Peru's
election and
the Indian question
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 1, 2006
LIMA - In Bolivia, with the
election as president of a representative from the
excluded Indian majority, Evo Morales, it is clear that
belatedly the Indian community has expressed its deepest
longings, albeit by voting for a leader who if he walks
like he talks will destroy any hope they may have for
escaping the worst poverty in Latin America.
In Peru, whose election is only a
few weeks away, the Indian question, although not as
polarised as in neighboring Bolivia, threatens to undo
the good economic work done by president Alberto Fujimori
(who had to flee to Japan in 2000 after scandal felled
him) and the present president, Alejandro Toledo. Even
though Toledo is an Indian, and even though he has been
able to maintain GDP growth rates at a healthy 5% a year,
he is probably the least popular president in Latin
America.
In this polarised situation there
is no automatic linkage between economic growth and the
quality of democracy. The steady and alarming drift in
the opinion polls towards Ollanta Humala, the
authoritarian-inclined clone of Hugo Chavez does not
reflect well on Peru's sense of maturity. Humala who
once, like Chavez, tried to stage a coup d'etat, is
winning the Indian and poorer class vote, as Morales did,
on promises to support the besieged Indian coca farmers
and to review the contracts that grant tax breaks to
foreign mining companies, with a dose of anti-Americanism
thrown in.
Understandably, many Indians are
not tuned into Western notions of democracy. The high
Indian civilizations, the Incas and the Aztecs, were
destroyed mercilessly by the Spanish conquistadors.
Prescott's great accounts of the advance of empire are
replete with one brutal act of ignorant savagery after
another. Over the centuries the Indians of the Andes have
been treated more badly than the blacks of South Africa
ever were.
Only in recent years have the Inca
descendents of Peru begun to re-discover their own
culture and thanks to more enlightened government
policies and the work of the UN's International Fund for
Agricultural Development begun to get their feet on the
ladder of economic development. Even so, as the revival,
albeit very limited, of the terrorist movement, Sendero
Luminoso, suggests, militancy and violence are not
totally rejected options.
Only one Andean country managed to
escape the worst. This was Chile where only a modest
Indian population existed. Chile, protected by deserts in
the north, was barely settled before the Spanish arrived.
Its political culture is not infused with a tradition of
repression and violence. Democracy arrived in Chile
nearly 120 years ago and survived relatively unscathed
until the coup of Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Now with this
month's election of Michelle Bachelet it confirms that
Chile has reinforced the stability that has characterised
most of its history.
Yet even in Chile steady economic
progress is a relatively recent phenomenon. The English
pioneers went to North America to build a paradise; the
Spanish and the Portuguese went to South America to enjoy
a ready made one. The conquistadors were not like their
counterparts to the north, fleeing persecution. They were
adventurers and mercenaries. They lived under the
Inquisition and the Counter Reformation. Authoritarianism
and feudalism were second nature. They were not much
interested in development and society. They were there to
conquer and to pillage, to extract the mineral and
agricultural wealth as fast as they could and ship it
home. Pizarro himself used a network of brothers as a
chain along which he passed his looted wealth to build
mansions in Spain. "The bloody trail of the conquest", as
the continent's earliest foreign correspondent, the
fifteenth century friar, Bartolomé de Las Casas,
put it.
Here were two continents side by
side, equally endowed by nature. One prospered, whether
in its U.S. or Canadian variants. The other has crawled
from one upheaval to another. Only in the last seventy
years have the more progressive parts of the southern
continent, Chile foremost, but also Brazil, Colombia and
Uruguay, begun to shed the inheritance of the Counter
Reformation state which banned and restricted enterprise
in the private sector. It licensed chosen entrepreneurs
to develop state monopolies and favored mercantilism.
Church, the propertied and merchant classes and the state
were all woven together. Individual initiative was simply
stifled.
Bolivia has not even begun to
escape its past and launch itself on economic and thus
social liberation. Neither has Ecuador. Peru since the
time of Fujimori has started to. But it is painful to
watch. Its Indian population, now half emancipated but
still only dimly aware of the historical and financial
forces (including the drug barons) that influence its
choices, may choose in April's election to sideline the
country's prospects once again.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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