April 20, 2019
Peru’s former charismatic president, Alan García, once hailed ‘the John F. Kennedy of Latin America,’ killed himself with a pistol this past Wednesday. What a tragedy and waste of a brilliant man.
In 1985, I flew to Lima to interview García for New York’s Wall Street Journal. He had just assumed office; I believe I was the first non-Latin American journalist to interview him.
García was successor to the nationalist firebrand Haya de la Torre, founder of the militant APRA party, whose aim was to nationalize foreign holdings across the Americas and send the Yankees home.
Lima, Peru’s capital of 9.8 million, was founded by the Conquistador Pizarro in 1535, almost a full century before my own hometown, New York City. Peru’s capital was dark, dusty, cold and spooky. Millions of native Quechua-speaking Peruvians had flocked down to Lima from the impoverished high Andes. The streets teemed with beggars and pickpockets.
The crime situation in Lima was so bad that as I was being driven to the president’s palace by his chief of staff, he warned me to remove my watch and glasses. Why? “We can be attacked even on the steps of the palace,” he replied.
I was finally introduced to Alan García, the new president. He couldn’t speak English; my Spanish was awful. But we found we were both graduates of French-speaking universities, he the Sorbonne in Paris and I the University of Geneva. So we settled into comfortable French, which relaxed the amiable president and me. I quite liked him.
Our interview was his first chance to address Americans, and, notably, Wall Street. Peru was up to it ears in foreign debt and unable to exploit its vast minerals industry without new foreign loans. The country’s 19.5 million people were seething with misery, poverty and hopelessness.
Up in the high Andes, rebellion was underway, led by two indigenous Marxist outfits, the Túpac Amaru and larger Shining Path. The latter crazies adopted Maoism and actually sought to turn Peru into a second Stalinist Albania! Nutty as they were, the Shining Path wild men inflicted grave damage on Peru until the next president, the iron-fisted Japanese Peruvian Alberto Fujimori, crushed them. (Fujimori is currently in prison for murder and kidnapping).
In the course of our interview, I got García to admit that, yes, he was a socialist, but of the soft European type. After I reported García’s comment in the Wall Street Journal a big furor erupted in the US, where few knew anything about Peru.
Headlines: ‘García admits he is a socialist’. There were hysterical claims Peru was to be a beachhead for Moscow and Havana. All nonsense of course, but red alarm bells went off in Washington and New York and the bankers took fright.
I felt badly. My editors were looking for sensations, not factual news. What García was, in fact, was a poor economic administrator and an academic ivory tower dreamer with no idea how business worked. Under him, inflation hit 7,500%.
He was a forerunner to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.
At the end of his first term in 1990, García left in semi-disgrace and went to hide out at his old sociology faculty in Paris. In my view, sociology is the biggest quackery in academia except for gender studies. Phrenology is more reliable. García and I discussed the tedious works of French sociologist Émile Durkheim well into the night.
In 2006, Garcia managed to get himself re-elected in Peru, this time promising financial rectitude, honesty, and sound economic strategies. His successors were deposed or jailed for corruption. Garcia started well but soon got himself into a peck of trouble.
The principal source was Latin America’s largest engineering/energy conglomerate, the Brazil-based leviathan Odebrecht that ignited the region’s largest ever corruption scandal. The Brazilian firm paid out at least $788 million in bribes to heads of state and politicians in 12 Latin nations to secure lucrative business contracts.
So far, the monster scandal, known in Brazil as ‘Lava Jato’ (car wash) has brought down former presidents of Brazil, Collor de Mello, Dilma Rousseff, Lula da Silva; three Peruvian former presidents, and leaders in Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama and Dominican Republic. The Mother of all bribery cases.
Alan García was facing arrest in this scandal. As Peruvian police arrived, he shot himself in the head and died soon after – the true man’s way out. He was a charming man and I will miss him. Adiós, el presidente!
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2019
This post is in: Peru
Mr Margolis, thanks for your article.
Here to follow are a my few brief punctual comments. Take them as from the perspective of a Peruvian who lived in Lima during Garcia’s first government and until 1991.
– “[1985] Peru was up to it ears in foreign debt and unable to exploit its vast minerals industry without new foreign loans. ”
Although I won’t front an apology for the clear mismanagement and ineptitude of presidencies and governments in Peru, we have to understand that the 80s were macro-economically a perfect storm for Peru and LatinAmerica as a whole, due mostly to the early 1980s corrective recession and interest-rate hikes in the US, among other things.
– “.. two indigenous Marxist outfits, the Túpac Amaru and larger Shining Path. The latter crazies adopted Maoism and actually sought to turn Peru into a second Stalinist Albania.”
Actually, to be more precise, the MRTA (Tupac Amaru) was more Marxist-Leninist, of the lineage of Che Guevara’s guerrillas, while Shining Path was Maoist, with the goal of turning Peru into PolPot’s Cambodia. Crazies both in ideology, but pragmatic as any terrorist group in the world who learns to make a living accepting vast amounts of revenues from narco-trafficking groups, who in-turn benefit from a distracted and decimated police and law-enforcing agencies.
– “.. García was, in fact, was a poor economic administrator and an academic ivory tower dreamer with no idea how business worked. Under him, inflation hit 7,500%. He was a forerunner to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.”
Just to clarify, Garcia was a forerunner to Chavez in terms of hyper-inflation records, but not ideologically. And that was Garcia’s saving grace, he was a democrat, not a Cuban-puppet dictator.
In summary, let me agree with you that it is a human tragedy the suicide of Mr Garcia. I don’t have first-hand experience to affirm whether or not he corrected himself and his mistakes of the past during his 2nd presidency, but at least that’s my impression from afar. However people tell me corruption was still rampant then, as it was during other president’s terms. And that’s the evil that has to be fought.
Compassion for the man, yes, but no compassion for the dirty money and corruption coming from foreign states and narco-groups.
For that reason, I leave my children the dignity of my decisions,to my colleagues a sign of pride.And my corpse as a sign of my contempt towards my adversaries because I already fulfilled the mission that I set my self; his last lines at his suicidal note.
…and was it hand written or typed?
.
Dik
I’m not a conspiracy ‘clown’ and have a high regard for the veracity of Eric’s anecdotes.
.
That said, I have a real problem with the truth these days. I have a tough time deciding on what is truth, what is fiction, and what is somewhat contrived from the truth.
.
In the extreme, I cannot state with certainty that Garcia even pulled the trigger. It’s too tidy and convenient for an ‘exit’.
.
Dik
Unending bribery scandals and rumours of bribery scandals persist indeed. Canada’s tawdry little SNC Lavalin prosecution seems so petty compared to the 1950’s to 1970’s Lockheed bribery scandals, let alone Lava Jato. Leave aside any question of American complicity in human rights abuse or corruption by Generals, Crown Princes, or Presidents who buy American, say they hate communism, and are toad-like regional allies of America? Cui bono to try and tag ex-President Garcia?
In theory, supposing Peru’s ex-President Garcia actually seems to have received ‘Lava Jato’ anything back in the day? Could it have been an indirect small bribe, not to him personally, but a bribe to an associate shielded from Garcia’s direct operational view? An associate who blamed Garcia when caught?
Eric, you describe Garcia as naive in the ways of business and commerce; and worse, a professor of Sociology! Who more likely to be a petty dupe, not an active crook? Surly no American could have had a hand in this?
Interesting column. I sometimes wonder if most of the countries in Latin America, be it Peru or anywhere else, and for that matter in most of the developing world, are really cut out to be democracies. There is nothing in the deep histories of the Latin American countries that would point them in the direction of democracy – a concept that came from within the cultures of First World countries, notably Britain, where it has been more or less successful. I happen to think that most developing countries would be better off if they could be governed by benevolent dictatorships, of which there have been many across the Third World. Of course, there have also been at least as many incompetent, corrupt, and /or blood-thirsty dictatorships to match. But, once the evil genie of democracy was unleashed onto the Third World countries, it was impossible to get it back into the bottle from whence it came.