By Simón Lazara – Socialist Workers Party (Peru)
Former dictator Alberto Fujimori died and “official” Peru has been paying homage to him, while the working and popular majority can only rejoice; they feel anything but sorrow.
Fujimori has died at the age of 86 after a long battle with cancer, but he has done so while being held up as a national hero built by the Peru of Boluarte and her corrupt Congress.
The former dictator was investigated and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2009 for crimes against humanity and corruption. But due to blackmailing by his cronies, the PPK government sought his pardon, which was recently validated by the Constitutional Court. This is the same court on which serve members handpicked by the spurious alliance that controls Congress and sustains the Boluarte government. Moreover, this was done without the State being forced to pay the 57 million Soles as dictated by the justice system for civil reparations. In addition, he did not express even the slightest sign of remorse for the victims of the La Cantuta and Barrios Altos massacres, the 314,605 women who were sterilized, and the thousands of victims of his genocidal regime.
In a further affront to national memory and dignity, before his death his party had announced that Alberto Fujimori would be their candidate for the presidency in the 2026 elections.
Under these circumstances, it is no coincidence that the government, Congress, and politicians have come forward to publically lament his death, defend his legacy, and honor him as former head of state. This has only provoked ever greater indignation from the working class and popular sectors.
There is no doubt that the sectors that govern us are in mourning, and that they are also taking advantage of their temporary and precarious exercise of power to whitewash the former dictator’s legacy, deify him, and at the same time legitimize themselves as his successors.
They have defended his acts by arguing that he was responsible for pacifiying the violence and subversion of Sendero Luminoso. What they fail to mention is that this was accomplished with a dirty war and crimes against humanity that have been condemned in Peru and all over the world. They defend the man who plundered the country together with a gang of rogues, and then fled to Japan where he was recognized as a citizen by that country.
But above all, they defend the man who, after applying a ruthless policy of economic shock, worse than the one Milei is now executing in Argentina, imposed the neoliberal transformation of the country. In this process, he handed over the national economy to imperialist voracity, privatizing everything, destroying public education and healthcare, as well as national industry. This threw millions of workers into the street, where they ended up in situations of informal and precarious labor. And this was done by Fujimori just to favor a handful of multinationals and capitalists.
Today’s Peru is the product of this neoliberal transformation, which for a time was presented to us as the assured path to progress. Now, however, it has been shown it was a farce. Neoliberalism, which only deepened national backwardness and dependence, has turned into recession after a decade of economic stagnation, creating more poverty, unemployment, and national backwardness.
When the Covid 19 pandemic arrived, the neoliberal model brutally revealed to us that the immense gap it had created between rich and poor was the difference between those who could live and those of us who were condemned to die. This is a model built on the corruption of the political elites, as revealed by the Lavajato mega corruption scandal in which all of the bourgeois parties who have governed, both left and right, are involved. At the same time, it is only a small part of much more widespread corruption throughout the State, whose greatest expression today is the current government of Boluarte and Congress, and the institutions on which they are based.
With the hope of changing this system, in the 2022 elections the working and popular majority elected Pedro Castillo. But Fujimorism and all the right-wing reactionaries did everything they could to violate the will of the people to the point of making his government unviable and forcing him out of office.
The uprising of the southern Andean region took place within this context, between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. One of its major demands was the call for a Constituent Assembly, which would bury the Fujimorist Constitution, in order to change the political and economic regime. That is why it is no coincidence that all of the wealthy classes united around the Boluarte government to drown the rebellion in blood and defeat. They did this in order to impose the current authoritarian, corrupt and criminal “order,” in the very image and likeness of what Fujimori did in the 1990s.
This is the official Peru, the Peru of the corrupt, the thieves, assassins, and the country’s sellouts; these are the legitimate heirs of Alberto Fujimori, who govern us and mourn the death of their leader.
That is why the poor and working people have nothing to mourn. Rather, this is an occasion to remember the nefariousness of his legacy, which is embodied by the current regime. It is a time to recall that Fujimori’s glorification by those who govern us today only shows that the country is not and will not be pacified, and that the continuity of his power in its current political manifestation only fortells new and greater confrontations.
The wounds remain open with regards to the 49 people who were murdered, the dozens who were seriously wounded, and the prisoners, in the struggles of 2022-2023. Too remains open the people’s questioning of an economic model that only brings more poverty, with factories that close and lay off workers, and a country that continues to be handed over to the mining multinationals and agro-exporters, while corruption rules the day, and at the same time opens the way for the growth of the illegal economy and organized crime.
The Peru that we inherited from Fujimori is today’s Peru, which is stagnating and regressing in all areas. It is the same Peru that we could not bury in 2000 when his government fell, because of the complicity of all the bourgeois and “left” parties that preserved the continuity of his model, and the regime established by Fujimori’s Constitution.
If the death of the former dictator serves as anything, it is a reminder that the task of putting an end to his political legacy is more necessary than ever.
The path to achieving it was already laid out by the uprising led by the heroic and dignified Andean south. And to carry out this task to its end, it is not enough to have the willingness to engage in mass struggle, but we need to set up a true revolutionary leadership, because the current ones that predominate in the so-called left are traitors and their agenda is only electoral.
Fujimori is dead, but we need to bury his Constitution. We must definitively bury Fujimorism, all the right-wing reaction and its political heirs, and build a way out that begins with the working and popular classes.
