Peru’s enduring Neoliberal regime dates back to 1990, when Fujimori’s government betrayed his electoral promises of gradualism and started a radical economic shock and structural adjustment (Stokes 2002). Dominant literature explained this outcome as part of the wave of liberalization that swept crisis-stricken Latin America in the nineties, so called “Washington Consensus” (Williamson 1990, Yergin and Stanislaw 1998). In that sense, literature stressed that international and economic context exerted an overwhelming influence cancelling any route to escape “shock therapy”. In addition to this, the strengthening of the export-facing business elite and the diffusion of neoliberal technocratic blueprints after the 90s reforms helped to secure the resilience of the regime (Durand 2006, Dargent 2015, Grompone 2017). Nonetheless, in my view these explanations do not suffice to explain the specificity and degree of hegemony that neoliberalism has shown in Peru, mostly after the endurance that the regime has shown throughout the last two decades, facing similar challenges that in other countries of the region give way to pronounced political turns. Therefore, in this presentation, in contrast to the grand narrative of international diffusion of neoliberalism I stressed how Peru’s neoliberalism is an outcome of a longer historical process with many internal drivers that produce a creative translation of the neoliberal ideas.
I focus on two strands of ideas that blend in Peru’s neoliberal regime, that I reconstruct through novel archive material (newspapers, correspondence, grey literature, etc.). The first is the populist strategy of a neoliberalism from below that economist Hernando de Soto championed, with success, in the 1980s and that helps to understand the prominence of the shadow economy and informality in the country since the 1990s. The second, less studied as its roots are deeper, is an understanding of the problems of inflation and exchange rate that was hegemonize by neoliberal groups in the 1950s (contrasting to Latin-America) liberal period in Peru. Build around a successful liberal abolition of exchange controls in 1949 (being Peru one of the few countries at the time with floating exchange), this understanding had wide influence among elites and also the public sphere. Connecting the second to the first strand, I hypothesize that the existence of this domestic ideational resource helps the return of fiscal discipline and monetary dominance in the transition to neoliberalism in 1990. In that sense, I stress the interplay of the international influence with local material (peripherality, debt, informality, etc.), but also, ideological, contexts, when neoliberalism goes local (Ban 2016).
My aim is to build, from this specific case, a reflection about the specific ways that different Latin-American countries relate to policy trends, also how these different trends (like developmentalism or neoliberalism or populism), when inspected closer, also see its borders blurred. As we enter a period of political and ideological uncertainties, it is important to mobilize political economy and historical research to show similar problematics of the past.
