POLITICS-PERU: US Keeps Options Open As It Awaits Official Announcement

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 13 2000 (IPS) - The United States government Wednesday said it will have “serious, serious questions” if President Alberto Fujimori is declared the winner of Peruvian elections after the first round of voting last weekend.

State Department spokesman James Rubin told reporters that if Washington sees “convincing proof of fraud,” Fujimori will face a “substantial challenge in restoring its credibility … with the international community and the United States government.”

But he declined to say precisely how Washington will react if the official tabulation shows that Fujimori won more than 50 percent of the vote in Sunday’s elections. Such a result would make a second round of voting unnecessary, according to the Peruvian constitution.

Independent election monitors and Peruvian polling companies have said such a result would be inconsistent with their own findings which showed Fujimori falling substantially short of 50 percent and in a neck-and-neck race with Alejandro Toledo.

The official results were expected to have been announced by noon Lima time Wednesday. The fact that no announcement was made indicates to many observers here – both within and outside the administration – that Fujimori’s government is itself undecided about what to do.

Experts outside the administration are urging the White House to have President Bill Clinton speak directly to Fujimori to persuade him that a first-round victory will not be credible both to the Peruvian people and the world as a whole and that Lima could face tough economic and other sanctions if such an announcement is made.

“The US should make it clear that it will use all instruments which it has at its disposal through the Organisation of American States and other multilateral agencies, such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank, just as it did in reaction to Fujimori’s notorious “autogolpe” in 1992,” said Michael Schifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank of analysts from throughout the Americas.

“This is a pretty nasty, unsavoury regime,” he said of Fujimori’s government.

Officials and others here are very worried about the prospects for serious unrest and possible repression in Peru if Fujimori claims victory without a run-off election.

“He’s a lot less popular now than he was eight years ago,” noted one administration expert. “You can see that in the really massive protests that have taken place,” he said, adding that the Peruvian president appears to have lost most of the big urban centres, including the capital which has seen tens of thousands of people in the streets over the last two days.

“There’s no question that there will be an intensification of the demonstrations we saw yesterday,” said Cynthia McClintock, a Peru specialist at George Washington University who returned here only Wednesday morning from observing the elections for Transparencia, a Peruvian monitoring group which has been widely praised by US officials.

She and others fear bloodshed, particularly if the government tries to put down any demonstrations or a possible general strike with force. Such a move could even promote a split in the military between Fujimori loyalists who have been systematically promoted to the top ranks, and middle-ranking officers who have objected to the politicisation of their institution.

“There is a lot of discontent in the ranks,” according to McClintock who has written extensively on the Peruvian military. She blames its politicisation on Fujimori’s top intelligence adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos, who has long been seen here as an eminence grise.

The uncertainty in Peru adds to more general concerns within the administration about the stability and future of democratic government in the entire Andean region.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana is currently in Washington in an effort to expedite Congressional approval of a controversial 1.6 billion dollar emergency aid package most of which is designed to train and equip the army to fight drug-trafficking and left- wing guerrillas who control about 40 percent of Colombia’s national territory.

Washington is also concerned about recent protests over water prices in Bolivia. At least six people have reportedly died in shootings by government security forces against demonstrators, and human rights groups here have complained about the declaration of a state of siege by the government of President Hugo Banzer.

It was only in January that Washington had to threaten to cut off bilateral and multilateral aid to Ecuador to prevent a coup d’etat against the government of former president Jamil Mahuad, while in Venezuela, the administration is expressing growing anxiety about the declining economy and populist politics of President Hugo Chavez.

“Instability Is Endemic to Andes,” headlined a story in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, which noted that a Fujimori first- round victory “would encourage potential political strongmen elsewhere in Latin America and especially the Andes.”

It is not only the administration which is worried. In a rare joint statement, Republican Senators Jesse Helms and Paul Coverdell and Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy called Wednesday for the administration “to make clear to Peruvian authorities that short- sighted manoeuvres to tamper with the results of the elections will have long-term consequences for our bilateral relations across the board.” They said fraudulent elections would make Lima “an outcast” in the international community.

Whether such warnings will have an effect on Fujimori is open to question. “Fujimori may very well decide to weather the storm come what may,” said McClintock.

In April 1992, when Fujimori dissolved Congress in his “self- coup,” Washington led the OAS in isolating Lima diplomatically according to the Santiago Declaration of 1990 which can be invoked whenever the democratic process in a member country is interrupted. It also cut all bilateral aid and blocked new loans from international development agencies like the World Bank.

In the end, new Congressional elections were held in November, 1992. Despite lingering human-rights concerns, the OAS and the United States lifted their sanctions, and Fujimori returned to Washington’s good graces. The United States has been particularly pleased with Peru’s anti-drug efforts and economic reforms.

Schifter and others argue that such pressure must be brought to bear on Fujimori again now. “The time for Washington to act is today,” wrote Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs under Ronald Reagan, in the Washington Post Wednesday.

“If Fujimori steals this election and declares himself president for five more years, he will be a pariah,” said Abrams, who also advises Baruch Ivcher, an independent television station owner whose Peruvian citizenship was canceled by Fujimori’s government several years ago.

Washington should “take the lead in organising Latin and European democracies to isolate him and his government, block Peru’s access to international financial institutions and end bilateral and multilateral co-operation.” he wrote.