CIAO DATE: 06/02

Making and Unmaking Authoritarian Peru: Re-election, Resistance, and Regime Transition

This paper examines how the plan to re-elect President Alberto Fujimori deepened authoritarianism in Peru and how the opposition's struggle against re-election reshaped the political landscape and laid the groundwork for a surprising opening to regime transition. The mobilization against the re-election project did not single-handedly topple the authoritarian regime. However, the opposition was able to generate a significant level of legal and political resistance to the re-election. This, in turn, provoked the government to take more extreme measures to assure the re-election, further eroding the legitimacy of the re-election at home and abroad. While international actors played a role in the regime transition, the opposition's struggle in Peru was sometimes complicated by ambiguous responses from the U.S. government and the Organization of American States.

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