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  • Contemporary Peruvian Politics and Policy
  • Gerd Schönwälder (bio)
Intersecting Inequalities: Women and Social Policy in Peru, 1990–2000. By Jelke Boesten. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Pp. xviii + 174. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780271036700.
Demanding the Land: Urban Popular Movements in Peru and Ecuador, 1990–2005. By Paul Dosh. Photographs by James Lerager. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Pp. xviii + 262. $75.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780271037073.
Second-Wave Neoliberalism: Gender, Race, and Health Sector Reform in Peru. By Christina Ewig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 255. $67.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780271037110.
Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980. By Jaymie Patricia Heilman. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 254. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804770941.
Toledo’s Peru: Vision and Reality. By Ronald Bruce St. John. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Pp. xxiv + 253. $44.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780813035215.

Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori may languish in prison, serving a twenty-five-year term for rights abuses, but the aftershocks of his almost-undisputed rule in the 1990s continue to be felt in many ways. The fundamental restructuring of the political-party landscape and the decline of established parties under his administration have been well documented, as have been the rise of a new brand of populism marked by a deep disdain for political institutions, the concentration of power in the office of the presidency, the savvy use of mass media, and the skillful exploitation of ethnic stereotypes. Fujimori’s authoritarian tendencies are also well known, surfacing in his “self-coup” against the Peruvian parliament in 1990 and culminating in serious human rights abuses in the struggle against Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, as well as in widespread and pernicious corruption during the later years of his regime, aided and abetted by his top aide, Vladimiro Montesinos.

In contrast, the policy reforms enacted under Fujimori—particularly following his abrupt and much-publicized conversion to neoliberalism—have received far less attention, although, arguably, their impact has been no less profound. As is well known, after campaigning against the right-wing economic proposals of his main rival, the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Fujimori reversed course just months [End Page 208] after his election to implement one of the most radical structural adjustments ever seen in Latin America. Dubbed “Fuji-shock,” these adjustments successfully reined in hyperinflation and relaunched Peru’s moribund economy. Together with the newfound political stability that followed the arrest of Abimaél Guzmán, leader of the Shining Path guerrilla movement, this enabled Fujimori to embark on a series of second-generation neoliberal reforms that amounted to an attempt fundamentally to reorganize the Peruvian state.

The studies reviewed here dissect the legacy of these reforms, revealing enduring impacts that are both deeper and more far-reaching than a simple restructuring of individual sectors of government. Jelke Boesten and Christina Ewig look at social policy making, broadly speaking, and at health policy, more specifically. They show that, far from being technical instruments geared to increase effectiveness and efficiency, reforms in these sectors affected women disproportionately—and usually negatively—especially indigenous women and those of lower-class backgrounds. Paul Dosh’s study of urban settlement policies demonstrates (helpfully drawing in comparable experiences from Ecuador) that neoliberal policies not only increased the likelihood of urban land invasions but also produced incentives for urban squatters, thus opening new avenues for them to organize and to defend their interests. Ronald Bruce St. John focuses on the aftermath of Fujimori’s regime, setting the presidency of Alejandro Toledo against a background of intense social mobilization; heightened public expectations; and the emergence and subsequent demise of various, and often disparate, political coalitions.

Though set in a period before Fujimori’s presidency, Jaymie Patricia Heilman’s analysis of the antecedents of the Shining Path guerrilla movement is a useful bookend to these studies. Heilman attacks a misconception perpetuated, in her view, by much critical literature: that when Shining Path emerged in Ayacucho, a midsize town in the central Peruvian highlands, it benefited from the political inexperience of the local peasantry, who were easy to indoctrinate and...

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