Many Peruvians living abroad were planning a Christmas visit to Peru for the first time in a long time when news of the spectacular takeover came through. Richard Valencia, a marketing and sales executive here, was going to Peru for the first time since 1988 with his wife and three children. I remembered a rifle pointing through our car window at a military checkpoint on a fog-shrouded night. Being dismissed early from school because of violent protests throughout the city and being ordered to keep our heads low lest we get shot through the school bus windows. For Peruvians, history is immediate and personal.
Families can connect their troubles with the headlines .
My parents' marriage never recovered from my U.S.-born mother's distress at the military coup of 1968, when she imagined Peru becoming another Cuba. Maybe that is why Fujimori's miracle was so powerful for us. Peru's economy and social fabric seemed beyond repair, and when Fujimori shut down Congress and the Supreme Court it seemed like more of the same. But Fujimori restored democracy. The leader of Shining Path Abimael Guzman is in a jail on an island off the coast, and Tupac Amaru leaders and hundreds of their troops have been jailed in the remotest parts of the country.