Editor’s Note: While this text was published in three separate articles in the Cuadernos del Seminario de Estudios y Debates Socialistas in August of 1995, its urgent relevance, in light of the recent events in Peru including the authoritarian imposition of a state of emergency by Dina Boluarte, the use of lethal force that has caused thousands of injuries and more than 60 deaths, and, most recently, the militarized incursion into San Marcos University that resulted in close to 200 people being arrested is disheartening, coming 28 years since the Fujimorist regime ordered a similar crackdown. Though the historical context is different the repression continues. So, too, however does resistance.
I. WHERE DOES THE RESISTANCE BEGIN?
Having been unable to win more than 58% of the vote for Fujimori’s reelection and having to impose their majority in Congress with barely 18% of the vote, despite years of illegal, unscrupulous, and open manipulation of all the resources and institutions of the State, even winning elections has not been enough to offer immunity to the regime.
WHAT LACK OF CONFIDENCE?
After the elections Fujimorismo can’t really trust in massive, let alone stable, support, nor in enough legitimacy to be able to govern with a minimum of equanimity, since it is not democratic. For its own ends, it now finds it ever more necessary to cook up its measures in off the cuff ways, hidden from public debate, and to impose its policies at full tilt.
Fujimori doesn’t even trust in its spurious majority in the next congress (some of its supporters in the press suspect that it’s a matter of fear) and before its installation, he is dictating ominous orders to his outgoing CCD [the Peruvian congress – tr.]: the blocking of the organization of political parties; the stripping away at the Defensoría del Pueblo; the subjecting of the electoral institutions to the Executive; assaulting the public universities; giving amnesty to the death squads of La Cantuta, Barrios Altos, and as General Robles declared from Buenos Aires, of other crimes that have not yet come to light. And he is paying his CCD members with large raises.
BEFORE THE PEOPLE HAD NO PAST TO MOURN
It could hardly be said, of course, that Fujimorist authoritarianism and arbitrariness have been countered by an effective democratic opposition, nor that the obliteration of the living conditions of workers have encountered organized popular resistance.
Doubtless there are a number of explanations for this curious scenario. Here it will be enough to note that the importance of the “dirty war” and the final stretch of Alanism [policies imposed under president Alan Garcia’s first term as president of Peru – tr.] in the memory and consciousness of the majority have been decisive -and skillfully employed. If to this one adds the conjuncture of the Peruvian experiences of the last number of decades, it’s no great difficulty to concede that very few are ready to mourn the past and far fewer to defend it.
On the other hand, almost undone in the crisis have been the principle social groupings of the dominated and their sources of identity and discourse. Already before Fujimorism the only approaches to the future came from the bearers of power and they ended up dominating the imaginary of the majority, including of the inevitable victims of their proposals and respective actions.
A large portion of the victims have already been convinced to bear with the situation, and from the beginning of Fujimorismo they had no other recourse but to immediately deal with what they faced. First, the Fujishock, the most ferocious economic shock in the world, and afterward the gradual dismantling of the liberal democratic institutions, of public services and of legal resources in the defense of labor against capital. They had been won over by the idea that this was an obligatory sacrifice in exchange for a better future that would not be long in coming.
WITH FUJIMORISMO THERE IS NO FUTURE TO HOPE FOR
However, not mourning the past isn’t the same as being content with the present, nor of holding onto a genuine hope for the imposed route toward the future. Thus, even if the democratic opposition has been erased and popular resistance dispersed, no one would dare say, seriously, that Fujimorismo is a cause for enthusiasm, nor a mobilization of hope. Did anyone go out in the street to celebrate Fujimori’s reelection?
That destiny corresponds to the original brand imposed on Fujimorismo: that serving one’s master (speculative international capital) is what everyone wants for themselves means that it can’t exercise its authoritarianism with the support of the multitude, but exclusively with machine guns and through the hitmen of the “intelligence service”. In contrast to its predecessors, the European fascisms after World War I it is impotent in awakening any conviction whatsoever and in place of the mobilizing myths of its predecessors it can only invoke a series of tricks and spectacles (weeping virgins and Zanattis), while pushing through the worst measures against the people.
THE NAKED EMPEROR
And it is late, of course, for something else, as the future promised in 1990 is now the present, and each day it is more unbearable for its victims. The Alan-era inflation and the Abimealian rebellion are past. Together with the violence, they were useful to keep the masses expectant and deployed, while they were stripped of work, of investment, of health, of education, of liberties. But now there aren’t such “successes” to flaunt to the victims, while they are condemned by new divestments (in political organization and access to universities), just when they are able to reclaim those they were previously deprived of.
The tricks and spectacles aren’t entertaining anymore. The discourse is beginning to be heard for what it is: false and coarse. And the acts are now being seen not as sparkling liveliness but as mere brutality and domination. Thus, Fujimorism required a final emblem: the amnesty of the murderers of La Cantuta. A warning to the masses that the government can kidnap, torture, murder and incinerate and…nothing will happen.
At the same time, there are numerous signs that that the people are beginning to make out, beyond the promises and tough talk, the face of an old enemy: unbridled exploitation and poverty without end, imposed by a dominating and abusive dictatorship. The number is growing of those who have discovered that all the changes promised are exclusively in favor of those who exploit and abuse the rest and that those features are only getting worse.
THE UNIVERSITY: BEGINNING OF THE RESISTANCE?
With the Fujimorist assault on the public universities, San Marcos in particular, the same thing seems to be happening as with the country’s politics in general: no one, or very few people, want to defend the past, but only the worst of them could be content with the present, that is, with the dictatorial intervention, with soldiers imposing and protecting authorities which the university students reject. Fewer still with the dreary future that, obviously, Fujimorism is trying to impose.
There is, however, a crucial difference: with the assault on San Marcos and La Cantuta, Fujimorism has, likely, originated the first important space for organized popular resistance against totalitarianism in progress.
During the earlier intervention and military occupation of the universities, protest was given asylum. Thus, the characteristics of the “dirty war” would be imposed on the bulk of the population, in all social sectors, including the university population, by accepting a pact with the devil: the imposition of law and order including under undesirable conditions in order to liberate themselves from the feeling of insecurity. It was not, then, solely the impotence faced with arms that produced the extraordinary scenario at San Marcos: occupied by troops and, still, contrary to its entire history, emptied of resistance.
Now, on the other hand, the scores of soldiers that, armed to the teeth, occupy San Marcos University’s campus, have not been able to intimate the multitudes of students who daily resist, above all else, the authorities imposed by Fujimorism and who discuss within and outside of their assemblies the meaning of this intervention and the next actions of resistance. This time, the official argument that Fujimori and the armed forces are combatting terrorism in the university sounds as it really is, both false and coarse.
II. HANDS ON THE UNIVERSITY
There’s no need to go either particularly far or particularly deep to understand why education and the university have such great meaning for the majority of the Peruvian population: ours is a society where the colonial bases of power remain active. That is to say, that it is a country where power relations are rooted, above all, in the discriminations of a colonial origin called alternately “ethnic” or “racial”. In Latin America, social classes have colors René Zavaleta noted some time ago. Not only color, of course, but the entire social and cultural conflict with which they are warped.
EDUCATION AND POWER IN PERU
It was on the lines of the Peruvian social confliction that first education and afterward the university won a foregrounded place of exceptional meaning for the victims of the coloniality of power: a privileged channel of social and cultural mobility, an entire mode of liberation from the prisons of coloniality.
Since World War I, people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, first “mestizos”, “cholos”, impoverished “whites”, the remains of the urban petit bourgeois, the rural middle classes or the new urban middle classes resulting from the disintegration of the landed manor system and of the expansion of commerce, and, gradually, afterward, “Blacks” and “Indians”, workers and campesinos, have converged in pressing for incorporation into the education system and the university.
Along that path they developed demands for changes in the content of education, at all levels, to boost access to education for the majority of people and to liberate it from direct control of those who hold power through the State. The dictatorial potholes notwithinstanding, since 1930 until Fujimorism education in general and the university, especially, advanced in that direction.
The new demands of the job market from capital combined with the struggles for changes to the colonial means of social classification. In that manner, education has been made one of the central spaces in the fight for democratization of this society and the university the center of that debate.
THE UNIVERSITY AND CAPITAL IN PRESENT-DAY PERU
The recent changes in the relations between capital and wage labor, both locally and globally, have reduced, in an important and visible manner, the capacity for a college degree to meet those prior goals. To be a doctor is no longer a guarantee of economic solvency, nor of social respectability.
That new situation has not completely annulled, by any means, the older privileged relation between education, the university, and democratization of Peruvian society. In effect, save in exceptional cases (for example, congresspeople), the best compensated roles in the present and future labor markets continue to pass through a university education, although they are no longer as they were before. On the other hand, however, the social polarization of the population in terms of income and access to markets for material and cultural goods tends to be much wider and deeper without meaning an end the social polarization associated with “ethno-racial” discrimination.
What is being raised, thus, is the urgency of a reorganization of education and of the university to bring to bear the struggle for the decolonization of power in society and in culture, in the same measure as the need for the production of new knowledge and skills both in today’s world and in Peru specifically.
Still, the present capitalist perspective on the Peruvian university is openly discriminatory and recolonizing. For capital’s truncated present and forecasted future needs in Peru, its present requirements and the future needs of its labor force at the upper professional levels are already covered by private business colleges. From that point of view, the state universities remain as holdovers and nuisances, and in the long run present a risk.
In that situation, the financially speculative bourgeoise and its agents in the associated middle classes preserve access to the highest levels of the university for their own people. They use simple mechanisms: one, making the cost of education brutally more expensive. Two, blocking the resources that the population pays into that the state is supposed to use to finance the workers’, and the poor in general’s, professional education. Thus, those who hold power can control knowledge, and particularly scientific-technological and professional knowledge directly linked to the management of capital and of the State as well as the respective professional bodies.
The continued reduction of financial and political assistance from the State to the public university corresponds to this new behavior of the capitalists, and of those currently in power. That State behavior was instantiated under Velasquism at the same pace at which the global crisis of capital devastated the Peruvian economy and generated a recession and unemployment. Since then, the financial and political abandonment of the State and unemployment have worked in tandem in our state universities.
Due to those conditions, state universities have been converted in large part, into an immense pocket of underemployed people, where all forms of manipulation, of accommodation, of unscrupulous use of resources coexist with real forces of continued knowledge production, debate, thought, and professional formation. This situation, for a long time at this point, been understand as the crisis of the Peruvian university.
THE FUJIMORIST ASSAULT
Fujimorism does not propose to resolve that situation through greater democratization or access to the university, nor of the democratization of the relations between State and university, nor in the democratization of the academic and administrative structures of the university, nor through policies of national scientific-technological development, of the development of publishing, or artistic activities, etc associated with that sort of university development. To the contrary, it is advancing toward total control over the direction of education in general and of the university in particular while at the same time taking steps toward the reduction of access for lower and middle income populations in the educational apparatus and, above all, in the university.
In the period that is getting underway now global financial capital will seek to concentrate still more of its power in this country, because it requires an ever more exclusive use of resources in Peru to continue to service external debt and to allow for highly profitable short-term investments.
The final elimination of the mechanism to defend labor against capital and the more complete dismantling of State financed public services are already in progress. In the specific case of education and of the university, it is not enough to disengage the State from the production of those public services. Their complete intellectual and political control is equally as important. To achieve the cheapest labor force in the world, the maximum freedom for capital in this country, the minimum of resources to produce and reproduce work and workers, are the next goals for capital and Fujimorism in Peru. But that is not sufficient. That workforce must be as ignorant and submissive as possible. The political control of the State and the population are, for that reason, indispensable conditions. The control of education is one of its key instruments.
It is not for therefore, by any means, simply by chance that Fujimorism has ordered the amnesty of the squadrons of murderers with its story of national reconciliation immediately after assaulting the universities of La Cantuta and San Marcos with its troops and shortly after blocking the political organization of the masses in practice, of neutering the Defensoria del Pueblo and of even further subordinating the electoral institutions to the power of the Executive. The fascist features of Fujimorism have begun to bulge at the seams.
There will always be people who hunker down. Some, due to indifference. Some out of fear. Others out of opportunism. Others, still, so as not to not risk what they have achieved. Many more out of perplexity. But there are also many who will not only not be intimidated, but are already organizing the resistance. Their number and their force will now have to grow.
III. EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY: THE SAME BATTLE
At the moment there are two salient points concerning the Peruvian situation. One, the rapid constitution of a space of popular resistance to Fujimorism, whose center is, for the moment, the university. Two, the expansion and affirmation of the political opposition against authoritarianism, through the general repudiation, globally and locally, of the amnesty given to the government’s death squads, leading to the formation of the first visible and important cracks in the political edifice of Fujimorism.
Is this a mere coincidence or are we on the threshold of a fundamental growth and change, leading to the popular resistance and democratic opposition coming together against Fujimorism?
A GAP TO CLOSE
The most recent national elections made visible a grave disagreement among, on the one hand, the majority of the anti-authoritarian political opposition that has only obliquely taken up the popular demands, and, on the other hand, the mass majority of the population concerned above all with issues of survival.
The current popular demands are aimed, basically, at adequate employment, wage solvency, well remunerated work, public services (education, health, housing, municipal services) that the population finances through the state and that the neoliberals and their Fujimorism paint as “free”.
The anti-authoritarian opposition demonstrated a preoccupation in these elections with the themes of poverty and “social spending”, but they were careful not to raise the debate about the origin of poverty and the dismantling of public services: the needs and demands of global speculative capital. What they did, in truth, is to repeat the World Bank (WB)’s own thesis. And in practice the democratic opposition defended the central tenets of neoliberal economic policy and control by global financial capital, through the IMF and the World Bank, over and against the advancement of Peruvian society.
Given those conditions, a good part of the working masses does not have a means of finding reasons to link themselves to the antiauthoritarian struggle given their demands concerning their immediate socio-economic needs.
To uphold that gap was, elsewhere, the objective of the manipulatory forces of Fujimorism, using the entirety of the state machinery to bring the masses on board through the implication that the construction of a few local schools and water reservoirs, the improvement of roads, and similar concessions as being more important in the immediate than resistance to authoritarianism.
In 20th century Peru, the struggles for institutional political democracy and for democracy in the economy and in society at large have not always been reciprocally interrelated. Still, at least in a general sense, from World War I until only recently, they have moved in the same direction if not along the same path.
The fight for de-oligarchization of power implied, for the majority, not solely the institutional modernization of the State, the universalization of citizenship and political representation or, in other words, the democratization of the political relationship to power. It also meant at one and the same time the reorganization of the relationship to power in the economy and society, and, above all, the redistributed control of labor and productive resources, and of the sources of cultural and personal development. Even with all of the acknowledged limits, this also tended to actually occur.
Of course, since the liberals of last century, for a not negligible part of the anti-oligarchic opposition, the chimera of political and cultural modernity without revolution in the relationship of power to the economy and society has always been dominant. But it wasn’t until after the political defeats of the organized workers movements, at the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, that the relation between the politico-cultural and socio-economic has been understood as divorced for the majority of people. Or, to put it a different way, the relationship between the struggle for political democracy and the struggle for daily necessities for survival. The “dirty war” helped this rupture along.
Fujimorism, itself the very product of that separation between the political and the social in the consciousness of the people, has skillfully sought to develop and perpetuate that perspective. And it has achieved, until now, a certain success. That has allowed, in turn, for certain people, lacking historical and theoretical depth to noisily announce that they have discovered that we are an authoritarian people from the beginnings of our history.
The coming demands of international financial capital are already visible in the country. They are already imposing themselves as grave problems for the country and for Fujimorism’s ability to retain its control. For that reason the number of the poor and workers who are joining the resistance is growing and more people in the middle sectors are starting to express their discontent and to protest against authoritarianism.
But if both movements are not able to find each other, if they are not able to uncover what separates one from the other they will be unable to go far, much less triumph, and the struggle will be much longer, more costly and more…uncertain.
For that reason it is quite important to open up a debate about the meaning of the recent actions concerning university education and the amnesty for the Fujimorist death squads.
WHAT IS FUJIMORISM LOOKING FOR IN THE UNIVERSITY?
Two arguments are given most frequently, both in the press and outside of it, about the Fujimorist intervention in the university: a) its authoritarian character, ergo anti-democratic, illegal given its unconstitutional nature and its violating of the autonomy of the university; b) the need for changes in the university, but without the intervention of the government. Proposals have begun to circulate around the latter, all of them, to date, from technocratic-administrative position.
These two arguments are, obviously, important. But they leave to the side other issues of not minor significance. First, that not every authoritarian act against the university has generated the same reaction as that of today because not all of those authoritarian actions have been directed toward the same ends. One need only compare, in that regard, what occurred between Leguiismo [the policies of Augusto B. Leguía – tr.] and Odríismo [the policies of Manuel Odría – tr.], from Velasquismo [the policies of Juan Velasco Alvarado – tr.] and that of Fujimorism. With respect to the last of them, for example, the University of San Marcos was already been occupied militarily since before this intervention, without provoking protests, assemblies, or public debates.
So as not to go too far afield, it is enough to remember that it was not only through its authoritarianism that Velasquism produced a massive social explosion in 1969 and afterward a hardened opposition of the university students and of the faculty, but because of its intent to end free education and because of its policy of financial and political asphyxiation of the university. The long domination of “Maoism” in SUTEP [Unitary Union of Workers in Education of Peru – tr.] and in the federated centers and the university federations, since then, would not otherwise be explainable.
In the recent Fujimorist interevention in the university, it is not solely about a authoritarian act or the violation fo the autonomy of the university nor – as the stupid argument of the comptroller’s commission – just a correction of the arbitrariness of the prior administration.
Two vital issues are at play: 1) the reduction of access for the majority of the population, which is perpetually more impoverished, to university education, through the elimination of the “gratuity” of instruction; 2) the total intellectual and academic control of university work.
Fujimorism, directing an authoritarian regime at the service of capital’s counterrevolution and after having dismantled and changed the institutions of the economicy and of the State, practically eliminating public services financed by the State, has now set itself on education and the university, so as to adapt them to the needs of this counterrevolution. Perhaps it ignores, nonetheless, that in this manner it may have entered into a hole that not even its masters will want to get it out of.