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In a move that has few precedents in the history of U.S. relations with Latin America, in anticipation of the second round of the presidential election in Peru the United States has warned president Alberto Fujimori, who is running for a third-term, that there could be serious consequences for U.S.-Peru relations if the electoral process and the election itself turned out to lack the desired fairness.
Fujimori won the presidential election on April 9 with 49.89 percent of the votes against Alejandro Toledo's 40.15 percent, failing by only about 20,000 votes to avoid a second round, now scheduled for late May or early June. But international election observers from both North and South America and Europe criticized the election as undemocratic due to irregularities in vote-counting, biased pro-government media coverage, and the use of state funds and handouts of food and land to bolster President Fujimori’s reelection campaign.
Last week, Clinton signed a joint resolution, passed earlier by the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, which threatens to review relations with Peru if second-round elections are not deemed to have been free and fair.
The president urged Peru to ensure the next round of voting was transparent, and said the countries of the Americas were united in their hope for a peaceful, free election.
“The people of Peru will go to the polls in the near future for a second and final round to choose their president,” Clinton said. “I urge that the concerns about the electoral process underscored by the Organization of American States mission to Peru, and by the U.S. Congress in this resolution, be fully addressed in preparations for the second round.”
There is no precedent for this kind of U.S. warning on an oncoming election to the democratically elected government of a major Latin American country. What made the warning even more remarkable was that it was issued at the time the opposition candidate, Toledo, in appearances before the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the Americas Society in New York, was demanding that the Fujimori government implement measures to give his opposition access to television, long criticized for being pro-government, and ensure there would be no fraud in the run-off.
In emotionally charged speeches in both fora, Toledo—who, having been born in poverty in Peru, graduated from Harvard and become a World Bank economist, is totally fluent in English—appealed to other Latin American governments to urge publicly the Peruvian government to hold free and fair elections, as the U.S. government has done, stating that he would boycott the deciding second round unless wide-ranging electoral abuses are eliminated and he is allowed to compete on a “level playing field.”
“Let me relate to you our firm commitment of not going into an election if conditions do not change significantly for the second round,” Toledo stated at the Americas Society in New York. “I don't want to legitimize a process that is fraudulent.”
Predictably, there was an immediate and angry reaction from the Fujimori camp. His running mate, Francisco Tudela, accused the United States of taking sides in Peru’s election against the incumbent after being “in some way bewitched” by the opposition, and urged the United States “not to allow hysteria win over them, and that they talk to both sides.”
However, the U.S. warning appears to have had some effect upon the process leading to the second-round polls. After refusing for almost three weeks Toledo’s challenge to a public debate, Fujimori announced last week he would debate the opposition candidate on national television. Also, responding to Toledo’s demand for “a minimum code of political conduct” to ensure clean elections and access to the news media, the coalition that backs Fujimori, Peru 2000, invited Toledo’s party, Peru Posible, to appoint three representatives that would meet with three from Peru 2000 to discuss how to “perfect the monitoring of the political process” as well as the “use of public resources to promote candidates and the fair access of presidential candidates to the media.”
It remains to be seen whether whatever is agreed upon in these meetings is actually implemented, but it is possible that it will be to a good extent. Fujimori is a canny politician and he may have concluded that the time has come to avoid further public criticism that might erode his popularity, which is real and wide among Peruvians, who consider he has done a good job as president, including the crushing of two left-wing guerrillas.
In his 10 years in office he has dissolved Congress and rewritten the country’s constitution to allow his re-election and strengthen his power. But under Fujimori Peru had some of the highest growth rates in the world in the mid-1990s, fed largely by a rash of privatizations. Growth has since petered out, and poverty and unemployment rates remain high.
Indeed, Toledo has promised if elected not to “undo the accomplishments” of Fujimori in stabilizing Peru’s economy and defeating left-wing guerrillas.
“I have come to recognize several of the accomplishments of the Fujimori regime,” Toledo said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. “I want to build on what Fujimori has done in the short term.”
Claudio Campuzano (claudio_campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com