To forgive, divine

The ultimate superpower

In 1994 my employer looked longingly at the rising economic strength of Latin America and looked for ways to play in that market.  Chile had become a minerals powerhouse by developing copper mines based on new technologies to recover copper oxide ores.  We had missed the Chile miracle but were positioning ourselves for the economic rebirth of Peru.

The company canvassed its employees to find someone who might be willing to relocate to Peru for at least six months to gather information on which to decide about investing a few million dollars to establish an engineering office in that country.  Based on my experience in Colombia I stuck my hand up and overstated my language skills.  To my surprise, I was invited to take a trip to Lima and start investigating the business potential.

When I arrived, Peruvian authorities had just arrested Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist revolutionary group that had terrorized Peru for almost a decade. Their activities had begun to migrate into Lima where they set off a series of devastating car bombs. Toleration for the terrorists went to zero and something had to be done.  The snake’s head was removed but there remained a lot of uncertainty – the country had almost collapsed into chaos after all. 

In 1990, a Peruvian agricultural engineer of Japanese descent named Alberto Fujimori had made a run for the presidency.  His opponent was a prolific and very good writer of aristocratic descent named Mario Vargas Llosa.  Peru, like most Latin countries, is highly stratified socially.  Mr. Fujimori, “El Chino”, was not from, nor would he ever be able to enter, the Peruvian Brahmin class.  But these were extraordinary times and the Brahmins were willing to take a flyer on him. Certainly the more impoverished rural population, pummeled by the Sendero Luminoso, were ready to try out a new presidential approach.

Against all odds, Fujimori won the election and immediately declared war on the terrorists.  At the urging of the United States, he employed the services of a Rasputin-like, ex-military and brilliant operator called Vladimiro Montesinos. Together they implemented Plan Verde – a strategy to destroy the Senderos.  They marshaled the military and organized armed citizens’ groups called Ronderos Campesinos to fight the terrorists in the first instance.  Fujimori also took the fight to the Universidad Católica, ground zero of the Sendero forces in Lima.  Television reports of him being pelted with tomatoes and other vegetables showed unmistakable determination in his eyes as he left, promising to return.

A wealthy Peruvian friend, in discussing Mr. Fujimori, stated that in the 1980s, he and others like him had sent their money to Miami and their kids to relatives in the US or Europe.  Peru during the presidency of Alan Garcia was a failed state.  Yet it took Fujimori less than four years to turn it around and give people the confidence to bring back their money and their kids.  My friend was a devoted fan of Mr. Fujimori and he recognized that sometimes the niceties of a liberal democracy were ignored to effectuate that turnaround.

From 1990 until 1994, Fujimori created an auto-coup to change the Constitution and provoke a new election.  With greater control of Congress, he pushed through economic reforms and privatizations known as “Fujishock”.  The country was in a state of chaos during this period but, by late 1994 when I first visited, the economy was beginning to turn and in 1995, Peru had the fastest growing economy in the world.  My company wanted to be there to participate in that growth.  It was an exciting time.

It was clear that the business climate in Peru was conducive to building a new engineering business but there was considerable doubt about how long that climate would last.  It was not altogether clear to me how I would assess the potential length of that positive business cycle.  The economic history of Peru in that regard was not comforting.

I spent the first month of my time in Peru meeting with as many people in the mining industry as possible, both expatriate North Americans and Peruvians.  At the same time, I read all the political history of the country I could find and tried to understand whether Fujimori’s government was stable and western-directed or would it soon be susceptible to collapse from internecine fighting. 

At a chance meeting with the manager of the Reuters news agency in Peru, I asked how to get an interview with Fujimori.  I was given the phone number of the presidential press secretary and some advice on how to handle the request.  A friend working for a Calgary newspaper gave me press credentials and I applied for an interview.  The press secretary called back within a few days and two weeks later I was ushered into the presidential palace for my interview.  I was told that I had 20 minutes and walked out 2 1/2 hours later.

We covered a lot of topics, and I was impressed with his understanding of Peruvian political and economic history.  I had just studied the topic so it was fresh in my mind, and he was easily able to compare and contrast his government with the earlier governments of presidents like Augusto Leguía and the Pardos.  What particularly impressed me was his courage.  He told me that the most difficult problem he faced as president was finding people who were willing to serve in his cabinet.  A Sendero “fatwa” had been issued following the election and no one wanted to exit their mortal coil with a Sendero bullet in the back of their head. 

This led to a discussion about what sort of people he wanted in his cabinet.  To my delight and surprise, he said that he chose engineers rather than lawyers and professional politicians.  To complete my contract with the newspaper that had given me press credentials, I wrote an opinion editorial that favourably compared Mr. Fujimori’s engineers with Canada’s government of lawyers and politicians. A cabinet of engineers!  I have been a Fujimorista ever since.

Based on Fujimori’s intelligence, determination and courage as demonstrated during the interview, I recommended that we invest in building the engineering company.  As far as I know, it remains profitable to this day.

Mr. Fujimori died on September 11, 2024.  The latter years of his presidency were tumultuous to say the least and he fled Peru for Japan in 2000.  In 2005 he returned to Peru via Chile with the intention of running for the presidency in 2006.  The government of Chile arrested him for crimes against humanity and he was extradited to Lima to stand trial.  In 2009 he was convicted of human rights violations for his role in the kidnappings and judicial killings by the Grupo Colina.  Ultimately, he served 16 years of imprisonment and was released in December 2023 on humanitarian grounds.

During my time in Peru, I had witnessed houses scrubbed of graffiti, parks planted with grass and flowers, rising employment and a swelling middle class.  In 1989 everyone wanted to leave the country.  In 2024 the economic growth of the country is assumed.  The entirety of the differences in those states of mind was due to Mr. Fujimori.

After his death, the government of Peru gave Mr. Fujimori a state funeral and the length of the visitation had to be extended due to the size of the crowds wanting to pay their respects.  How is it possible that an authoritarian president, jailed for crimes against humanity could attract such devotion from the government and people of Peru?

In keeping with the theme of this substack, then, was Mr. Fujimori a bad guy or a good guy?  How can some people call him a depraved, antiestablishment killer while others mourn the loss of their small “s” saviour.  Killer or saviour, he can’t be both.  Well, he can’t be both if we base our worldview upon a binary, Manichean world in which there is no nuance. 

If you think that the ends never justify the means and that one man’s revolutionary is another man’s criminal and that these rules are immutable then Mr. Fujimori broke a lot of rules and may be an unrepentant bad guy.  If you think that life is about compromise, that revolutionary excess is tantamount to war and that self defense, once established, needs no justification then Mr. Fujimori may be a good guy.  However, if you think that life is complex and there is never full disclosure of necessary information then you must conclude that only history will properly judge Mr. Fujimori.  

During the war between the Peruvian state and the Sendero Luminoso, an estimated 60,000 people died.  In the years following the decapitation of the leadership of the Sendero Luminoso and later the MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario de Tupac Amaru) Marxist revolutionaries, the death count plummeted and most of the victims were the armed revolutionaries.  With these facts in mind, I am prepared to cut Mr. Fujimori considerable slack based on the net benefits that his morally bumpy presidency produced.  It is complicated.

But so what?  Peru is a small, developing nation that has no significant impact on the rest of the world.  Its reign as the Vice Royalty of the New World is long over and no one cares that a bunch of mestizo Peruvians were killed.  Except perhaps me and their family members.

But what about the Palestinian citizens of Gaza?  Does it make sense that 40,000 non-combatant Palestinians should die for the 1,200 murders of October 7, 2023?  There are strong views on both sides of this issue but, once again, surely the history of Israel and Palestine is so fraught that there are no easy answers and perhaps our views should be more nuanced.  One can’t argue against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza without bearing in mind the prior ethnic cleansing of two million Jews and Christians from the Middle East.  One can’t feel umbrage about the lack of passage of Palestinians into Israel without accounting for their inability to enter Egypt or Jordan as well.  This is not to justify any of the violence of the Middle East but is to recognize that the centrifuge of history distributes rather than concentrates culpability in the horrifying scenes of the present.

Tomorrow, US citizens will vote in a highly contentious election for a new president.  A few days after that Canadians will pause to reflect on the immense sacrifices of previous generations.  “Lest we forget” is not an injunction to carry a grudge into the future but to promote peace and forgiveness as a way of giving meaning to those sacrifices.  I have never met a single veteran of the World Wars who exhorted me to carry the hot embers of hatred to retributively punish those who caused so much pain and sadness those many years ago.  We have moved on from the days of Hamilcar Barca it seems. Quit the contrary.  The veterans I spoke with hated war and urged peace. 

Forgiveness, said Gandhi, is the attribute of the strong.  Jesus told Peter that we are to forgive seventy times seven - that is, without end. The Peruvian people forgave their errant president, and I believe he died knowing that.  It was good for his family and the people of Peru to see the outpouring of respect for this man who redeemed a nation.  [Ironically, it is reported that Abimael Guzman and Vladimiro Montesinos, once mortal enemies, later occupied adjacent jail cells and became fast friends.]

We will soon know what reservoirs of forgiveness lay in the hands of the American electorate.  I think they are deep.  We can pray for the laying down of arms and mutual expressions of forgiveness from all sides on the world’s current battlegrounds.  And we can work towards mutual forgiveness to resolve the issues that plague Canadian society.

Life is complicated and virtually nothing is binary.  We do not live in a Manichean world but in a world of great complexity where fairness is rarely present and almost never contends in the great debates.  I am not a Pollyanna. Bad things happen habitually but if we are to find solutions to the great issues of the Middle East and Ukraine and the Koreas and the Indigenous reserves of Canada, we are going to have to open the apertures of our imaginations, put aside the horrors of the past, and ask,

“Ok, you did a bad thing and it has been recompensed. You must now stop and put an end to the violence and hatred. What are we going to do going forward?” 

The key words, unspoken, are “grace” and “forgiveness”.  Much easier said than done but we must start somewhere.