by Todd Gordon
In their recent study of “water grabbing” in the Peruvian mining industry, engineers and social scientists Milagros Sosa and Magreet Zwarteveen have scrupulously documented multinational mining companies’ expropriation of water resources in the country. They show how large mining operations have fundamentally altered how, and by whom, water is controlled.764 The net effect of these operations is the reconfiguration of water governance in Peru, whereby marginalized local communities lose access to and control over water. They are “effectively being dispossessed by losing their water rights.”765
HISTORICAL BACKDROP: RACE, CLASS, GEOGRAPHY, TERROR
One useful point of departure for understanding the historical trajectory of Peru’s political economy and social struggles are some of the foundational insights in the work of the country’s preeminent Marxist theorist of the early twentieth century, José Carlos Mariátegui. Central emphases running throughout Mariátegui’s writings are precisely those which continue to animate—albeit in new forms—much of Canada’s foreign policy in Latin America in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—the history of colonialism, the world market and dynamics of imperialism in a an asymmetrically patterned world system of states, the uneven and combined development of capitalism in late-developing societies, and the enduring legacies of racism through slavery and conquest.
Mariátegui begins from the premise that the Spanish conquest of Peru “destroyed economic and social forms that were born spontaneously from the Peruvian land and people,” forms which were “nourished by an indigenous sense of life.”766 The conquest was, above all, “a terrible carnage,” after which the “political and economic organization of the colony…continued the extermination of the Indigenous race. The viceroyalty established a system of brutal exploitation.”767 In what is probably his most famous essay, “The Land Problem,” Mariátegui describes Peru’s economy in the early twentieth century as “colonial,” in the sense that its “movement, its development, are subordinated to the interests and the necessities of the markets in London and New York.”768 Peru is reduced to supplying the primary products to the dominant imperial powers, as well as serving as a market for their manufactured goods. Elsewhere, he charts a large part of the flow of profits from mining, commerce, and transportation leaving Peru for capitals based in the imperial countries, forcing the South American country into a position of requesting them back through loans and the acquisition of debt.769 Mariátegui also notes the way in which imperialism “does not allow any of these semicolonial peoples, whom it exploits as a market for capital and goods and as a source for raw materials, to have an economic program of nationalization and industrialization.” The recurring crisis of the Peruvian economy “arises from this rigid determination of national production created by forces of the world capitalist market.”770
Unique to Mariátegui’s work in this period is the systematic treatment of the racialized character that uneven and combined development assumed in republican Peru. “Feudal and bourgeois elements in our countries have the same contempt for the Indians, as well as for the blacks and mulattos, as do the white imperialists,” Mariátegui stresses in his dissident address (read in his absence) to the First Latin American Communist Conference in Buenos Aires in 1929:
The ruling class’s racist sentiment acts in a manner totally favorable to imperialist penetration. The native [Peruvian, not indigenous] lord or bourgeois has nothing in common with their pawns of color. Class solidarity is added to racial solidarity or prejudice to make the national bourgeoisie docile instruments of Yankee or British imperialism. And that feeling extends to much of the middle class, who imitate the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in their disdain for the plebeian of color, even when it is quite obvious that they come from a mixed background.771
“The republic has the responsibility to raise the status of the Indian,” Mariátegui notes in the essay “Peru’s Principal Problem.” “And contrary to this duty, the republic has impoverished the Indians. It has compounded their depression and exasperated their misery. The republic has meant for the Indians the ascent of a new ruling class that has systematically taken their lands.”772 Considering the centrality to Mariátegui’s framework of the racialized character of economic and political development in Peru, it is not surprising that a politics of anti-racism, and especially of indigenous liberation, proliferates throughout his discussions of emancipatory strategy and the potential sources of liberation.
Many of the themes taken up in the work of Mariátegui—racial, class, and geographic divides between coastal oligarchic elites rooted in Lima and the indigenous communities of the Andean highlands and Amazonian lowlands, waves of racist dispossession of indigenous peasants by light-skinned Peruvian elites allied with foreign capitalists, the subordination of Peru to the dominant powers of the world market, and the resistance to these injustices offered by indigenous peasants and Peruvian workers and the poor—have been of continued relevance to Peruvian reality throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first.
The local dynamics of the Cold War in Peru merely intensified long-standing patterns. Beginning in the late 1950s, a powerful indigenous-peasant movement was forged in the Andean highlands, weakening and threatening the hegemony of the Peruvian ruling class. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 further inspired peasant movements, rural guerrilla formations, and urban labour activism in Peru in the 1960s, as it did other movements and popular organizations elsewhere in Latin America.773 The worker and peasant protests which continued to grow over the course of the 1960s constituted a New Left of a breadth and depth which was never matched in the country in the often devastating decades that followed.774
A coup by the armed forces in 1962 was the first signal of a response from above to the growing momentum of social movements from below, and this was followed six years later by a second coup in 1968, this time under the leadership of reformist-nationalist generals. “The experiment in authoritarian nationalist reform launched by the Peruvian military in 1968,” notes historian Gerardo Rénique, “did not solve the crisis of oligarchic legitimacy that began in the late 1950s, but merely postponed its resolution.”775 According to Rénique, once the military had allowed for the return of democratic rule in 1980, “the country was in an even more volatile situation than it had been in the 1960s.”776
The stage had been set for the most extreme period of political violence in the republic’s history, the civil war between 1980 and 1992, in which the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Peruvian state were the principal players.777 Peru’s deep historical backdrop of geographically uneven capitalist development, intense levels of class-based inequality, racism, and repressive violence on the part of military and paramilitary allies trained in U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, conjoined in the 1980s and early 1990s with the the fundamentalist strain of Maoism adopted by Sendero to produce catastrophic levels of violence. “Although the Peruvian state had previously used arbitrary detentions, killings, torture, exile, and deportation to discourage mass action and eliminate opposition leaders,” Rénique points out, “during the 1980s war…‘traditional’ modes of repression gave way to harsher forms of exemplary and punitive violence aimed against civilian men, women, and children.”778
So-called “death caravans” run by the military
carried out rapes, tortured, executed and disappeared not just alleged subversives and their relatives but also college professors and students; they also corralled peasant villagers into strategic hamlets and arbitrarily detained and harassed thousands of citizens, including large numbers of journalists and lawyers.779
The state justified these actions with reference to the “just war” it was carrying out against terrorist subversives. Mobilizing the well-honed racism of coastal elites in the capital, the Peruvian military tended to see the rural indigenous population of the Andean highlands in particular as “natural” allies and social bases of Sendero, and
thus there was often a distinctly racialized character to the repression of civilians carried out by the Peruvian state and right-wing paramilitaries.
Meanwhile, Sendero saw anyone without explicit allegiances to the guerrilla movement as obstacles standing in the way of the successful resolution of its revolutionary war against the Peruvian state, or worse, collaborators of that state. “It executed leaders of the many unions, peasant federations, women’s groups, neighborhood organizations, and student federations who had not pledged allegiance,” Rénique, together here with anthropologist Deborah Poole, points out. “Activists, elected officials, nuns, priests, nongovernmental organization workers, and local government functionaries were also targeted, often in public executions of ‘people’s trials’.”780
According to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (June 2001—August 2003), roughly seventy thousand people were killed between 1980 and 2000, with 54 percent of casualties coming at the hands of Sendero—an anomalous proportion of deaths perpetrated by a guerrilla group in any Latin American civil conflict in the twentieth century, as in other cases the vast proportion of killing was done by the armed forces and allied paramilitary groupings.781 Nonetheless, the atrocities committed by the state and its paramilitary allies were near equal in number and stature, argue close observers of Peru, such as Poole and Rénique. The country was increasingly militarized, and special powers were granted to the executive branch during the administrations of Fernando Belaúnde (1980–1985) and Alan García (1985–1990). “Curiously,” Poole and Rénique point out,
among the most frequent targets of the state’s terrorism laws were the same people targeted by the PCP-SL [Sendero]. Grassroots leaders and elected officials from the United Left coalition (at the moment the country’s second most important electoral force) were charged as sympathizers or terrorists. Antiterrorist legislation also provided justification for rounding up all the dark-skinned cholos and indios who the state perceived as the “natural” allies of Sendero Luminoso.782
FUJIMORI AND AUTHORITARIAN NEOLIBERAL RULE
Alberto Fujimori was elected president on a far-Right ticket in 1990, promising a combination of hard-line policies against Sendero terrorism; more power to the executive office; further militarization of Peruvian society; and the establishment of a coordinated and centralized national intelligence service, to be directed by the now notorious Vladimiro Montesinos.783 In 1992, Fujimori’s popularity was strengthened when, thanks to a pre-existing police surveillance operation, Abimael Guzmán, the leader of Sendero, was captured, and the civil war was for all intents and purposes brought to a close. Still unsatisfied with his powers as president, however, Fujimori launched an auto-golpe, or self-coup, against his own government in April 1992, suspending Congress and delegating unrestricted authority to the executive. In so doing he established unmitigated authoritarian rule in Peru that would last until 2000.
As was the case elsewhere in Latin America, the concentration of power within the Peruvian state, and the violence unleashed against any and all progressive expressions of opposition to state authority, under Fujimori, provided the necessary political freedom of manoeuver to simultaneously introduce an extreme economic program of neoliberal restructuring; this economic dimension of authoritarian rule under Fujimori was ultimately the domestic basis for the “mining boom” into which Canadian foreign direct investment would flow in abundance over the following decades. “In this respect,” Rénique observes,
the counterinsurgency launched against not just Sendero but also the broader Peruvian Left and popular movement not only enhanced the military capabilities of the state but, more important, expanded its ideological hold over the political and cultural imagination of a society in which the memory of war and the privatizations of neoliberal reforms have combined to undermine the appeals of collective organization and the critical stance of utopian thinking.784
The market reforms under Fujimori were multifaceted, but their underlying motive was to secure a juridical environment in which the rights of foreign direct investors in the mining industry could be held over and above virtually all other considerations. Inalienable communal property rights of indigenous and peasant communities, established in the 1920s, were seen as a serious obstacle standing in the way of private mining development. Likewise, legal conditionalities for approval for foreign concessions in extractive industries were seen as prohibitively bureaucratic, particularly those involving environmental obligations and restrictions. The attack on these and other components of excessive “red tape” in the mining industry by the Fujimori regime was enabled precisely by the concentration of decision-making power within the hands of the executive.785
In a single year, 1991, an entire program of structural reform was introduced. This involved a series of laws designed to guarantee the stability of Foreign Direct Investment. Environmental, land, and indigenous communities laws were passed in lightening succession, the motive of all of them subject to the logic of extending foreign investment in private mining as commodity prices began to rise on the international market. The dynamic of the 1991 legislation culminated, ultimately, in a new General Mining Law and a new Constitution in 1993, both of which consolidated the reforms by favouring the rights of foreign investors in the country in myriad ways.786 A new land law of 1995, implementing many of the themes embodied in the undemocratic constitution of 1993, made it possible to commercialize indigenous and peasant communal lands for the first time since the 1920s.787
Other small peasant landowners were also forced into selling off their land to facilitate large-scale mining operations under the control of foreign capital. Landowners’ property rights in Peru do not extend below the surface, as the rights to subsoil minerals belong to the state. In the case of any recalcitrance on the part of a landowner—for example, refusal to sell at the market price or above—Fujimori’s reforms made it possible for the state to expropriate the property in question. In effect, this facilitated transfer of title to the mining company. The threat of this legal possibility alone stimulated huge transfers of private and communally held land to foreign mining firms across large swathes of Peruvian territory.788 Fujimori also smashed residual protections of workers in the extant labour code, introduced a floating exchange rate, and eliminated restrictions on remittances of profits, dividends, and royalties.789 Legislation exempted new mining operations from royalty payments, and under the new rules multinational mining companies investing in Peru were not required to pay the standard 30 percent tax on profit until they had recovered their initial investments.790 Meanwhile, at a regulatory level, the Ministry of Energy and Mines was simultaneously made responsible for: “(i) promoting investment in new mining operations; (ii) granting mining concessions; and (iii) reviewing and approving the environmental impact assessments required for new exploration and extraction activities.”791 In addition to these economic incentives and regulatory laxities, the military defeat of Sendero Luminoso made the investment environment more attractive to foreign capital. The end of guerrilla activities in the Andean region, “allowed geologists to travel safely through the highlands in search of new mineral deposits and to establish new mining claims,” the geographer Jeffrey Todd Bury points out. “Consequently, in 1992, more mining claims were staked than for the previous fifteen years.”792
CONTINUITIES IN POST-FUJIMORI PERU
In terms of political economy, the continuities between Fujimori and his immediate successors (Alejandro Toledo, 2001–2006; Alan García, 2006–2011) were pronounced. The orthodox economic mixture of neoliberal policies that had transformed the country into a sought-after destination for new mining investors was continued with striking fidelity by both Toledo, a former employee of the World Bank, and García, an erstwhile left-populist president (1985–1990) turned born-again neoliberal during his second administration.
If the economic trajectory remained largely unchanged in post-Fujimori Peru, however, the end of
explicit authoritarian rule opened up new space for organizing social movements, and anti-mining protests rose to the surface in a dramatic way, embroiling a number of Canadian mining concessions into new conflicts with local communities in the process. What had been relatively isolated mining protests throughout the 1990s made an organizational advance into a national network of activism just at the end of Fujimori’s rule, in 1999, with the establishment of the Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería (National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining, CONACAMI).793
In the context of Fujimorni’s authoritarian rule, strike activity and protests of various sorts experienced an overall decline. This pattern changed dramatically under Toledo, with the weekly magazine Caretas documenting eight hundred separate protests in Lima in 2002 alone.794 A major anti-neoliberal protest threw the city of Arequipa into crisis in 2002, when citizens rose up to protest the privatization of the municipal electricity companies. More than any other sector of conflict, however, mining became the new frontier of emergent activism and protest. While these protests were geographically fragmented and more often than not locally organized and unarticulated at the national level, all of their local expressions began to have a national impact economically and politically in the mining sector.795 One detailed scholarly study of social conflict in Peru between 2004 and 2011 notes that the “total number of social conflicts…considering all types of disputes, has increased dramatically since 2004.” The study goes on to show that the conflicts in question:
