Fujimori Asesinos

I have arrived in Cusco, Peru and I plan to undertake research concerning how women's participation in the informal economy in the Andes is linked to food security. Before arriving here, though, I had been following the intense elections that ended just the other Sunday on June 5. As authors Edna Acosta-Belen and Christine E. Bose point out in their article “Colonialism, Structural Subordination, and Empowerment: Women in the Development Process in Latin America and the Caribbean” (from the book Women in the Latina American Development Process), the acts of colonialism must be understood in order to understand current gender, economic and social ideals. They state that "In this complex system of economic and social relations, the subordination of women has been ideologically conceived as an integral part of the natural order of things and perpetuated by cultural practice, religion, education, and other social institutions…understanding development also entails drawing on the continuities of power relations and ideologies rooted and molded in the era of European imperial and colonial expansion." In a way, following these elections was my historical opening into understanding how colonialism has evolved into current acts of "development" through Western control of Peru's resources, spending and government. 


The elections ended up between two individuals on very separate sides of the political spectrum: Keiko Fujimori, the rightist daughter of imprisoned former dictator Alberto Fujimori, and Ollanta Humala, a leftist who once attempted to overthrow Alberto Fujimori in a military coup and also fought against a Free Trade Agreement between Peru and the United States.  Ollanta won the elections, by a bare few percent. However, in areas such as Cusco and Puno (poor Andean cities) Humala often earned 78% or more of the vote--giving some insight into the economic, class, and cultural differences separating Peruvians of the highlands and other regions. It is here that I began my understanding of how colonialism shaped Peru and has especially affected peoples of the Andean highlands. 


As Peru fell into the debt crisis with the rest of Latin America in the 1980s, its leaders attempted to alleviate the pain of debt through international aid. Unfortunately, most of this aid came from Structural Adjustment Programs, which are tied to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. What this means is that this aid comes with stringent conditions, most of which require severe social spending cuts and complete opening of the market (no taxes for international imports, etc). Theoretically this will create money that will eventually end up "shocking" (as Milton Friedman, a Chicago School Economist coined) the economic system back to life. However, in Peru it has left millions impoverished, malnourished, with no access to food, and no jobs. Nations with unrefined resources such as cocoa, coffee, etc cannot compete with nations that are exporting and trading higher-end, refined goods (cars, laptops, etc). Additionally, this opened Peru up to international corporations who could exploit the cheap land and cheaper labor. People left rural areas to find jobs in the big cities, but they arrived in numbers greater than the infrastructure of cities could hold, creating sanitary and housing issues as more and more people could not find access to these basic services. And, Alberto Fujimori was the most Structural Adjustment Program friendly of this secession of leaders. While he was able to decrease inflation, he did little for poverty or food security. Instead, he cut help to small farmers, he cut nearly all government assistant programs, and he did nothing to create job security. Instead he fully invested himself in the ideals of the IMF and World Bank and slashed the country open, leaving its citizens exposed and vulnerable, fully prepared for corporate and economic exploitation. 


And who was to pick up the slack for all of these cuts? How were the people to survive? As authors Edna Acosta-Belen and Christine E. Bose state, "women’s unpaid or underpaid labor was at the core of new development programs and policies and a crucial part of…capitalist expansion." And this is precisely what happened. Women begin spending more time performing health care activities on household members who could no longer afford medical services.  Children, the elderly, and the infirm all became the responsibility of poor women. Additionally, women went further and further to find food, often leading themselves to work in the informal economy as marketers. Thus, as people had less access to social services, food, and work, women took on more and more responsibility to ensure the survival of society--one family at a time. However, as I will examine throughout this study in Peru, women did not merely submit and accept these increased needs of society, rather, they have created resistance in various forms: creating community kitchens, bartering systems, and other forms of collective activity that actively resist against the notions of industrialized economic activity, against dependency, and against this new wave of colonization. 


Back to the current elections, though. It is not surprising, given all of this, that a walk down the streets of Cusco turns up a number of spray-paint scrawled letters reading "Fujimori Asesinos," meaning Fujimori Murderers. Andean peoples, the people hit the hardest by the economic shock spread across Peru and devastated the most in civil wars against the socialist group the Shining Path (which was eradicated under Fujirmori at the expense of numbers of indigenous Quechua peoples from the Andes), are not willing to risk another Fujimori--or yet, another set of laws and systems of dependency of the new colonial order of Western imperialism.