Alberto Fujimori, a little know university professor of Japanese descent, won the 1990 presidential election by a commanding majority. Following his election, Peruvian pundits referred to his campaign as a tsunami, a powerful metaphor highlighting the velocity and magnitude of his final electoral surge. With a straightforward campaign platform promising “Honesty, Technology and Work,” Fujimori promised an era of socioeconomic and political reform. Instead, he presided over a decade of increasingly authoritarian rule, marked by a level of graft and corruption unknown in Peru.

Fujimori's election led to enormous change in countless areas of socioeconomic and political life, including the end of the traditional party system in Peru. In the 1980 presidential election, four political parties, Acción Popular (AP), Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), and Izquierda Unida (IU), won 97 percent of the vote, and in the 1986 municipal elections, they took over 90 percent. The traditional parties appeared to be vibrant and robust; however, a weak electoral tradition, an inexperienced electorate, and the disappointing performance of traditional parties in office undermined their appeal. As the established parties were discredited, voters increasingly sought options outside the existing political system. Fujimori's victory in the June 1990 runoff sanctioned this decline. During the campaign, Fujimori created a new model of electoral organization known as the disposable party. Described by some observers as independent movements, disposable parties were seldom more than electoral labels or candidate-centered vehicles. Over the next three decades, the decline in traditional political parties, combined with the rise of disposable parties, had a significant influence on both the domestic and the foreign policies of Peru (Tanaka 1998, 59–235).

The Five D’s

Given the deplorable state of the Peruvian economy, the first priority of the Fujimori government was to improve relations with the international financial community. Before his inauguration, President-elect Fujimori traveled to Japan and the United States, promising to implement an austerity program and resume service on the external debt. In response, an international consortium, including Japan, Spain, and the United States, made a preliminary commitment for bridge loans to cover the defaulted debt to the IMF and other multilateral lending agencies.

Throughout most of the 2016 presidential campaign, Keiko Fujimori was the front runner with Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski Godard, a wealthy investment banker with considerable international financial experience, occupying third or fourth place in most polls. Kuczynski was well known in Peruvian political circles, having served as an economic adviser and manager of the central bank during the first Belaúnde Terry administration and both finance minister and prime minister in the Toledo administration. Kuczynski's prospects improved in March when the candidates polling in second and fourth place were disqualified. Fujimori won the first round with 39.82 percent of the vote with Kuczynski in second place with 20.98 percent (Horler and Cazarez 2016). In the second round, Kuczynski benefitted from the endorsement of the leftist politician Verónika Mendoza, who placed third in the first round, and a strong anti-fujimorista animus among the electorate. Kuczynski won the second round by the narrow margin of 42,597 votes (Crabtree and Durand 2017, 186).

Rise and Fall of Kuczynski

On 28 July 2016, President Kuczynski appointed Víctor Ricardo Luna Mendoza, a career diplomat who had served as ambassador to the United States (1992–99) and Great Britain (2006–2010), as minister of foreign affairs. In a succinct overview of Peruvian foreign policy, Ambassador Luna highlighted the key components of the foreign policy of the Kuczynski administration. With neighboring Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador, he planned to continue binational cabinet meetings in conjunction with targeted programs for each country with the intent to encourage development in the borderlands. On the regional level, he prioritized the Pacific Alliance, noting blocs like ALBA, CAN, CELAC, and UNASUR often were competitive instead of complementary in their promotion of integration and development. Elsewhere, Luna recognized the need for institutional change at the United Nations, arguing the best way to effect change was for Peru to take a leadership role. As a former ambassador to the United States, he also recognized the importance of maintaining good relationships with the White House even as Peru continued to expand its ties with China and the European Union. Finally, Luna promised to better serve Peruvians abroad by continuing efforts to improve efficiency and reduce bureaucracy at Peruvian embassies and consulates (Luna Mendoza 2016).

Following a period of extended political instability, an unprecedented 18 candidates sought the presidency in April 2021. When the ballots were tabulated, José Pedro Castillo Terrones, a school teacher, union leader, and self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, was the surprise winner in the first round with 18.99 percent of the vote, and Keiko Fujimori was in second place with 13.39 percent (El Comercio, 20 April 2021). Castillo won the second round with 50.13 percent of valid votes due to overwhelming support in the poorest areas of the country and in key mining regions, like Cotabambas, Espinar, and Chumbivilcas (El Comercio, 16 June 2021). Keiko Fujimori, who finished second for the third time, cried foul without evidence to back up claims of fraud, and once she exhausted every avenue to substantiate them, Castillo was declared the winner.

During the campaign, Castillo promised to rewrite the constitution, spend 10 percent of the GDP on education and health care, restructure the pension system and nationalize the energy industry (La República, 18 April 2021). His socialist platform alarmed international investors and the political class of Peru who feared his administration would end the free market economic model in place since the early years of the Fujimori government. Castillo responded to his critics by softening earlier proposals, promising a technocratic heavy cabinet and moderate economic policies. These changes temporarily calmed nervous investors and financial markets; nevertheless, his election was expected to lead to an extended period of political unrest. Of 130 congressional seats, Perú Libre, the party that nominated Castillo for the presidency, won only 37; consequently, Castillo was forced to govern without a congressional majority. Keiko Fujimori's Fuerza Popular party took 24 seats, presenting a small but determined opposition (Moncada 2021).

Democracy in Peru

The election of Pedro Castillo highlighted the many problems undermining democracy in Peru. Low levels of institutional legitimacy, a weak party system, an often corrupt unicameral legislature, and the repeat appearance of outsiders in the political arena have plagued Peru for three decades (Paz-Soldan 2022). The ongoing conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government was the most persistent problem as it made it difficult if not impossible for chief executives to enact the policies, they promised during their election campaigns (Shifter 2021).

Having left office in 1990 with the lowest approval rating in Peruvian history, former President Alan García Pérez, a brilliant orator and protégé of the legendary APRA leader, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, reinvented himself in the course of the 2006 presidential campaign. Billing himself as an elder statesman who had learned from past mistakes, he targeted his message at younger Peruvians with no memory of his disastrous first administration. During the campaign, García promised “responsible change,” embraced the neoliberal model and positioned himself as a defender of the status quo (St John 2006b; Crabtree and Durand 2017, 1, 125–26). In the first round of the 2006 election, García came in second behind Ollanta Humala Tasso, a populist retired army officer, but in the second round, García overtook Humala, winning the presidency with 52.8 percent of the vote (St John 2006c).

Peru experienced strong economic growth during the second García administration; nevertheless, government policies were slow to reduce poverty levels, leaving the majority of Peruvians increasingly unhappy (Economist, 12 May 2008). President García also failed to address pressing social issues, like indigenous rights, corruption, drug trafficking, and human rights, and his attempts to open the Amazon rainforest to exploitation and development led to spirited indigenous protests. In the highlands, indigenous elements protested living and working conditions at multiple large mining sites, including La Oroya, considered one of the 10 most polluted places in the world. Additional sources of discontent included coca farmers opposed to coca eradication efforts, informal miners rejecting efforts to integrate them into the formal economy, and splinter groups of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla–terrorist movement active in remote regions of the country (La República, 4 June 2011). Constrained by limited popularity and the absence of a legislative majority, the García administration appeared largely content with strong macroeconomic figures, ignoring the paradox between economic growth rates among the highest in the region and dysfunctional governance. President García focused on his coastal base mostly ignoring the interior and failing to bridge deep socioeconomic divides in a country marked by severe inequality and widespread social discontent (St John 2006d).

Blending Old and New

In his 28 July 2006 inaugural address, President García stressed domestic issues.

This chapter details this book’s theoretical contribution. It develops the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which synthesizes an innovative framework that explains how and why mobilization endures over time in highly inhospitable conditions at the urban margins. This framework’s conceptualization of citizenship goes beyond traditional, liberal approaches. It relies on a more flexible and informal notion of political incorporation, which depends on the ways in which collectives build their identity and rescale community-building beyond the framework of the nation-state. In other words, it captures an alternative type of politicization that is often neglected in studies of collective action. Mobilizational citizenship involves the dynamic interaction between four components: agentic memory, mobilizing belonging, mobilizing boundaries, and decentralized protagonism. The chapter’s framework also outlines the barriers to mobilization in the urban margins. It explains how political institutions regularly withdraw and control political capital within urban communities in the aim of demobilizing them. When mobilizational citizenship fails to develop, local dwellers engage in political capital hoarding dynamics within their neighborhoods, which further deactivates collective action.

This chapter focuses on the case of Lo Hermida, a neighborhood in which mobilization has endured since Chile’s democratic transition. The chapter explains how memory-building prepares the ground for the emergence of mobilizational citizenship in Chile’s urban margins. It begins by delivering a historical account of how radical movements socialized young urban dwellers in some neighborhoods during the anti-dictatorial protests in the 1980s. This contextual information is key to understanding the development of mobilizational citizenship in Chile’s urban margins. By providing political training to neighborhood dwellers, radical groups and parties on the left ensured historical continuity between the present construction of identity and the past, pre-coup insurgent project of mobilization at the urban margins. The chapter then explores how activists develop agency in the present through memory-building. This is accomplished by using memories of successful collective action to performatively subvert oppressive past events. The chapter shows how activists carry out this subversion through their interactions, idealizations of past radical groups, and repertoires of contention.

This introductory chapter describes Chile’s recent and unprecedented wave of protests starting in late 2019 to situate this book within a broader socio-political context and academic debate. The book’s core contribution is the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which adds to the literature on social movements and citizenship studies. It explains how and why communities at the urban margins are able to sustain collective action over several decades and become prepared to support large-scale protests leading to a democratization process. To develop this theoretical argument, this book tells the story of two very similar urban communities founded in eastern Santiago in 1970. They have a similar socio-demographic configuration and location, their histories coincide, and grew as highly politicized and mobilized communities. Remarkably however, while one of the communities followed the pattern of demobilization observed across the country in the wake of its transition to democracy, the other is a counterexample of enduring mobilization. I studied this puzzling contrast through an ethnographic approach that included observations, interviews, and archival research.