Who are the terrorists in world crises?

There is nothing like a hostage crisis to stir the enthusiasm of the major news media. The new Clinton Cabinet is a ho hum affair and the Gingrich mess a pretty tired story. Storms in the Northwest can fill only so much air time. The standoff in Peru thus couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. These made-for-TV dramas feature powerful governments, exotic settings, and the lives of ordinary people. Unfortunately, most media coverage of this event is likely to do little more than contribute to the barbarity network producers purport to decry.

From most of the recent accounts, one would suspect that the ongoing crisis was provoked by nothing more than the attempt to free a group of political prisoners. These prisoners are viewed as ruthless thugs out to disrupt an emerging Latin democracy. Hardly anyone has mentioned Peru’s criminal justice system, where minimal forms of due process have been abandoned and, in the words of a recent editorial in the Nation magazine, ” faceless courts with hooded judges dispatched hundreds to medieval style prisons on the mere suspicion of terrorism.”

The hostage crisis in Peru is one more manifestation of a downward cycle of violence and oppression that goes well beyond even courts and prisons. The role of President Fujimori himself merits far more careful scrutiny than the media have provided. During a 1992 coup, Fujimori shut down Congress and assumed emergency powers, much as Boris Yeltsin did for a period in Russia. And as in the Russian case, little was heard from the Western media to suggest that Fujimori was a terrorist.

The Nation makes another point completely missing in major media discussions of this event. Fujimori has been engaged in enforcement of the kind of economic initiatives long advocated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These include efforts to slow wage gains for workers, reduce government subsidies for food and housing, and curb labor rights. All these steps are taken in the name of making the these states more competitive internationally and viable capitalist democracies. Japan has played a major role in these initiatives. It has promised 600 million in loans to Peru in return for adherence to these policies. And it also offers the carrot of eventual admission to Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

Whatever we here in the West may think of these policies, the indisputable fact is that they are an even greater burden on poorer societies. And inevitably, they evoke much indigenous resistance in these states. These dilemmas are compounded by a lack of democratic traditions and values among the elites that seek to impose them.

Although neither the Japanese government nor the World Bank is explicitly hostile to democracy, in practice both have looked the other way when the inevitable protests against such policies are met with stiff repression. When this model of unregulated corporate hegemony comes into conflict with democratic norms regarding free speech and the right to peaceful assembly, democracy is always slighted. It is not surprising in such a context that politics all too often takes a paramilitary turn.

The point here is not to excuse even the terrorism of the dispossessed. Innocent human beings are being treated as pawns in a political struggle. Part of the tragedy of such an event is that, which ever side “wins” this immediate encounter, hostility and violence will likely escalate not only in Peru but throughout most of the nations now being buffeted by these World Bank “reforms.”

It is, nevertheless, clear that the repression of political dissent invites the formation of secretive counterinsurgency groups. Their hallmarks are hierarchical organization, strict internal discipline and surveillance, the demand for the complete and all-embracing loyalty of their partisans, and the deployment of espionage and violence as routine strategies. The Bolshevik formations in Czarist Russia were an early prototype. The desperate poverty and the repressive atmosphere in which such organizations operate reinforces a millennialist faith in their own innocence and eventual vindication. With this faith goes a willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the cause.

Such groups do indeed often become enemies of the kind of civility and tolerance on which the best forms of democracy are premised. Nonetheless, newly enhanced anti-terrorism efforts on the part of western governments or international organizations are no answer to this escalation of violence. Indeed, agendas that play fast and loose with civil liberties only exacerbate this destructive dialectic.

If democratic civility is our goal, it must also be our means. New models of trade and development, however positive in the long run, cannot be imposed on disadvantaged minorities without dire consequences. Decisions to provide full trading rights or lucrative aid packages to nations that routinely suppress democratic dissent are not only morally wrong, they are naive. They contribute to a political and economic climate that breeds forms of violence and cynicism ultimately disruptive of world economic and political development.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor.