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“Quien Habla es Terrorista”: The Political Use of Fear in Fujimori's Peru

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Jo-Marie Burt
Jo-Marie Burt*
Affiliation:
George Mason University
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Abstract

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Scholarship on the decade-long rule of Alberto Fujimori emphasizes the surprising popularity and support for Fujimori's rule. This essay, which analyzes the politics of fear in Fujimori's Peru, suggests that this presents a partial view of the nature of Fujimori's authority. Drawing on a Gramscian conceptualization of power, it explains how coercion achieved a consensual façade by manipulating fear and creating a semblance of order in a context of extreme individual and collective insecurity. It traces the roots of this insecurity in the economic crisis and political violence of the 1980s and 1990s, and explains how the Fujimori regime manipulated fear and insecurity to buttress its authoritarian rule. This essay also complements existing studies on Peruvian civil society, which point to economic factors, such as the economic crisis of the 1980s and neoliberal reforms, to explain civil society weakness. This paper explores the political factors that contributed to this process, particularly the deployment of state power to penetrate, control and intimidate civil society.

Resumen

Resumen

La literatura acerca de la década de gobierno de Alberto Fujimori enfatiza la sorpresiva popularidad y amplio apoyo a su orden. Este ensayo, que analiza la política del miedo durante su régimen, sugiere que esta observación presenta una visión parcial de la naturaleza de la autoridad de Fujimori. En base a conceptualizaciones Gramscianas de poder, explica como la coerción adquirió un aspecto consensual a partir de la manipulación del miedo y la creación de un orden ficticio en un contexto de extrema inseguridad individual y colectiva. El ensayo halla las raíces de esta inseguridad en la crisis económica y violencia política de los ochenta y noventa, y explica como el gobierno de Fujimori manipuló el miedo y la inseguridad para fomentar su orden autoritario. Asimismo, este ensayo complementa los estudios disponibles sobre la sociedad civil peruana, los cuales enfatizan factores económicos, como la crisis económica de los ochenta y las reformas neoliberales, en la explicación del debilitamiento de la sociedad civil. Aquí en cambio se exploran los factores políticos que contribuyeron a este proceso, particularmente el uso del poder estatal en la penetración, control e intimidación de la sociedad civil.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , October 2006 , pp. 32 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

1.

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at LARR, as well as Cynthia McClintock, Philip Mauceri, Julio Carrion, Charles Kenney, and Karen Sosnoski for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this essay. Research for this essay was made possible by grants from the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Inter-American Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace. This article is based on a paper presented at the conference, “The Fujimori Legacy and Its Impact on Public Policy in Latin America,” organized by the Dante B. Fascell North-South Center at the University of Miami and the University of Delaware's Department of Political Science and International Relations, Washington, DC, March 14, 2002.

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