Ballot-Rigging in Peru

The trouble in Peru is just beginning. Three days of ballot tallies ended last Wednesday in the announcement that a runoff vote would take place in June between the two leading candidates for the Peruvian presidency, incumbent Alberto Fujimori and opposition leader Alejandro Toledo. President Fujimori is vying for his third straight term in office, but his campaign has been recently marred by allegations of corruption. Most recently, it is likely that Fujimori tampered with the ballots. When "official" election returns suggested a Fujimori victory--even though exit polls 12 hours earlier indicated that the Peruvian president would not have a required majority of electoral support--the international community responded in uproar.

The United States, currently allied with Fujimori in his fight against Shining Path guerrilla warfare, passed a bipartisan resolution early last week that implored Fujimori to maintain the integrity of the electoral process and threatened to "modify its political and economic relations with Peru" should he fail to comply. A few days later, it was announced that Fujimori had fallen short of the required majority by about 20,000 votes.

The U.S. should make it clear that it will impose economic sanctions on Peru if Fujimori continues to tamper with election results. These would not be ineffectual threats. The economic situation in Peru is delicate. Although Fujimori was able to reduce national hyperinflation in 1990 to the current 3.7 percent, it came at the price of huge unemployment--over half the nation's working-age population lacks a steady job. Toledo, a shoe shiner who later trained as an economist at Harvard, has been able to gain popular support by focusing on the nation's impoverished masses. Such sanctions would seriously undercut Fujimori's already dwindling support base.

Equally deplorable as Fujimori's ballot-rigging is the president's troubling disregard for the rule of law. Three years ago, Fujimori resorted to suspicious measures when he fired three judges who refused to abrogate a constitutional prohibition against presidents seeking third terms. Fujimori eventually found a constitutional loophole that rendered his bid admissible: His Congress decided that he could run for not one, but two, extra terms since the original amendment that prohibited three terms was written during Fujimori's first term in office. In the area of civil liberties, the government does no better. Trials are swift and arbitrary; 30-year-old Lori Berenson, an American convicted of treason by a kangaroo court, is currently imprisoned without heat, light or running water.

This is not to say there is no hope that the next president of Peru will be elected in a fair and democratic manner. Fujimori's actions are curiously parallel to those of former Argentine Peronist President Carlos Saul Menem who also pressed until he found a way around the Argentine constitution, offering him the possibility of a third term, in 1998. Yet despite his backhanded methods, Menem was defeated in Argentina's elections last fall.

The political climate in Latin America is changing. Now that most nations enjoy a greater degree of national security than they did a decade ago--Peru was in chaos when Fujimori first came to office--it is time that they move away from autocratic, superficial democratic rule, toward true national consensus-building. In this new age, dissolving Congress and the Supreme Court, as Fujimori did in 1992, is not acceptable. Whether Peruvian voters choose Fujimori or Toledo in June, one hopes that their ballots will reflect a justified confidence in the integrity of the electoral system.