The Broker State and the 'Inevitability'of Progress: The Camisea Project and Indigenous Peoples in Peru (original) (raw)
Related papers
Latin American Research Review, 2016
In the first decade of the twenty-fi rst century, Latin America experienced a so called left turn that sought either to reform or eliminate the neoliberal institutions established during the 1980s and 1990s. However, although Peru has electoral, economic, and social processes similar to those of its neighbors, the neoliberal institutions established in Peru by the 1993 Constitution remain fi rmly in place. This article aims to understand the mechanisms sustaining Peru’s neoliberal regime since its creation. Why have these institutions survived and grown in strength in a regional environment that has been hostile to neoliberal legacies? The article answers that question, emphasizing the evolution of the balance of power between the precarious Peruvian political class and the empowered technocrats and bureaucrats within the state. The reformist politicians are too weak and amateurish to challenge the technobureaucrats within the state. Moreover, the article analyzes the different strategies deployed by technocrats and bureaucrats in order to ensure the continuity and stability of the neoliberal regime and its policies. Theoretically, the article suggests that institutional stability can arise from a daily process gradually shaped by actors and their strategies.
Notes on the "cycle of impugnment/contesting to neoliberalism in Latin America" (CINLA
2017
At the beginning of the 21st century a new political stage opened in Latin America, giving rise to governments opposed to neo-liberalism that had been hegemonic until then. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, plus Nicaragua, El Salvador and, briefly, Paraguay, set up a new regional political map whose main features (progressive, post-neoliberal, leftist, of "popular national consensus", neo-developmental, neo-extractive) were and remain the subject of debate. We opted to call this stage the "cycle of impugnment/contesting/challenging to neo-liberalism" (CINLA), to include common and more characteristic features which comprise all cases, beyond their national specificities. With this characterization we want to emphasize the idea of process, moment of hegemonic dispute and not a completed stage. Naming matters: the "post" approach (as in post-neoliberalism) does not help us to advance in the understanding of what is going on, it just means that one period or cycle comes after the other. This "post" framework also risks of falling into determinism. If the emphasis is put on the end of the commodities super-cycle, the conclusion will be the end of the contesting government. But reality is much more complex than this, and the features that singularize it are linked with political and social specificities, as well as economic. The differences in the policies implemented by governments in the region during the CINLA are related with the depth of the crisis that originated them in each case and with the political viability of projects that attempted new political experiences, autonomous of neo-liberalism and its most prototypical beneficiaries. However, such policies did not transcend the stage of neoliberal accumulation, whose main features are the prevalence of global financialization and the intensification of the exploitation of natural resources (extractivism). This does not mean to ascribe to the hypothesis that the continuity of the
PERUVIAN ECONOMIC POLICY IN THE 1980S: FROM ORTHODOXY TO HETERODOXY AND BACK
This paper examines the dramatic fluctuations in Peruvian macroeconomic policy in the 1980s. We trace the failure of "orthodox" or neoliberal policy in the first half of the decade to external shocks, economic inconsistencies, and the erosion of the state's institutional and administrative capacities. These difficulties paved the way for the triumph of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) party in 1985 and the subsequent adoption of a "heterodox" economic program. This program "worked" briefly, then collapsed owing to inattention to the external sector, a flawed approach to inflation control, rising class conflict, and the state's continuing inability to implement its decisions. We close by reviewing the legacy of the decade: deepening social cleavages, highly volatile politics, international isolation, a severely weakened state, and a populace wary of new policy shifts.