Peruvian president Alan Garcia took to the pages of Lima’s most august newspaper, El Comercio, on Sunday 10/29 to decry what he sees as (sorry, Spanish only) an unpardonable ideological rigidity on the part of his opponents, which he characterizes thusly:
“Y es que allí el viejo comunista anticapitalista del siglo XIX se disfrazó de proteccionista en el siglo XX y cambia otra vez de camiseta en el siglo XXI para ser medioambientalista.”
“And it’s that [in a town that voted to oppose new mining ventures] the old anticapitalist communist of the 19th century unmasked himself as the protectionist of the 20th and now changes his stripes in the 21st to be an environmentalist.”
The president’s proposition is to launch Peru into the developed world by throwing open Peruvian resources, from aquaculture to mines, to private capital investment. Garcia contrasts this innovative vision against the sagging principles of an army of unspecified straw men, who seek to block rural development because peasant community lands are deemed “by demagoguery and trickery” to be sacred and who “have created the figure of the ‘uncontacted tribesmen’” (by which he means Peru’s very real isolated indigenous tribes) in order to obstruct the exploitation of $90/barrel oil reserves in the Amazon. It continues from there, bringing in mining, an industry where environmental concerns are “so last century” (“un tema del siglo pasado”), aquaculture, agriculture, and even education.
Would that it were so easy, Sr. Presidente! While those who would deny the potential utility of capital investment are fringe indeed, there aren’t very many people like that. However, there are a great many people who welcome investment but do not think the Peruvian state has yet proved itself trustworthy to carry out many of its appointed duties, whether the task is holding mining firms accountable for environmental harm, improving and enforcing basic labor standards, extracting the state’s fair share of resource-based income, or enacting direct or indirect redistribution programs to combat the country’s entrenched inequality. These folks would like to see Garcia expend some political capital on reforms before the government allows investment capital expanded space in what are undeniably fragile ecological and social environments.
Having presided over Peru in two very different eras – the 1980s of internal conflict and economic collapse, and the current era of relative peace and economic expansion – Garcia knows how hard it is to govern a geographically large, socially fragmented country. In particular, Peru has suffered from underdeveloped institutions ranging from disarticulated political parties to a judiciary that lacks the confidence of 95% of the population. But changing those things is difficult and time-consuming, and achieving success is uncertain. Better and easier, it seems, to find the magic bullet – resource exploitation, clearly – that will lead Peru to the Promised Land, and boldly identify the scapegoat – environmentalists, apparently – that always seems to get in the way.
