Troubled, Struggling Peru

Politics in Latin America is notoriously volatile, but even there a democratically elected leader’s popularity seldom plummets the way Peruvian President Alan Garcia’s public support has in the last several months.

When he was first elected in 1985, Garcia was only 36, and one of the youngest heads of state in the world. He seemed to represent a new generation of leader in Peru--eager, energetic and articulate. After winning in a landslide, Garcia’s approval rating surged as high as 96% in some public-opinion polls--largely due to his populist economic policies and fiercely nationalist political rhetoric.

Garcia’s critics now complain that those policies and rhetoric were the young president’s undoing. To overcome several years of economic stagnation, his government overspent, running up a large deficit and stimulating inflation that has run out of control--up to an annual rate of 1,300% last year, the highest in South America. Garcia’s rhetoric, especially threats to stop repayment on Peru’s $15-billion foreign debt, frightened away the international bankers whom Peru needs to keep capital flowing into the country. Today the nation is all but cut off from international credit, and is so low on foreign reserves that it cannot afford to import basic foodstuffs like milk and wheat. Garcia is widely blamed for the economic mess. One recent poll gave him an approval rating of only 16%.

But Garcia’s economic troubles are only the half of it. He has also been unable to defeat a leftist insurgency sponsored by a shadowy and violent organization known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), whose leaders claim to be the only true heirs to the philosophy and tactics of China’s Mao Tse-tung. The government’s bloody fight against Sendero Luminoso has spread from the Peruvian countryside to the nation’s cities, including Lima. The assassinations and bombings carried out by these radicals have inspired imitators--rival leftist groups are using violence to get attention, and there are indications that right-wing groups may be doing the same, using as their models the rightist death squads of Central America.

Garcia has been so weakened by this turmoil that political jockeying to find someone to replace him in 1990 has already begun. Members of his own party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance--or APRA, as it is commonly known--hooted him when he spoke to their national convention recently. Another sign of Peru’s desperation for new leadership is the campaign by several right-wing parties to persuade Peru’s most famous novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, to run for president in 1990. Vargas Llosa is not a declared candidate, but is not discouraging speculation that he will run.

Given Vargas Llosa’s worldwide reputation, it is understandable that his fellow Peruvians might turn to him in a time of travail. But the noted author must think long and hard before commiting himself to steer Peru’s ship of state. For while some of the problems that helped bring Garcia down were clearly of the impulsive young leader’s own making, others may be too big for any one man to deal with. Sendero Luminoso was spilling blood before Garcia came into office. And Peru’s economic troubles are similar to those faced by other Latin American debtor nations--even those, like Mexico, that have done everything that their creditors have demanded of them. Peru’s damaged economy and dangerous political situation will remain as challenges to whoever follows Garcia into Lima’s presidential palace.