I have been in Peru for the last year studying Spanish. Of the many countries I have been to over the years, Peru is one of the very most charming. It boasts a unique cuisine, beautiful colonial architecture, and some of the nicest, friendliest people you’ll ever meet anywhere in the world.
And Peru’s future is looking distinctly brighter as it appears that Keiko Fujimori will win this month’s runoff election to become Peru’s next President.
She is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who served as President from 1990 to 2000. Fujimori, the father, was and is widely hated by the Latin American Left. But when he assumed office, annual inflation was 7000 percent, the government was bankrupt, and a murderous Maoist terrorist organization, Shining Path, was waging guerrilla war and killing thousands in the name of “workers’ and peasants’ revolution.”
By the end of his term in office, inflation had come down to single digits, Peru had successfully restructured its foreign debts, and the Shining Path insurgency was decisively crushed, with its top leaders all in prison.
Today, Fujimori, the daughter, is the conservative candidate who has run her campaign promising law and order, free markets, and fiscal responsibility. Her opponent, Roberto Sanchez, is a typical leftist who promised more government interference in the economy, more government spending, and hobbled law enforcement in the name of “human rights.”
Peru’s recent history explains much of this turn towards conservative governments in South America. Peru has had nine presidents in the last ten years. Sanchez ran as a loyal successor to Pedro Castillo, a dedicated socialist who was impeached by Congress while facing allegations of corruption. Castillo was afterwards convicted of sedition after attempting to dissolve Congress and impose martial law.
Like nearly all of Latin America, Peru is plagued by systemic corruption. The country is suffering from a tidal wave of violent crime, most of all widespread extortion by criminal gangs. Investment and economic growth have been stifled by excessive government regulation and bureaucracy.
Fujimori has concrete plans to address these challenges. To tackle the problem of crime, she intends to establish an across-the-board security structure combining the Presidency, the Armed Forces, the National Police, and all relevant ministries to act decisively against organized criminal structures.
To complement this new strategy, she plans for Peru to build four high-security mega-prisons that will keep high-ranking gang leaders out of contact with their criminal organizations.
Fujimori wants to employ artificial intelligence to review all public contracting and introduce enhanced criminal penalties for public corruption. AI can audit innumerable contract-related documents and search for patterns of corrupt activity.
Finally, Fujimori plans to promote economic growth and private investment by cutting out unnecessary bureaucratic red tape and digitizing administrative procedures to make government more efficient and more responsive to the needs of private enterprise.
Fujimori envisions these various initiatives as all part of a “technocratic shock” to bring Peru into the 21st century and dramatically improve the performance of the government in serving the needs of the people. And her political party, Popular Force, along with its smaller political allies, enjoys control of both houses of Congress. Fujimori seems poised to break a decade of political deadlock and to rapidly enact her reform plans.
Fujimori has a lifelong affection for the United States. She studied as an undergraduate at Stony Brook and Boston University and earned her MBA at Columbia. She describes the United States as a “crucial political and diplomatic ally,” and praises U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again philosophy."
And President Trump is an ardent fan of Fujimori. He describes her electoral victory as Fujimori’s best opportunity “to deliver a strong rebuke to the radical left-wing policies that have fueled crime, instability, and economic problems. Peruvians are clearly demanding tough leadership against crime and instability instead of more socialist experiments linked to people like imprisoned former president Pedro Castillo.”
In recent elections, the people of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and El Salvador have rejected the failed economic and social policies of socialists and their fellow travelers and elected solidly conservative presidents. And thanks to U.S. President Trump, the notorious Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist president, is now a guest of the U.S government at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Even the cruel Cuban dictatorship seems ready to finally fall, under relentless pressure from President Trump. The Left in Latin America is in full retreat; its last bastions are now in the faculty lounges of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.
In hundreds of conversations with people in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, I have been struck by how hard-working South Americans are. They don’t want Welfare State Socialism; they want Honest Government that does its job efficiently and allows its citizens a fair chance to have a decent life, with dignity, economic opportunity, and personal security. Basically, the things all decent conservatives wish for.