Last night Peruvian president Alan Garcia gave the annual independence day address, which is similar to the State of the Nation speech in the USA. Given Peru’s robust economic growth and status as a darling of international business, one might have assumed that the speech would adopt a valedictory tone. However, for a variety of reasons Garcia has less to celebrate than first meets the eye.
The most recent nationwide poll measured Garcia’s approval rating at a paltry 26 percent. Though his support is somewhat stronger in Lima, far and away the country’s dominant city, the impoverished populations of the Andes mountains and Amazon jungle are overwhelmingly disdainful of the administration. The immediate reason provided by many analysts and poll respondents is food price inflation. While the overall inflation rate of 5.71 percent is not high by regional standards, basic food items, which comprise a substantial portion of the basket of the poorest, have risen at a significantly higher rate. In addition, many observers point to a sense of frustration that the country’s GDP gains, constantly trumpeted by both the Garcia government and the preceding Alejandro Toledo administration, are being swallowed up at the upper levels of Peruvian society.
This sense of anguish is nothing new in Peru, where street protests have never gone out of style. But the success of a recent general strike, and perhaps more importantly, the ferocity of a local demonstration several weeks earlier, reveal serious social schisms. During his presidential campaign Garcia frequently decried Peru’s endemic malady of social exclusion; however, once in office he began to govern as a fairly straightforward free-marketeer, even penning a number of newspaper columns bemoaning those who would rein in the market.
Garcia and his partners in government are actually correct, at least in part, that inflationary forces are something they have little control over. But his administration is certainly capable of governing better and acting with more modesty – as he explicitly stated in last night’s speech. Pity, then, that in the elections for leadership in the Peruvian congress, Garcia’s APRA party relied on the votes of representatives associated with one of Peru’s worst governments: the followers of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori. Though the two groups have no explicit alliance, many analysts believe that they are acting in a joint spirit of concern about the results of Fujimori’s trial on human rights violations. The Fujimori group’s motivations for concern for its leader are obvious; less well-known outside of Peru is the fact that APRA members have reason to fear the precedent that conviction of a high-level politician would set.
It appears that Garcia has decided that profound changes in the final three years of his term are implausible in Peru’s fractious society and that the best option is to maintain high GDP growth, continue to gradually decrease the poverty rate, and act with a sort of disinterested obstruction on human rights issues. While a vast improvement on his first disastrous term (1985-1990), this is unlikely to be enough to win him the hearts of the Peruvian citizenry.
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