Peru
suffered from serious economic and political instability during 1988-1990 with
hyperinflation and social hardships. The situation was ideal for an
authoritative Fujimori government to come to power in 1990 and Alberto Fujimori
proved adept at bringing the situation under control with his neoliberal
macroeconomic policy changes, popularly known as the ‘Fujishock’. However,
after almost ten years in power, the Vladi-videos shook the country with
allegations of his corruption, embezzlement of public funds and abuse of power.
The Vladi-videos were basically records showing Vladimiro Montesinos, the
intelligence service head, offering bribes to opposition parties,
television-channel owners, etc., which revealed a decade of corruption that was
aimed at disrupting the very means of checks and balances in a democracy – the
media and the political opposition.
What
follows this authoritative regime in the present Peru day is again worth
noting. All the recent instances of corruption reported come from a more local
level. There has been a worrying growth of the illegal economy and the
increased decentralization of the government seems to have been a contributing
factor.[i]
The Alejandro Toledo government that took over from Fujimori called for the
election of 25 (initially thirteen) regional governments that would then be
directly involved in the economic development of their specific region. With
decentralization, the leaders at the upper levels of governance could denounce
responsibility for what happens at the lowest levels.
Michael
Johnston, in his analysis of the syndromes of corruption, places Peru under the
‘Oligarchs and Clans’ syndrome which is characterized by ‘rapid and significant
liberalization of politics, economies, or both, yet their institutions and
civil societies are very weak’.[ii] However, Johnston points
that in this syndrome, corruption takes place at multiple levels but more
importantly ‘involve a relatively small number of elites and their extended
personal clans’ which is consistent only with the first decade of Fujimori’s rule.
The second decade however has seen a greater amount of corruption from the
decentralized wings of the government.
A study
conducted on the Vaso de Leche (glass of milk) program in trying to track the
spending of public funds from budgeting to the final consumption of the milk by
the beneficiaries in their households reveals that only about twenty-nine cents
of each dollar spent by the central government reaches the beneficiaries.[iii] It points that the
around forty percentage of the leakage takes place at the final stage of
transfer from the municipality to the beneficiary with almost no significant leakage
at the top most levels. The Peruvian case thus puts into question the argument
on decentralizing governance and focusing on civil society and participatory
models of governance and Aristotle’s idea that ‘to remove oneself from politics
and avoid one's responsibilities to the collectivity, to detach one's power
from the polis, was to leave the common life more vulnerable to external and
internal forces of decay and destruction’.[iv]
[i] Divide and Bribe, http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21623706-corruption-and-political-fragmentation-threaten-perus-democracy-divide-and-bribe
[ii] Michael Johnston, Syndromes of Corruption, 2005
[iii] Jose Lopez-Calix, et.al., Local Accountability and the Peruvian
Vaso de Leche Program, 2009
[iv] Peter Euben, On Political Corruption, 1978
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