From: howard@iscsvax.uni.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Subject: Re: Situation in Peru ?
Date: 17 Apr 92 11:38:29 -0500
Organization: University of Northern Iowa

In article <16APR199218505809@envmsa.eas.asu.edu>, 
cs421bloc@envmsa.eas.asu.edu (Carlos M. Block) writes:

> If you want to know about the situation in Peru ask the people who lives
> there, and not to Mario Vargas Llosa who lives who knows where in Europe.
> There is a Peruvian distribution email list, in which we keep contact with
> Peruvians in the world and in Peru (of course).  That list has been quite
> active these last days.  Send email to
	
>	owner-peru@athena.mit.edu    to susbcribe to it.


> What is your meaning of democracy????
> What do we (Peruvians) elect every 5 years??? 
> A democracy or a dictadure for 5 years??

> --
> Carlos M. Block                

I will subscribe to the list. I'm not totally ignorant about what has
been happening in Peru. I'm an active member of Amnesty International. 
For the past several months, many reports of dissapearances have been 
issued by Amnesty as urgent action cases about Peru. I was not surprised when 
Fujimori dismissed the Congress, just sad.

I do believe that Fujimori is a caring, honest person who is really doing
what he believes is best for the country. However, I have lived in 
the Dominican Republic, and was there at the height of the Jean-Claude
Duvalier regime against the Haitians(1979). Thousands of Haitians flooded into
the Dominican Republic at that time. The abuse in Haiti of the military
against the people was horrible- they would do anything to escape. So
that is what I think of when I think of dictatorship. That probably
is not fair to President Fujimori. 

What worries me about the situation in Peru is that some military general
might decide to assasinate Fujimori, which would leave the military totally
in control. Such a situation would then resemble that of a Pinochet in 
Chile, Duvalier in Haiti, or Assad in Syria. I don't think, even if these
countries actually have had a higher rate of growth in GNP under dictatorship
(and I've seen conflicting stories about whether that is correct, expecially
in the case of Chile), that growth in GNP is telling the whole story. For
one thing, under a dictatorship almost all the wealth goes to the dictator
and to the members of the military, so that they will be loyal to the 
dictator, and the actual common person gets none of the new wealth. The 
common person is probably worse off than he was before: there is no incentive
to redistribute the wealth. Also, the military, in wanting to protect
their privileged position, are prone to many human rights violations. 
A plebesite does not necessarily reflect the true attitude of the people. 
Since people are very scared, they may vote for the dictator when they
are actually opposed to him. This happened in Syria in December, when 
Assad got all but 26 votes out of 6 million cast- but the reports about
Syria from Amnesty have been terrible (read: Syria Unveiled, by Middle
East Watch, Yale Univ. Press, 1990). 

I know that the U.S. is not helping any in this. It's policy about
drugs seems all wrong, and is contributing to the problems in Peru. 
It is my opinion that we ought to focus our drug policy more on the
demand than the supply: that our mostly black youth of the inner cities
feel so hopeless they turn to drugs is a reflection of a society that
offers them a substandard education, racial prejudice, and no real
opportunities to improve their economic position. Only when we start
dealing with these problems will the amount of drugs coming into this
country decrease. Will a new U.S. President in the White House help?
Maybe. Candidates make lots of promises; whether they can actually
carry them out remains to be seen. 

The issue in Peru is not cut and dry, which is why I brought it up. 
Mario Vargas Llosa may be an elite, but I know he worked for at least
part of his money, as many of his books sit on my shelves, and many
of his stories do seem to reflect the common person in Peru. I gained
interest in Peru, and Latin America in general, because of him. 
If he lived in the best part of town, I am not surprised. If you made a lot
of money writing books wouldn't you like to live in a nice house, too? 
He does live in Berlin at the moment: his article on Sunday said that 
he had decided to not live in Peru because he did not want to interfere
with President Fujimori; I don't know how true it is. I understand that 
his politics are of the extreme right, and that he ran a multi-million
dollar campaign against Fujimori, so it may be that he has little sympathy
for the common people- I am not the best person to say.  

I wish your people of Peru only the best. I wish I knew what "the best"
is. The world is certainly a complicated place, with no easy answers. 

Mary Howard
Statistical Consultant/
Professor of World Geography
University of Northern Iowa