Have Typewriter, Will Run

A crisis has taken hold in Peru that might soon make the present doings in Central America look like a curtain-raiser. Shining Path guerrillas are on a bloodthirsty rampage. Inflation in the last quarter of 1988 was 20,000 per cent, which in a year would multiply prices a terrifying two hundred fold. “Populist” President Alan García has seen his approval rating fall over the last two years from 70 to 13 per cent. In the jungle, drug lords rule their fiefdoms and the Maoist Shining Path (which finances its operations by drug trafficking) controls most roads into Lima. Guerrilla bombings of electric-power lines cause almost daily blackouts. Water, too, is in short supply. Each week brings new rumors of a military coup.

The electoral scene is ominous as well. A leading candidate in the upcoming presidential election, Marxist Alfonso Barrantes Lingán, an admirer of Mikhail Gorbachev, is surrounded by Soviet advisors. Peru’s military regime of the 1970s brought into the country millions of dollars’ worth of Soviet tanks, jet planes, and helicopters, and there are now more Soviet military advisors and diplomatic officials in Peru than in Nicaragua. Peru is in the throes of an exceptional economic crisis. Nationalized industries are nearing bankruptcy. Unemployment is at a record high. The country’s economy is thought to have regressed by 8 per cent last year. In the whole Western Hemisphere, Peru outperformed only Nicaragua and Haiti. According to a recent poll, two-thirds of Peruvian teenagers wished they’d been born elsewhere.

RG

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Richard Grenier

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A crisis has taken hold in Peru that might soon make the present doings in Central America look like a curtain-raiser. Shining Path guerrillas are on a bloodthirsty rampage. Inflation in the last quarter of 1988 was 20,000 per cent, which in a year would multiply prices a terrifying two hundred fold. “Populist” President Alan García has seen his approval rating fall over the last two years from 70 to 13 per cent. In the jungle, drug lords rule their fiefdoms and the Maoist Shining Path (which finances its operations by drug trafficking) controls most roads into Lima. Guerrilla bombings of electric-power lines cause almost daily blackouts. Water, too, is in short supply. Each week brings new rumors of a military coup.

The electoral scene is ominous as well. A leading candidate in the upcoming presidential election, Marxist Alfonso Barrantes Lingán, an admirer of Mikhail Gorbachev, is surrounded by Soviet advisors. Peru’s military regime of the 1970s brought into the country millions of dollars’ worth of Soviet tanks, jet planes, and helicopters, and there are now more Soviet military advisors and diplomatic officials in Peru than in Nicaragua. Peru is in the throes of an exceptional economic crisis. Nationalized industries are nearing bankruptcy. Unemployment is at a record high. The country’s economy is thought to have regressed by 8 per cent last year. In the whole Western Hemisphere, Peru outperformed only Nicaragua and Haiti. According to a recent poll, two-thirds of Peruvian teenagers wished they’d been born elsewhere.