on how the "Peruvian case" is resolved...
...If APRA has been faithful to anything it is 172 to its anti-imperialism, which sufficed to win it the institutional enmity of the armed forces...
...it is the final phase of a long period of decadence of power that perhaps began before APRA came into being...
...One of the worst traits of Velasco Alvarado's military government was its senseless vainglory, its tendency to a self-congratulation that fostered the illusory image of a country ruled by infallible and wise Caesars...
...It is foolish to think they will disappear in the near future: violence is now a substantial part of late-twentieth-century Peruvian political life...
...For him Peru is its roads, its trees, its dams, the humble but noble villages of the remote interior where time seems to have stood still—an earlier world than the confused, urgent reality that is the country today...
...Something has been achieved, but the task ahead is immense...
...Since the Constitution grants job security to anyone after three months, businesses try to contract only those new workers who are strictly indispensable, for fear of the economic burdens that arise from having to pay social benefits...
...171 But in this country the past dies hard and illusions soon disappear...
...The opposite occurred...
...as the opposition has appealed the official results, the situation on that front promises to remain tense...
...The losers did not resign themselves to defeat, and demanded that the whole process be annulled on account of certain irregularities, their immediate goal being to prevent the president from enjoying the fruits of this vicarious triumph...
...It is hard to decide if he really is a social democrat or not...
...The fact that a vote for the mayoral candidates in Lima and elsewhere could be construed as a sign of support for or rejection of the leadership of Alan Garcia little more than a year after his taking power gave a markedly national character to elections usually of only local interest...
...The confusion and slowness of the public registries are Kafkaesque, which explains why people have resigned themselves to living in precarious legal situations though they own the real estate in good faith...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
