Regarded as a key ally in the US “war on drugs” which increasingly became the pretext for US military intervention in Latin America following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Montesinos fell afoul of his CIA sponsors when it emerged that he was making deals with drug traffickers, using surveillance equipment against political opponents rather than the drug gangs, pocketing US funding and selling automatic weapons to the FARC guerrillas in Colombia, a principal target of the so-called drug war.
While Montesinos, who today remains in jail, and Fujimori both initially claimed that they had themselves uncovered these illicit activities, which they attributed to others, the evidence steadily mounted against them, leading Fujimori to flee the country for Japan and tender his resignation via fax. Traveling to Chile in 2005 with the apparent aim of mounting a return to political life, he was extradited back to Peru and forced to stand trial.
In addition to the 1993 Constitution and the destruction of social rights for millions of workers, Fujimori leaves behind a political culture characterized by virulent anti-communism and unbridled corruption. His style of right-wing populist politics combined with capitalist “free market” economic policies and police state repression have found echoes in other contemporary Latin American figures ranging from Bukele in El Salvador to Milei in Argentina.
Boluarte’s declaration of an official mourning period for Fujimori was motivated in part by her need to placate Fuerza Popular, the largest party in a Congress which, like her presidency, has an approval rating in the single digits. She is also driven to defend Fujimori’s crimes as a precedent for defending her own, having come to power herself through a parliamentary coup and then overseeing the security forces’ massacre of nearly 50 people involved in unarmed protests against the ouster of Peru’s elected President Pedro Castillo in December 2022.
In addition to the mourning of Fujimori, the Peruvian Congress and the courts have engineered the dropping of a case involving a genocidal campaign of forced sterilization of indigenous women in the Andean highlands during the dictatorship and pushed through an amnesty for human rights and war crimes carried out before 2002, granting impunity to all the military and civilian criminals from the Fujimori era.
Just as Washington backed Fujimori as a defender of big business interests and vehement anti-communist, so today it supports the illegitimate Boluarte regime, including with military aid and training.
The dependence on such figures to defend their profits and strategic interests is a measure of the combined crisis of US imperialism and Latin America’s native ruling classes. Mounting economic crisis and the relentless drive to global war are creating the conditions for the emergence of a powerful new wave of revolutionary struggles of the working class in Peru and throughout the region.
What is required is a new revolutionary leadership based on the assimilation of the bitter lessons of the 20th century and dedicated to the unification of the struggles of Latin American workers with their counterparts in North America and internationally in the common fight for socialism. This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International throughout the hemisphere.
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Publish date : 2024-09-16 12:07:00
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