Room for Improvement

The Organization of American States (OAS) clearly played a construc-tive role in Peru's recent return to democracy, and Andrew Cooper and Thomas Legler provide an interesting and useful account of its involve-ment. At the same time, I believe that they overstate the importance of the OAS contribution to bringing down the regime of President Alberto Fujimori. Furthermore, a consideration of the factors that limited the OAS's effectiveness can yield some useful lessons for the future.

OAS involvement in Peru in 2000 began with the Election Observation Mission led by former Guatemalan foreign minister Eduardo Stein. From its arrival in Peru on March 2 until its withdrawal before the presidential runoff between Fujimori and Alejandro Toledo scheduled for May 28, the mission carefully evaluated campaign conditions and the ballot-tabulation process. Working with other observer delegations, the OAS mission urged the Fujimori government to level the electoral playing field and to ensure the transparency of the computer systems at the National Electoral Processes Office. In particular, the OAS mission asked that the runoff be postponed so that improvements could be made. When more time was not allowed, the OAS mission (and all other major election-observation missions) declined to observe the May 28 exercise, which was boycotted by Toledo. The mission's final report concluded that, "with respect to international standards, the Peruvian electoral process is far from being considered free and fair." ¹ For the first time in the history of OAS election observation, a Latin American election had clearly and carefully been judged illegitimate.

At the annual OAS General Assembly in Windsor, Canada, on June 4, member states negotiated their response to Stein's report. As numerous political analysts noted, a determination by an OAS mission that an election had not met international standards should logically have been followed by OAS refusal to recognize the results. In other words, the candidate claiming victory should not have been immediately recognized as president; negotiations leading either to new elections or to some kind of compromise should have ensued. Indeed, this has been the OAS response in similar cases, including the 1994 presidential elections in the Dominican Republic and the 2000 legislative elections in Haiti.

In this instance, however, the OAS General Assembly decided not to question the legitimacy of Peru's 2000 elections. As Cooper and Legler recount, the General Assembly resolved instead to send a High-Level Mission to Peru, with a mandate not to review the 2000 elections but instead to "strengthen democracy" (thereby implying that democracy already existed) and to "explore" future reforms. Why did the OAS fail to seize what could have been a historic opportunity to declare that it would not recognize fraudulent elections?

First, electoral fraud is not a clear trigger for the invocation of Reso-lution 1080, the OAS's primary instrument for the defense of democracy. Written in 1991 with an eye to responding to military coups, Resolution 1080 authorizes the OAS secretary general to convene a meeting of the Permanent Council when there is a "sudden or irregular interruption of the democratic political institutional process." At Windsor, the repre-sentatives of Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela argued that Resolution 1080 did not apply to the Peruvian case. The Hugo Chávez government in Venezuela and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government in Mexico were not enthusiastic about international scrutiny of elections and were probably relieved that the wording of Resolution 1080 was anachronistic.

It also appears that some U.S. and Latin American leaders did not want to face the implications of the electoral fraud. Many hemispheric leaders had worked effectively with President Fujimori and believed that they could continue to do so. They hoped that the 2000 fraud was an anomalous event for which an ad hoc OAS response was appropriate. Uppermost in their minds were the past achievements of the Fujimori government--not the mounting evidence that its relentless pursuit of power was a result of its need to hide its crimes.

Limited...