Linking Civil Society and the State: Urban Popular Movements, the Left, and Local Government in Peru, 1980-1992 (review)

After a decade of corrupt and authoritarian rule under the regime of Alberto Fujimori, the fact that the Left in that country was one of the most powerful in Latin America during the 1980s may seem little more than an interesting footnote. Yet the power of the Peruvian Left in mobilizing grassroots support and seeking to empower urban social movements and expand popular participation through the control of local governments makes this chapter of Peruvian history well worth studying. Gerd Schönwälder has done a fine job of presenting key aspects of that history in this book.

The author provides a useful and synthetic discussion of the relevant literature on urban popular movements, social movement theory, and decentralization in the book's first two chapters. The next two chapters discuss the creation of United Left (IU), an electoral alliance of several leftist parties, the IU's objective of promoting popular participation, and how the party purported to do this through control of municipal governments. An interesting discussion of the tensions between the dominant currents of thought within the IU—the "revolutionary" and the "radical democratic" approaches—highlight the ambiguities of the Left's support of Peruvian democracy at a time when the state was under assault from the Shining Path insurgency. The remaining two chapters are empirical case studies of the Peruvian Left—first of the administration of Alfonso Barrantes, who as president of the IU was elected mayor of Metropolitan Lima in 1983; and then of the left-wing municipal governments that ruled the popular district of El Augustino between 1980 and 1993.

While Schönwälder offers us a useful study, he ultimately does not give us a working theory of the state to tie together many of his observations. The Left in Peru was more than an institutional "link" between the popular sectors and the state. By assuming control of municipal governments, the Left also became part of the state apparatus. In this sense, the Left was not only a "link" to the popular sectors; it also helped constitute the popular sectors through programs like the Vaso de Leche (Glass of Milk) program, created by the Barrantes government to assure a glass of milk daily to children and pregnant and lactating women. Women's committees were formed across metropolitan Lima to help administer the program—organizations that otherwise would not have existed.

This is not to suggest that the Left simply "created" these organizations for its own political objectives, but to raise theoretical questions about the way in which the state, even at the local level, constitutes civil society. This also forces us to think about what might happen to these organizations after the Left has gone from power. In the 1990s, the Fujimori government was able to manipulate its control over state resources to co-opt and control these organizations in ways that Schönwälder cannot account for, which is particularly problematic since he highlights the Vaso de Leche program as the stellar example of the Left's success in promoting popular participation.

The author is equally sanguine about the nature of the Left's relationship with popular movements, suggesting that it was not until the IU's split in 1989 that competition and pressure among the distinct parties led to undesirable practices such as clientelism and co-optation. While the leftist municipality under Barrantes may have been better than most at avoiding such practices, the same cannot be said of the local municipal governments run by IU, many of which succumbed to the same practices of clientelism and co-optation as the "traditional" parties they railed against. This contributed to an erosion of support for the IU in 1986 and beyond...