A Year Later, Peru’s Leader Defends Coup

President Alberto Fujimori isn’t exactly touting his “self-coup” as an example for other countries to follow. But he does argue that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, for one, could deal better with his nation’s problems if he could shut down the Russian Congress.

“I don’t have the slightest doubt,” Fujimori said in an interview. “Boris Yeltsin himself has said so, and the big setbacks he has had in applying his structural reform arise precisely from the effort he must divert to his relations with that Congress.”

It has been a year since Fujimori closed the Peruvian Congress in a military-backed autogolpe, or self-coup, on April 5, 1992. He insists that he did what was needed to keep the country from collapsing in a growing maelstrom of inefficiency, corruption and terrorism.

Today, a newly elected Congress does Fujimori’s bidding as he basks in opinion-poll approval ratings of more than 60%. There seems to be a general perception of greater order and progress.

Could the Fujimori coup indeed serve as an example of corrective surgery for dysfunctional democracies?

“I wouldn’t be the one to call it an example,” said Fujimori, 43. “But for Peru, after a year, it has produced results. Notable advances have been made.”

For the pragmatic Peruvian leader, results clearly count for more than constitutional formalities. And the Fujimori formula does raise serious questions about sticking to the formal rules of democracy when democracy seems headed for disaster.

But his authoritarian alternative brings up other troubling issues: When is it really justified? What will keep authority from becoming arbitrary and abusive? How can a return to democracy be assured?

Those issues are vital today in Peru and, of course, should be weighed by anyone advocating the Fujimori formula for Russia or other countries in crisis.

Some analysts here recall that, like Fujimori, Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini were elected leaders who felt it necessary to shut down their country’s Parliaments. In Latin American countries, uncounted military dictators have seized power under the pretext of saving or restoring democracy.

Fujimori and his supporters insist that he has the best interests of Peru at heart, that he has no dictatorial pretensions.

His critics, however, call him an autocrat and warn that he is bent on staying in power at least until the end of the century.

The president offered a blunt defense of his actions in the interview, saying: “There are three evils that affect many countries in the world, that particularly affect the people directly. They are corruption, violence and inefficiency of the state apparatus. That trilogy brings great harm to the population. And those evils, paradoxically, are covered up by what is called democracy.

“Today, I believe that, wherever that kind of problem may exist, options that are not the traditional ones can happen.”

He noted that measures such as the one he took may lead to the imposition of a dictatorship.

“It is a risk, but it hasn’t happened here,” he said, adding: “Public opinion is decisive in this kind of measure. And the people do perceive which orientation best suits the country. And if they perceive that there is an absolutist, dictatorial, arbitrary power that harms the nation, then the people react.”

Fujimori has shown himself to be a boldly unorthodox leader with an authoritarian streak, a wily manipulator of public opinion and a master of power games.

He keeps the military in line by filling key positions with officers selected for their unquestioning obedience to him. He is said to have the National Intelligence Service spy on the armed forces, monitoring any dangerous developments.

In November, intelligence agents discovered a coup plot headed by retired army officers. Several officers have been court-martialed for the plot, and there have been no coup rumors since.

Lourdes Flores, leader of the opposition in the new Congress, said the president’s main power base is public opinion. She said the National Intelligence Service directs a “psycho-social campaign” aimed at enhancing Fujimori’s popularity and besmirching the image of groups and institutions that could challenge his power.

“He sells an image of sureness, decisiveness, and he undermines the prestige of everyone else,” Lourdes said. “His power is based on the weakness of the institutions.”

Fujimori appears often on television talk shows, speaking softly but firmly. He tours the countryside, opening schools and handing out donations such as school computers, tractors, clothing and food. Those activities also receive ample coverage by Peru’s notably uncritical television stations.

Most analysts say Fujimori is preparing to seek a second five-year term, which would begin in 1995.

“Fujimori is going to do everything necessary, without scruples, to win the next elections,” Flores predicted. If he wins another term, she added, he will become much more authoritarian. “He feels like the owner of the country,” she said.

A constitutional change would be required to allow him a second consecutive term. But the president’s supporters in Congress already are working on that.

Fujimori sidesteps questions on any reelection plans, saying he doesn’t have time to think about that now. “I am dedicated to this work of correcting the problems of the country,” he told The Times.

The son of poor Japanese immigrants, Fujimori studied mathematics and agronomy and became the rector of Peru’s main agricultural college. As a political neophyte in the 1990 presidential elections, he campaigned against corruption, inefficiency and violence to beat novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in a runoff.

When he took office, hyper-inflation was reaching a rate of 90% a month, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas were advancing from the countryside into Lima slums and the national judicial system was all but inoperative, riddled with corruption and political influence.

Some analysts speculate that Fujimori began planning his coup at the beginning of his tenure.

But he waited 20 months to carry it out, keeping any such plans in deep secret.

Augusto Blacker, who was Fujimori’s foreign minister at the time of the April 5 coup, said he learned about the plan only hours before Fujimori announced it on television that Sunday night.

The president showed Blacker the text of the announcement, which said the Congress was being dissolved, the courts temporarily closed and parts of the constitution suspended--all with the cooperation of the armed forces.

“When I was reading this document that the president was presenting to me, I was saying to myself: ‘What do I do? What do I say to this man?’ ” Blacker recalled. He decided quickly. “You say, ‘This might not be the perfect solution, but at least it’s a ray of hope you are offering to the population.’ ”

Blacker discussed the plan with Fujimori. “It was clear in our understanding that this was a temporary solution to a situation of a lack of govern-ability,” Blacker said.

According to Blacker, Fujimori is deeply influenced by his Japanese heritage of disciplined striving. “The Japanese have a special way of coming to decisions, which is not the Western way,” he said. “All of this will color his attitudes. That does not mean he is not a true democrat.”

The president, discussing the self-coup, observed: “The situation before April 5 was, for Peru, a political situation in which democracy was disguised to really hide a situation that included inefficiency by the state, immoralities and incapacity to fight violence. So the (self-coup was) exactly to fight against those three evils that put the very security of the government and the state in danger.”

He said he realized his actions may have violated the Peruvian constitution. But, he added: “There are formalities that sometimes one has to bypass to get to the bottom of the problem. We could not continue with those formalities when the greater crime was to let the country be brought to collapse.”

Enrique Obando, a researcher with the private Peruvian Center for International Studies, has a dim view of Fujimori’s attitude toward democracy, saying, “If he were left free, he would turn into a dictator.”

But Obando said international pressure after the coup, especially from the United States and the Organization of American States, helped persuade Fujimori to move back toward democracy.

“The current Fujimori regime is a democratic regime, but with strong authoritarian tendencies,” Obando said. “It’s democratic not because he is enchanted with it but because he doesn’t have any choice.”

Another analyst said Fujimori was completely surprised by international opposition to the coup. “He didn’t really understand what all the ruckus was about because all he had done was suspend Parliament. He didn’t make a military coup,” the analyst said.

Elections in November--boycotted by two major opposition parties--gave Fujimori the majority in a new Democratic Constituent Congress that will redraft the country’s 1979 constitution. Fujimori’s opponents fear that the charter, to be finished around midyear, will set the stage for a further consolidation of the president’s power.

For example, Fujimori supporters are proposing clauses that would let the president dissolve Congress to resolve political crises as well as run for a second consecutive term.

Magazine publisher Enrique Zileri, an outspoken Fujimori critic, said the president seems to want a government system that will pass for democracy but will concentrate power in the executive branch. “He has Taiwan or Singapore on his mind, or South Korea 10 years ago,” Zileri said.

Even some of Fujimori’s supporters, such as retired army Gen. Gaston Ibanez, say they fear his election to a second term.

“This man, in 2 1/2 years, has put things in order,” Ibanez said approvingly. But later, in a conversation on the tiny patio of his home, the general said Fujimori had sometimes shown overbearing, offensive attitudes, giving “a sensation of supreme power. . . .”

“He used expressions like ‘I order,’ ‘I command and it is done.’ Well, those expressions don’t sit well; they hurt people.”

Ibanez said he fears that, if Fujimori was reelected, “those overbearing attitudes could return and maybe increase.”

The Peruvian public apparently sees Fujimori more as a decisive and effective leader than as an overbearing or offensive one.

A year ago, right after the coup, the president won a phenomenal approval rating of 81% in a poll by Apoyo, a leading opinion sampler. The latest Apoyo poll, in early March, still showed a comfortable rating of 61% approval.

Although Fujimori has not pulled the impoverished country out of a deep recession, his austerity program has brought inflation down from 7,650% in 1990 to 56% in 1992. And he received a huge boost in popularity last September when police captured Abimael Guzman, founder and leader of the feared Sendero Luminoso guerrillas.

Terrorism continues here but appears to be subsiding. Fujimori vows to win the guerrilla war by 1995. Part of his justification for the coup was that the courts and Congress were tying his hands in the war.

Alfredo Torres, manager of Apoyo, said Peru’s poor majority values democracy but not over peace and economic well-being.

“It feels that democracy can be an obstacle because it doesn’t understand how it works,” Torres said.

Hernando de Soto, a former adviser to Fujimori, said the president is what the people want. “He’s not a Jefferson, not a Hamilton,” De Soto said. “He’s an inflation fighter and he’s a guerrilla fighter and he’s the demolition expert of a democracy that wasn’t working.”

What remains to be seen is whether Fujimori can build a democracy that works any better.