Putting a face on free-market economics: the politicisation of race and ethnicity in Peru

Abstract

The election, in 1990, of the Japanese-descended Fujimori to the presidency of Peru, against novelist Vargas Llosa and against the backdrop of Sendero Luminoso, revealed the deep race and class divides in Peruvian society. Fujimori, the son of immigrants, was able to mobilise the indigenous majority in his favour through his appeal to the poor and their sense of marginalisation, as against Vargas Llosa s appeal to the Spanish-speaking elite. Nonetheless, once in power, Fujimori s policies were increasingly neoliberal and autocratic. Yet the template he had set for the electoral mobilisation of ethnicity and race was followed over the next decade and a half, resulting in the election in 2001 of Peru s first indigenous but still neoliberal president, Alejandro Toledo. Whereas other Latin American countries have seen a wave of Left-leaning, indigenous activism resulting in major change, the premise that neoliberal solutions can overcome the divisions of race and class has continued to hold sway in Peru. Meanwhile, those divisions have grown starker.