Impasses of Contemporary Peruvian Politics

Chapter 9 Perversion and Trauma: Impasses of Contemporary Peruvian Politics

Water yes, gold no! Ollanta Humala during election campaign, 2011.

…I believe, as Head of State, that we can have both things, water and gold, not water or gold; water or gold is an extremist, antihistorical and anti- national position. Ollanta Humala in the presidency, 2012.

1 Introduction

In the 1980s, the Peruvian left was considered to be one of the most powerful on the continent, and its future seemed promising. However, since then the right has regained the political initiative, a situation that still subsists. Three elements are fundamental to an understanding of this: the trajectory of the left; the ambiguities of the Alan García government from 1985 to 1990 which in turn are related to the history of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (apra); and the specificity of Senderoism. Although I am unable to explore the idea further in this chapter, I believe that the last two phenomena allow an analogy with the psychoanalytic notion of perversion.1 The relationship of Alanism to the apra2 and the relationship

1 In general terms, psychoanalysis identifies three ways out of the Oedipus complex, conform- ing three patterns of the place of the subject in culture. The neurotic is subordinated to the rules of the culture to which it belongs, accepting them in conflict. It is the condition of ‘normality’. The psychotic avoids social interdiction, forging a world of its own rules. The perverse instrumentalizes the prevalent rules according to their own interests. Senderoism, Alanism and Fujimorism are perversions in the sense that they take as reference a socially established norm in order to instrumentalize it in the opposite direction, configuring a devia- tion that results in a self-referenced normativity instrumentalized according to particular interests far from its original purpose. 2 Although the term ‘Alanismo’ is not common to designate the first apra government, referring regularly to the segment of the party led by Alan García, presidential candidate in 2016, I use the term in the sense suggested by Aníbal Quijano, referring to the process of political degeneration of apra synthesized by the trajectory of its main leader after Haya de la Torre.

Impasses of Contemporary Peruvian Politics 199 of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) to the guerrilla tradition are of this nature, as also is Fujimori’s relationship to democracy, in a country where the Velasco military regime from 1968 to 1975 was not associated with repression. Taking a step further into psychoanalytic analogy, the conjunction between economic disorganization and Senderoist violence that marked the end of the García administration generated both the objective and subjective conditions for a radical political response at a time when the left was in disarray. To para- phrase Trotsky, Fujimorism, a traumatic response to a traumatic situation, established the foundations of present-day Peru.3 In contrast to other coun- tries in the region, the neoliberal clash in Peru was associated with a regime that pacified and, in the eyes of some, saved the country – which poses addi tional difficulties in confronting it. I shall analyze the historical roots of this singularity as part of the effort to understand trauma, and as a premise for overcoming it.

2 New Left and United Left

The roots of the so-called ‘new Peruvian left’ go back to the period between 1959 and 1965, when two short guerrilla experiences originated in two parties then identified with the left, the Popular American Revolutionary Alliance (apra) and the Peruvian Communist Party (pcp). Shortly afterwards, the Revolutionary Vanguard came into being, an organization joined by former militants of Popular Action,4 Trotskyists and independent Marxists. In the following decade, the guerrilla appeal gave way to connections with a grow- ing peasant movement, consolidating what Carlos Malpica termed a ‘national, mariateguista and chola’ left.5 A new socialist tradition within the Marxist left, not identified with the apra or the pcp, was founded. The other side of this left-wing radicalization in the 1960s was the accom- modation to the establishment of the main opposition party, apra. Founded in 1924 in Mexico City by the student leader Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the apra quickly left its original continental aspirations to become the largest

3 ‘Trauma is an event which, by its violence and suddenness, provokes an influx of excitement sufficient to call into question the usually effective defense mechanisms, often producing a state of sideration and leading, in a more or less long term, to a disorganization of the psychic economy’ (Mijolla 2005: 1858). 4 President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, deposed by Velasco Alvarado in 1968, belonged to this party. 5 José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) was the founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party and a key reference in Peruvian and Latin American Marxism.