[A-List] US Imperialism: Peru

["Annewilliamson" <Annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

ALL NEWS IS LIES

S A N D E R S     R E S E A RCH ASSOCIATES

June 2, 2003

 Darkest Peru

by JOHN LAUGHLAND



At least the foreign investors are happy - or so Allan Wagner claims. The
Foreign Minister of Peru was defending the decision, taken on 28th May, to
declare a state of emergency in the South American state. It is the second
time in less than a year that the President of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, has
had to bring the army out onto the streets: the last time was last June,
when Toledo responded to three days of violent protests in the Southern
province of Arequipa by introducing a panoply of measures allowing the
government to arrest people without charge, to prevent demonstrations, and
to search homes without a warrant.

This time, the state of emergency is nationwide. It mean military rule in at
least 12 out of the country's 24 provinces, under the benevolent control of
the Vice-President and Minister of Defence, David Waisman. Within the first
few hours of the military rule, 95 people had been detained and 40 injured
in violent clashes with the police and army. [1]   But, at Mr. Wagner
helpfully explained, the state of emergency would pacify foreign investors
who wanted social, political and economic stability. [2] Investors and the
international community, he said, wanted a country in which the President of
the Republic and his Ministers exercised authority for the benefit of public
order and the rule of law.

Representatives of the business community rushed to agree. The Associated
Press quoted "Samuel Gleisner, a prominent business leader" saying, "It's
the best showing by Toledo so far." The head of the Lima Stock Exchange,
Rafael d'Angelo Serra, expressed the same view, saying that investors should
interpret the word "emergency" not to mean "alert" but instead "order". He
claimed that the Peruvian stock exchange was had risen by 30% a year in
dollar terms this year, and that it would probably top a 100% rise by the
end of the year. By the same token, an analyst from Bear Stearns said,
"Foreign investors are not worried about politics or social pressure because
they are totally convinced Peru is strongly tied to the IMF." [3] They are
right - Alejandro Toledo used to work for the World Bank, and his wife is a
private banker.

Indeed, it is precisely because Peru is so strongly tied to the IMF that the
protests have been so massive. Last June's state of emergency in Arequipa
was called to suppress mass demonstrations against the privatisation of the
state electricity company: some 100 people were injured and many shot. The
electricity was to be sold off to Tractebel, a Belgian company (President
Toledo's wife, Eliane Karp, is Belgian) but the deal was eventually called
off. No doubt the people of Arequipa know that citizens from Lithuania to
Georgia have learned - that "privatisation" means selling of state utilities
to foreigners for a song, who hike the prices up and cut off those who
cannot pay. The president of Lithuania is even now trying to change the law
so that pensioners can have their heating cut off.

This year's demonstrations are even bigger. The combined protests of
farmers, health workers, members of the judiciary and 300,000 schoolteachers
came close to being a general strike. As happened last year, the state of
emergency declared last week prohibits people from assembling in public; it
has also declared the teachers' protest illegal. They must return to work in
six days or face the sack. The farmers, for their part, had done what
farmers in Poland and France regularly do: they had set up road blocks
around the country to protest against cheap foreign imports of agricultural
produce. There is also a powerful lobby of coca growers who are determined
to prevent the government from destroying the coca crop.



The state of emergency in Peru is noteworthy because they come on the tail
of similar violent clashes in another South American country with a pro-US
government, neighbouring Bolivia, where 20 people were killed and 100
injured last February when the army and police put down protests against
IMF-imposed tax hikes on workers' salaries. As in Bolivia, moreover, and as
Wagner's remarks suggest, the state of emergency is being driven principally
by business considerations. For this very reason, both uprisings received
scant attention in the media, and our prediction is that the Peruvian state
of emergency will achieve almost no television coverage whatever. Contrast
this with the saturation coverage given to the management organised workers'
lock-out, universally and mendaciously presented as a strike, which occurred
in Venezuela last December. There, the president, who came nowhere near to
getting the army to implement his employment policies, is universally
denounced as a dictator.

The state of emergency in Peru therefore recalls the one which recently
ended in Serbia, another client state in which the West's concerns for
universal human rights seemed to vanish as thousands were being rounded up.
Powers which Slobodan Miliosevic was denounced for putting on the statute
book, but



which he never used, were welcomed as essential for protecting democracy
when used by the post-Milosevic government. And Alejandro Toledo, like Zoran
Djindjic, is a model New World Order politician: so completely did he come
from "nowhere" in 2000 that he was born either in a port town [4] or high up
in the Andes, [5] according to whom you ask. The fairy-tale story of
"shoe-shine boy turned politician" was rather like the claim that President
Vojislav Kostunica had translated the Federalist Papers into Serbian - as
unsubstantiated as it was much repeated. Underneath the Hollywood shlock and
his embarrassing tendency to dress like an Andean peasant for the TV
cameras, the main point about Toledo was that he worked for the World Bank,
and that he was married to a powerful Belgian banker. He is, to put it
bluntly, a front man for a lot of very powerful and horrible people. Mrs
Toledo, aka Eliane Karp, a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
was accused last year of secretly drawing a salary of $120,000 a year from a
bank while claiming to work "22 hours a day for the poor of the country".
The bank in question, Banco Wiese Sudameris, was in turn accused of
transferring money amassed by the former head of the Peruvian security
services, Vladimiro Montesinos, to Switzerland. And Montesinos, who played a
key role in getting rid of Fujimori even though he is now on trial for
murder and conspiracy, had in turn received at least $10 million from the
CIA at a time when his boss, the former president, was still in favour with
Washington. The Peruvian first lady has protested her innocence.

The investors are happy with the imposition of military rule now for the
reason given by the head of the stock exchange. The official economic
statistics from Peru show over 5% growth. But if the country is booming, why
are public sector workers like farmers on the streets in their hundreds of
thousands? A lot of foreign funny money is probably flowing into Peru,
snapping up state industries and utilities, and maybe this is driving the
stock prices up. But I have seen so many examples of Eastern European
countries slumping into unimaginable poverty, while The Financial Times and
The Economist babble happily about their booming growth rates, to have any
faith in such macroeconomic figures. Inflation is supposed to be under
control in Serbia, but everyone you talk to blanches when they tell how
expensive everything has become. How is this possible? Quite simply,
inflation figures include things like washing machines and DVD recorders
which most people cannot afford, and which in any case they purchase only
once every few years. In the real lives of real people, by contrast, price
rises in food, electricity, heating and things consumed every day affect the
poor very considerably.



In other words, a when a foreign "investor" says a country is doing well,
what he means is that he is doing well. I recall a conversation with such a
man at breakfast in a hotel in Zagreb, who told me excitedly about the
investment opportunities which had opened up in Croatia following the death
of President Franjo Tudjman, whom the West hated. When I asked him
sceptically which sectors of the economy were expanding, he looked a little
embarrassed and admitted that the "opportunities" were in reality funds from
the European Union which were being made available, mainly for Western
companies rather than local ones, now that the government was compliant. So
bad have things got in Peru, indeed, that last year, Toledo, who was
installed by Washington only in 2000, very nearly lost the presidential
election to a clapped-out old Socialist Alán García, whom I first remember
from a trip to Peru in 1985, when he came to power on an anti-poverty
slogan. Economic reform has evidently bitten so deep that Peruvians are
really scraping the barrel - anything to get rid of Toledo.


One of the principal forces of opposition comes from coca farmers. The head
of the farmers' union, Nelson Palomino, was arrested in April for
 "terrorism"; under his successor, Nancy Obregón, the farmers were
organising a massive march on Lima, with thousands of them pouring into the
capital at the beginning of May. In an interview with Narco News, Nancy
Obregón accused CARE Peru, the local branch of CARE International, of having
paid the people who arrested Palomino. If true, this is a good example of
the abusive behaviour of non-governmental organisation, which are one of the
preferred vehicles for political influence by the West in poor countries.
They were used massively to get Toledo elected in the first place, with
various self-appointed bodies popping up to say that the elections would be
rigged even before they had occurred. Popular suspicion at the role of these
bodies may be what prompted Allan Wagner to say, on 9th May, that the role
of NGOs "ought not to be demonised". He was referring in particular to the
role of a shadowy organisation called Transparencia, which played a key role
in overthrowing Alberto Fujimori three years ago.

Fujimori was a quite remarkable president. Some years ago in Paris, I met
his Vice-President, Francisco Tudela, whose brother is a friend of mine.
Seldom have I met a more charismatic or intelligent man: I can only assume
that Fujimori himself was also a man of very considerable talent. My
acquaintance, Francisco, was subsequently caught up in a siege by the Tupac
Amaru guerrillas at the Japanese embassy in 1996-1997, which was broken only
after a long stand-off. When Peruvian special forces finally stormed the
building, the Sendero guerrillas shot at Francisco "like a rabbit" - in his
words to his brother - as he tried to hide under a table. He was wounded in
the foot but survived. Interestingly, Alejandro Toledo was one of the few
people in the embassy at the time to be released by the guerrillas before
the end of the siege. Under his presidency, the Peruvian authorities, with
quite disgraceful chutzpah, have charged the former president, now a
fugitive from Peruvian "justice" in Japan, with complicity in murder because
the guerrillas were all shot dead.

Fujimori had, by contrast, distinguished himself by capturing the head of
the Sendero Luminoso, Abel Guzman, and putting him in a cage. As if by
coincidence, Fujimori's eradication from the Peruvian political scene - on
the same vague charges of "corruption" which were used to get rid of Josef
Estrada in the Philippines and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia - has led to
reports that the Sendero is back on the rise again in Peru. He must have
contacts with them. But Fujimori's success in the fight against terror
counted for little when he started to baulk at the privatisation of certain
state assets, like the water company, fearing that their sale to foreigners
would lead to considerable price hikes in charges to ordinary people.
Fujimori therefore joined Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Václav Klaus in the
Czech republic, two prime ministers who went from being darlings of the
West, and the US in particular, to becoming demons of reaction overnight,
because they, too, started to get awkward about privatisation. Fujimori was
eventually overthrown by systematic acts of violence orchestrated by Toledo,
backed by Washington. These are the same mechanisms which have been deployed
in Albania, Serbia and Zimbabwe. So now we have in Peru what we have all
over the Balkans, and what we are evidently getting in Iraq: a combination
of military rule, extreme poverty, and the rise of very serious networks of
organised crime. Now, that's progress!

  _____


[1] El Comercio, Peru, <http://www.elcomercioperu.com.pe/online/>, 29th May
2003

[2] El Expreso, Lima,
<http://www.expreso.com.pe/expreso/hoy_dia/index.html>, 29th May 2003

[3] "Strikes plague Peru's President Toledo", by Missy Ryan, Reuters, 27th
May 2003

[4] http://www.infoplease.com/spot/toledo1.html

[5]
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:_1F1xwJ2w94J:www.ndi.org/support/events
/toledo/toledo.asp+Alejandro+Toledo+biography&hl=en&ie=UTF-8





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The following is a list of quotations from articles by the American
Enterprise Institute "scholar", Michael Ledeen.   Every quotation is the
last line of an article by Ledeen in National Review Online, and every
article is about the need to extend the war on terror to Iran.

"Faster, please."   4th April 2003

"Faster, please!"   18th February 2003

"Faster, please. We don't need more dead Americans."   21st January 2003

"Faster, please."   11th December 2002

"Faster, please. A free Iran will change the world."   21st November 2002

"Faster, please. Opportunity is knocking at our door." 12th November 2002

"Faster, please. Don't let the war against terrorism turn into a replay of
the Gulf War, with the tyrants still in power."   4th November 2002

"Faster, please. What the hell are you waiting for? Another September 11?"
23rd October 2002

"Faster, please. Much faster. These people will soon lunge for our throats."
23rd September 2002

"Faster, please. What the hell are you waiting for?"   9th September 2002

"Faster, please." 3rd September 2002

"Faster, please." 20th August 2002

"Faster, please. It may happen tomorrow." 8th July 2002

"Faster, please."   3rd July 2002

"Faster, please."   2nd July 2002

"So let's get on with the war. Faster, please."   3rd June 2002

"So let's roll, already. Faster, please."   3rd April 2002

"Let's roll again. Faster, please."   1st April 2002

"Faster, please. We're losing ground."   4th March 2002

"Faster, please."   22nd February 2002

Omitted from the list are the following two quotations:   "Iran is the heart
of darkness. Enough already. Do it now."   (6th February 2003) and "We're
bringing freedom to the oppressed peoples of the terror tyrants. It's about
time. He could even do it faster..."   (29th January 2003).

One of the articles has the interesting and original title, "Faster,
 please."

Source:   <http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen-archive.asp>

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