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Either side claimed to be defending democracy from the opposite. Each appealed to Peru’s navy, which had historically performed a job of final arbiter, nearly akin to that of a supreme courtroom. The general public, deeply polarized, cut up. The navy was additionally cut up.
The Themes of the Jan. 6 Home Committee Hearings
On the vital second, sufficient political and navy elites signaled assist for Mr. Fujimori that he prevailed. They got here collectively informally, every reacting to occasions individually, and lots of interesting to completely different ends, resembling Mr. Fujimori’s financial agenda, notions of stability, or an opportunity for his or her get together to prevail underneath the brand new order.
Peru fell into quasi-authoritarianism, with political rights curtailed and elections nonetheless held however underneath phrases that favored Mr. Fujimori, till he was faraway from workplace in 2000 over corruption allegations. Final yr, his daughter ran for the presidency as a right-wing populist, dropping by lower than 50,000 votes.
Fashionable Latin America has repeatedly confronted such crises. That is due much less to any shared cultural traits, many students argue, than to a historical past of Chilly Conflict meddling that weakened democratic norms. It additionally stems from American-style presidential methods, and deep social polarization that paves the best way for excessive political fight.
Presidential democracies, by dividing energy amongst competing branches, create extra alternatives for rival places of work to conflict, even to the purpose of usurping each other’s powers. Such methods additionally blur questions of who’s in cost, forcing their branches to resolve disputes informally, on the fly and at occasions by pressure.
Venezuela, as soon as the area’s oldest democracy, endured a sequence of constitutional crises as President Hugo Chávez clashed with judges and different authorities our bodies that blocked his agenda. Every time, Mr. Chávez, and later his successor, Nicolás Maduro, appealed to authorized and democratic ideas to justify weakening these establishments till, over time, the leaders’ actions, ostensibly to save lots of democracy, had all however gutted it.
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