The future without Fujimori(秘鲁前总统藤森）


The squalid （肮脏的）exit of Peru’s president leaves a caretaker （看守者）with work to do

	Declared unfit, in an unrigged vote

IT WAS fitting that this week’s denouement（结局） to Alberto Fujimori’s decade of increasingly authoritarian 独裁的, 独裁主义的）rule should be played out in the Congress. In 1992, Mr Fujimori sent tanks to shut down the parliament, arranging a slimmer（更加精简的） and more subservient（ 屈从的）replacement in a new constitution.

Spurning（拒绝） a letter of resignation faxed by Mr Fujimori from a Tokyo hotel room, Congress on November 21st voted by 62 to 9 to declare the president “permanently morally unfit（不称职）” for the office. With both his vice-presidents (Peru has two) having resigned as well, the next day Congress did as the constitution requires, and elected its own speaker, Valentin Paniagua, as Peru’s caretaker president（看守政府总统）.

For Mr Paniagua, a lawyer aged 64, it was a lightning ascent（地位, 声望等的提高） after a long, but fairly obscure, career as a moderate democratic politician. He had become speaker only a week before, when for the first time since 1992 the opposition won control of Congress as the government’s majority disintegrated（瓦解）. In another irony, Mr Paniagua is a representative of Popular Action, one of the traditional parties which Mr Fujimori’s regime seemed to have wiped out. His party has only three out of 120 Congress seats.

But Mr Paniagua can count on a new spirit of co-operation（合作）. His task is to steer（ 驾驶, 掌舵） Peru to a fresh general election in April, and to hand over power to its victor next July. His first move was to name as prime minister Javier Perez de Cuellar, an elderly former UN secretary-general （联合国前秘书长，德奎利亚尔）who stood against Mr Fujimori in an election in 1995.

Mr Fujimori’s fall came with extraordinary speed, a bare four months into a constitutionally dubious（可疑的） third term. Despite his authoritarianism and his destruction of many of his country’s institutions, had Mr Fujimori not sought that term, many Peruvians would have hailed him as one of their greatest presidents, because of his success in the early 1990s in crushing （镇压, 压垮）terrorism（暴力） and hyperinflation（恶性通货膨胀）, and in reforming the economy.

Instead, he proceeded with a rigged（作弊的, 非法操纵的）election in April that made him even more beholden （对...表示感谢）to Vladimiro Montesinos, his intelligence chief and political fixer（死党）. Facing a divided country and international opprobrium, he was never going to find governing easy. Two revelations about Mr Montesinos made it impossible. First came a confused episode involving the smuggling of guns from Peru to Colombia’s guerrillas, which convinced the United States that Mr Montesinos had to go. Then came the leaking of a video showing the spy chief bribing an opposition legislator to switch sides.

Although that prompted Mr Fujimori to agree to fresh elections, he had hoped to stay on until July. But his farcical（闹剧的,滑稽的）efforts to find the fugitive （逃亡的）Mr Montesinos only underlined how swiftly he had lost control of events. And when foreign bank accounts worth $50m were found in Mr Montesinos’s name, few Peruvians believed that Mr Fujimori was untainted by his regime’s corruption. Far from being the guarantee of an orderly transition, he had become an obstacle to it.

In the end, the son of Japanese immigrants could no longer face Peruvians. No doubt fearing investigation and trial, he used the pretext（借口） of an APEC summit in Brunei（本月在文莱的亚太经合会议） to seek refuge（政治庇护）in Japan (where opponents maintain he was born). He said he would stay there indefinitely.

Now Peru must clear up the mess Mr Fujimori has left behind. The first job is to complete the reforms needed for clean elections. A start has been made: Peru now has an independent public prosecutor（检举人）and a new head of its electoral board. The “emergency” committees through which Mr Montesinos ran the courts and prosecution services are being dismantled. Congress’s first act under Mr Paniagua’s speakership was to reinstate three Constitutional Court judges sacked in 1997 for ruling that Mr Fujimori could not stand for re-election this year.

Several other matters remain to be tackled（处理, 解决）. One is to restore Channel 2, a popular television station, to its owner, Baruch Ivcher. Another is to take measures to prevent abuse of government resources in the election campaign. But the biggest challenges are to bring Mr Montesinos to justice, and to clean up the armed forces.

Almost the entire corps of 50-odd army generals were handpicked（用手挑选, 精选） by Mr Montesinos, and many were his cronies（假冒的）. Last month, Mr Fujimori sacked （罢免）four senior commanders; ten army generals were retired last week, but their proposed replacements include other Montesinistas.

Whether to veto those promotions will be the first decision facing Mr Paniagua’s choice as defence minister. The generals are worried about being pursued for corruption, and for abuses in the war against terrorism. But they have lost credibility with （失信于）the public and their junior officers, and have little scope for resisting the new government, argues Diego Garcia Sayan, an adviser to Alejandro Toledo, Mr Fujimori’s chief opponent in this year’s election.

Mr Paniagua must also manage an economy badly hurt by political turmoil（骚动, 混乱）. Even some populist （平民论者,民粹主义者）legislators say they will not block scheduled privatisations（个人主义）. But Carlos Boloña, Mr Fujimori’s economy minister, was also seeking a new IMF agreement, and a bundle of loans from development banks. Both are still needed, if Peru is to shrink its fiscal deficit and restore confidence.

To complicate matters, Mr Paniagua’s congressional majority depends on a group of slippery（滑的）, defectors（背叛者, 叛离者）, who have shuttled in and out of the Fujimorist benches. When the election campaign begins, consensus （舆论）may be strained（紧张的）. Many potential presidential candidates are talked of, but two start with an advantage: Mr Toledo, and Francisco Tudela, Mr Fujimori’s conservative former vice-president, though he insists he will not stand.

Peru has a fresh start. But there are dangers ahead. Among Mr Fujimori’s many enemies were not just Peru’s democratic opposition, but the imprisoned leaders of the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrilla movements. They, too, will be celebrating his demise（让渡） . And after a decade of autocratic（独裁的, 专制的） rule, the new government will face many demands for change. Such is Mr Fujimori’s awkward（笨拙地） legacy（ 遗产).

From The Economist print edition