Peru, Party Systems, and a Strange Case of Autocratization

In previous columns (referenced below), we discussed some of the contemporary sources of autocratization around the world. We talked about the traditional self-coups, military coups, civil-military coups, and revolutions common to the first (roughly covering the years between 1920 and 1940) and second (roughly between 1960 and 1970) waves of autocratization in history. We also discussed the co-optation of the machinery of the State by corporations and interest groups (lobbying), the aggrandizement of executive power, illiberal and authoritarian transnational alliances, and even electoral autocratization, in which the people themselves vote an authoritarian into power with the promise of ending democracy. We examined typical cases, some more than others, that follow a global trend: countries such as Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Sudan, Russia, and many others.

But what about the less studied, more confusing, and unusual cases? Might these not be precisely the ones capable of shedding light on other possible forms of autocratization, and perhaps making us reflect on new mechanisms of democratic defense? By forcing us to question premises and axioms, these cases may become the window through which a great deal of democratic innovation emerges.

And in that sense, unless better judgment prevails, we can think of no case more singular than that of our neighbor, Peru. Since 2018, the country has had (depending on how one counts) no fewer than eight presidents, a political instability deeply tied to Operation Car Wash in Brazil, to a party crisis rooted in authoritarianism, vast social inequality, flawed institutional designs, a constitutional clause with “playful” interpretations, conflicting elites, and fundamentally different ideas about how to build the good communal life. But calm down — for all this to make sense, we must begin with the historical roots of the problem. Roots, in the plural, because there are many.

A brief history of party fragmentation, mass public violence, and political-social exclusion

Regimes with democratic pretensions between the 1940s and 1960s in Peru were paradoxically associated with a minority white elite, wealthy and based in Lima. This elite, of European origin and which had largely remained in power since the Spanish invasion of the Americas, saw no reason for the democratic regime to truly extend itself to the rest of society. From the standpoint of regime survival, the logic makes sense. As Svolik points out in his seminal The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, more than two-thirds of all coups are carried out by elites, not by the population. In a bizarre contrast, the regimes of that period most concerned (even if only symbolically) with extending official political life to a broader share of the population were those led by General Manuel Odría (1948–1956) and Juan Velasco (1968–1975), both authoritarian.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the socialist left and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) sought, unsuccessfully, to include rural labor bases and urban informal workers in politics. The problem? These same groups looked at their own history and concluded — perhaps with some reason — that political parties, both on the left and the right, had been co-opted by Lima’s white elite. Without substantial support, the socialist left and APRA ended up witnessing two more decades of stratified political representation in the country.

Meanwhile, in the early 1970s, philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, influenced by the context of political exclusion in Peru and by the Maoist idea of a radical peasant revolution, founded a guerrilla organization known as the Shining Path. In the years that followed, public security in Peru would be threatened by car bombs in Lima, terrorist attacks, assassinations, and massacres (such as the 1983 Lucanamarca massacre, in which the group murdered 69 Andean peasants in retaliation for the capture of guerrilla fighter Olegario Curitomay). Years later, Peru’s Truth Commission estimated roughly 70,000 dead or disappeared during the conflict with the Shining Path.

The public security crisis and the high degree of the population’s real exclusion from the democratic regime came alongside episodes of hyperinflation, which in turn destabilized relations between the executive and legislative branches, causing each to obstruct the other’s actions in a cycle that produced continuous governmental paralysis.

It is hardly strange to think that a population excluded from the democratic system would support an outsider willing to abandon that very system. Fujimori dissolved Congress and proceeded with his self-coup with approximately 80% popular support. When he captured Guzmán in 1992, large sectors of the population understood that it was worth exchanging a minority democracy — already barely functional — for a dictatorship capable of providing public security (a line of reasoning familiar to those of us following the current situation in El Salvador, for example). Fujimori’s “Fujishock,” his austerity economic measures, successfully fought hyperinflation, and people outside Lima began to feel that, perhaps for the first time in decades, the government “cared” about all citizens.

Peru seemed to be living through a sort of “enlightened despotism” or “democratic dictatorship,” but the euphoria was short-lived. After the coup, Fujimori did little to replace the limited institutions of the previous democracy. He did even less to replace the European elites who had previously governed. Instead of establishing an institutionalized relationship with his popular base, and thus rebuilding and strengthening the Peruvian party system, Fujimori resorted to personalistic appeals and periodic public spending projects. Worse still, he created “disposable parties” — minimalist organizations created for a single election and then abandoned.

Despite his rhetoric about decentralization, Fujimori proved unwilling to transfer power and resources to local governments. In fact, his efforts to co-opt and control local mayors and their organizations systematically undermined decentralization projects. In the years following democratization, Peru continued with a profoundly disorganized party system, characterized by disposable parties, parties without clear ideology or willing to change ideology whenever necessary, power struggles between levels of government, conflicts between executive and legislative branches, and a population deeply distrustful of the party system and willing to exchange democracy for security, healthcare, or any other public good. All these elements came from a recent past justified by history — a past that, as Faulkner tells us, is not even past.

Another element behind Peru’s current democratic dysfunction is the absence of a strong, unified civil society committed to democracy. Decimated by hyperinflation, by the activities of the Shining Path, and by the co-optation strategies of the Fujimori government, the civil organizations that had forced the end of military rule in the late 1970s became little more than a memory of what they once were. Similarly, the opposition to Fujimori failed to replicate his popularity among the poor and, divided among themselves, proved incapable of encompassing groups beyond the urban middle class. With democratization, this fractured, stratified, and niche opposition came to compose both government and opposition alike, which helps explain the current difficulty of forming a strong and centralized political movement in Peru. But of course, not all the roots of the problem lie within Peru itself. Brazil, the United States, and other external actors played a decisive role in the current crisis.

Peru and external actors

When thinking about local political situations, especially in times of crisis, there is a certain tendency to search for blame within national institutions or even within the government currently in office. However, the actions of external actors can be decisive in the construction of political crises and, consequently, in shaping an unstable future for a given nation. Precisely for this reason, it is important to analyze the context of external actions carried out by actors such as Brazil and the United States in the Peruvian case, since internal dynamics alone are insufficient to explain the complexity of the current situation.

In March 2014, Operation Car Wash began in Brazil, essentially aiming to investigate money-laundering schemes linked to multimillion-dollar public contracts connected to the state-owned company Petrobras. However, the origins of these corrupt practices were older and involved state actors beyond Brazil, including Peru. As previously discussed, the Peruvian political context is unstable for a series of historical reasons, ranging from colonial legacies to economic issues such as hyperinflation. In this context, contractors saw Peru as an opportunity to expand highly profitable practices involving high-level bribery.

In December 2016, investigations revealed that between 2005 and 2014, Odebrecht — the major Brazilian construction company — had paid roughly USD 29 million in bribes to Peruvian officials. In exchange, the company benefited by approximately USD 143 million. Some emblematic cases are worth mentioning to illustrate the scale of this internationally engineered corruption. Alejandro Toledo, Peru’s president from 2001 to 2006, allegedly received around USD 20 million to favor Odebrecht in the construction of the Interoceanic Highway, which connects northwestern Brazil to Peru’s southern coast. Furthermore, Ollanta Humala (also a former president) and his wife Nadine Heredia were accused of receiving USD 3 million from Odebrecht for his 2011 electoral campaign; they still face trial. Other names, such as Keiko Fujimori, Susana Villarán, Pedro Kuczynski, Jorge Tito, and Alan García, also faced accusations linked to corruption scandals.

The historical connection between Operation Car Wash and Peru clearly demonstrates the fragility of Peruvian national institutions. Corruption systems — widespread across Latin America as a whole for historical reasons — found in Peru an especially lucrative opportunity for all parties involved, generating widespread distrust among Peruvians toward their institutions and politicians, which may help explain the path Peruvian democracy has taken toward its distortion.

Nevertheless, beyond international corruption schemes, another historical context deserves mention in order to understand the fragility of human rights in Peru and how this is linked to the growing wave of violence: the “War on Drugs” policy coordinated by the United States across Latin America. Ronald Reagan, former U.S. president, declared in 1986 that the international drug trade constituted a threat to U.S. national security. This declaration was later reaffirmed by President Bush, continuing the War on Drugs policy. In other words, it was an institutionalized American policy that enabled international intervention throughout South America. The literature on the subject argues that the complex economic and social causes behind drug production were ignored in favor of an increasing emphasis on militarization. Militarization, however, is a crucial variable for understanding the dynamics behind the war on drugs. According to Youngers and Rosin, “it is clear that, as a result of increasing militarization, the war on drugs quickly became as dirty a business as one might expect from a real war. The human rights situation in all producing countries became a matter of grave concern.” Youngers and Rosin further state: “drug control programs are imposed on governments, which then impose them upon the peasantry. These eradication programs were meant to be implemented within unrealistically short periods of time, while also lacking adequate institutional and contextual support.”

What emerges, therefore, is a top-down dynamic in which adaptation of control programs to Peruvian realities never truly occurred, making U.S. external policies coercive toward the Peruvian peasantry, which suffered a massive wave of violence.

Within the Cold War context, the United States saw itself tasked with containing the advance of socialist ideology throughout Latin America. Peru, however, during the 1970s and 1980s, broke with the liberal economic model and with American military cooperation, opting instead for stronger tariff barriers, the nationalization of foreign companies, and diplomatic alignment with the Non-Aligned Movement. Furthermore, Peruvian politicians and citizens did not want U.S. military aid, but rather economic aid; the northern country, however, acting within the aforementioned context, generated serious concerns. One of them was the perception that the U.S. failed to understand the true needs of the Peruvian people, potentially creating bottlenecks within domestic dynamics. For example, the war on drugs was seen as encouraging a possible rapprochement between coca producers and the Shining Path guerrilla organization. Furthermore, as a direct consequence of American policy, trafficking routes were blocked, leading producers to seek alternatives to satisfy demand for their product. This resulted in increased cocaine sales to Peruvian youth in urban areas, where the drug began to be sold for less than one dollar. Additionally, it is important to recognize that the U.S. emphasis on military repression conflicted with Peru’s priority on development and crop substitution, generating tensions between what Washington desired and what Lima considered politically acceptable for its 200,000 coca producers.

As a direct result of these policies, the literature points to severe human rights violations and the erosion of democratic standards in order to sustain the anti-drug strategy within Peruvian territory. Under this second aspect, the U.S. government frequently “lowered its standards” regarding democracy and abuses committed by Alberto Fujimori’s government. Thus, this form of external intervention directly impacted Peru’s internal organizational dynamics, progressively distancing the country from democratic ideals and respect for human rights — both fundamental variables for guaranteeing public security and controlling violence within a country.

The strange current case

Peru is not experiencing a classic collapse of democracy, nor a traditional return to military authoritarianism. What we are witnessing is something more diffuse — a typical outcome of the third global wave of autocratization, but without its classic mechanisms of executive aggrandizement or power seizure by interest groups: a sort of fragmented capture of the State by discredited political elites, within a regime that remains formally democratic while its institutions progressively lose any real capacity for popular representation or governmental coordination.

Since the fall of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2018, amid scandals related to Odebrecht and Operation Car Wash, the Peruvian political system has entered a spiral of institutional self-destruction. Presidents began governing without even minimally stable legislative support, while Congress — deeply fragmented and discredited — started using constitutional mechanisms expansively and opportunistically to remove heads of the executive. Chief among these is the clause of “permanent moral incapacity,” originally vague and intended for exceptional situations, but reinterpreted with extreme flexibility by parliamentary elites. In practice, any president lacking sufficient congressional support began governing under the constant threat of removal.

What is curious — and dangerous for democracy — is that this instability did not strengthen mechanisms of democratic accountability, but precisely the opposite. The constant conflict between executive and legislative branches transformed Peruvian politics into a war of institutional survival, in which fragile parties, often created solely for specific elections, negotiate immediate power without any enduring programmatic commitment. As Sandoval Vasquez points out, the Peruvian Congress gradually ceased functioning as an arena of political representation and instead became a mechanism of corporate self-protection for parliamentary elites themselves. In a scenario of disposable parties, low public trust, and the absence of strong intermediary organizations, parliament came to operate almost without real political cost.

Even compared to other Latin American countries, which according to Mainwaring possess less institutionalized, more volatile, and more fragmented party systems than Europe, Peru still stands out negatively. As Valenzuela describes, parties in the region suffer from weak internal cohesion, weak discipline, and virtually no institutional incentives capable of preventing uncontrolled party splits and constant party-switching (as seen, for example, in the proliferation of parties in Brazil), ultimately limiting channels of genuine representation and coordination among the region’s diverse social groups.

Still, there are rare cases in the region of strong parties existing within fragile party systems; generally, these are left-wing parties originating from grassroots popular movements during democratic transition processes, such as the PT in Brazil or MAS in Bolivia. Booth, for example, discusses the only episode in which conservative parties attempted to formulate a cohesive movement in Costa Rica, yet proved incapable of sustaining themselves over the long term, eventually fragmenting.

The Peruvian case may well be one of the most important examples for understanding the limitations of classical theories of autocratization. There are no tanks in the streets, no explicit suspension of the constitution, nor a single party organizing the capture of the State. Nor is there a leader sufficiently strong to concentrate power in a lasting manner. What exists is perhaps something more difficult to diagnose: the continuous erosion of democracy’s functional capacity to the point where it remains formally alive but politically incapable of producing coordination, representation, or social legitimacy. Peru does not seem to be moving toward a traditional dictatorship; it seems to be moving toward a permanently exhausted democracy.

And perhaps this is precisely what makes the case so dangerous. In many contemporary examples of autocratization, the process occurs through the excessive strengthening of a central actor — usually the executive — which gradually subjugates the remaining institutions. In Peru, almost the opposite occurs: extreme fragmentation prevents the consolidation of any minimally stable center of authority. The result, paradoxically, is not greater democratic pluralism, but a kind of institutionalized anarchy, in which competing elites weaponize constitutional mechanisms themselves as tools of political survival. The constitution ceases to function as a shared rulebook and instead becomes a tactical instrument of permanent conflict.

There is a particularly cruel irony here. Fujimori destroyed a significant part of democratic institutions under the justification that they were incapable of governing a fragmented, unequal country ravaged by political violence. Decades later, democratized Peru inherits precisely that fragmentation. Fujimorismo did not solve the country’s structural problems; it normalized them, institutionalizing fragile institutions, disposable parties, a weakened civil society, and a population profoundly distrustful of politics.

And this is probably the element of greatest risk in Peru’s political process of autocratization. The continuous succession of presidents, impeachments, parliamentary dissolutions, protests, and constitutional crises gradually comes to be perceived as a natural part of Peruvian politics. Democracies rarely survive once the population ceases to believe they are capable of producing even the minimum horizon of stability, order, security, or collective well-being. At some point, the demand for governability tends to surpass the demand for representation.

The Peruvian case also serves as a warning to other Latin American countries. Deinstitutionalized party systems, political personalism, low public trust, extreme inequality, and distrust in institutions are not exclusive to Peru. To greater or lesser degrees, these are characteristics spread throughout the region. The difference is that, in the Peruvian case, these elements seem to have simultaneously reached a particularly acute level, producing a kind of extreme laboratory of the contemporary democratic crisis.

And perhaps that is Peru’s main lesson for the debate on autocratization in the twenty-first century: democracies do not die only when strong leaders capture institutions. Sometimes they die slowly, when distrust in the system, inequality, and urban violence become normal.

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