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Literary Review:
“The United States and Peru: Cooperation at a Cost”
by Cynthia McClintock and Fabian Vallas. New York: Routledge, 2003.

“The United States and Peru” is one of the ten-book “Contemporary Inter-American Relations” series about the changing nature of relations between the United States and specific countries of Latin American and the Caribbean at the turn of the century.

The authors -- a renowned Peru-watcher from George Washington University and a Peruvian journalist -- present the reader with a thorough analysis of the bi-lateral relations from the 1980s to 2000, with a chapter devoted to each major item on the agenda: national security, free-market reform, narcotics control, and democracy and human rights.

McClintock and Vallas view the U.S. relations with Peru during the 1990s as a sad story filled with lost opportunities. In the opening chapter of this thoroughly researched scholarly volume, they describe clearly how the Peruvian political panorama from the 1960s to the 1980s had not been conducive to warm relations with the United States. Left-leaning political currents ran strong in Peru throughout this period when, at various times, U.S. companies were nationalized, tariff barriers were raised, and foreign debt obligations were left unserviced.

President Fujimori's turning Peru around in 1990 with the implementation of free-market reforms was thus greeted in Washington with a great sigh of relief. In large part due to Fujimori's relentless pursuit of power during the course of the decade, however, this initial optimism never blossomed into a deeper relationship with mutual benefits for Peru and the United States.

The underlying question of the book is why did the Clinton administration place a relatively low priority on democracy and human rights in Peru, even after the authoritarian nature of the Fujimori government became increasingly evident during the latter half of the 1990s? The authors do not give their readers the satisfaction of a simple answer, however, but rather present an array of answers: the priority placed by the U.S. government on maintaining good relations with a government that had been a proven partner in the drug war, an upholder of free-market reforms, and the ever-present emphasis on maintaining political stability.

This lack of a simple answer is an accurate reflection of the array of political events that rocked Peru during the decade of the 1990s as well as the many-faceted nature of the policymaking process. Painstaking research of well-documented secondary (primarily English-language) sources and interviews with high-level officials of both governments help assure the reader that the McClintock and Vallas account is well-balanced and contains a minimum of personal bias of the authors.

The relationship between Vladimiro Montesinos and the Central Intelligence Agency that played a central role during the decade continues to be particularly problematical for the researcher, however. McClintock and Vallas do make clear, however, that the cooperation among the two governments' intelligence agencies came at a great cost to building a lasting bi-lateral relationship based on democratic values and human rights. -- JR

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