PERU'S DILEMMA: Giving Fujimori the upper hand.

Atriumphant President Alberto Fujimori takes the oath of office for a third term after fraudulently "winning" Peru's presidential contest...and a few weeks later announces that he will step down and hold a new election. Caught on videotape bribing a congressman and long accused of illegal activities and human-rights abuses, Peruvian intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos flees the country and seeks political asylum in Panama...but then returns to Peru. Trying to avert a military coup, Fujimori sacks the commanders of the army, air force, and navy...only to see a midranking officer stage a mini-mutiny and take hostages. The president personally leads a highly publicized manhunt for Montesinos...and turns up empty-handed. Indeed, the only thing certain about the political melodrama unfolding in Peru is that any news you read today will probably be found hopelessly outdated tomorrow.

How did we get here? It is tempting to place responsibility for this crisis squarely on Fujimori's shoulders. After all, the president's insatiable appetite for power has resulted in a weakening of the rule of law and of democratic institutions in Peru over the last decade. But all Peruvians--in particular the feckless political opposition--share some responsibility for the country's current turmoil. By relying solely on one man to solve the nation's economic and social problems, Peruvians in fact facilitated and encouraged

Fujimori's authoritarian, uncompromising style of government--the very style we now so stridently condemn. Fujimori's unlikely ascent to the presidency in 1990 had little to do with the candidate himself and everything to do with the failure of Peru's traditional political parties. After Peru returned to democracy in 1980, following twelve years of military rule, both the Right and the Left had a chance to govern. For five years, conservative leaders were in charge, but they fell victim to sectarian infighting and failed to recognize the growing terrorist threat in the Andean provinces. And the corruption-ridden tenure of socialist president Alan Garcia (1985-90) resulted in the worst economic crisis in Peruvian history, while the Shining Path insurgency grew even more insidious and violent.

Against this backdrop, an opportunistic Fujimori emerged. He offered few concrete policies or programs; his lone promise was to stabilize the economy through "honesty, technology, and work." Peruvians voted for Fujimori out of a sense of desperation, with the rationale that anything would be better than what had come before. The gamble paid off. During his first term, Fujimori stunned the world by turning the economy around via a radical economic-reform package of fiscal austerity, trade and price liberalization, and privatization of state-owned businesses--a textbook IMF-style reform. Inflation subsided and economic growth, though erratic at first, eventually resumed.

But this success came at a high price. On April 5, 1992, tanks rolled through downtown Lima as Fujimori shut down the congress and the courts and began ruling via presidential decree. Military support was crucial to the success of this so-called auto-golpe (self-coup), revealing the uneasy alliances Fujimori had struck to remain in power. The government's capture later that year of Shining Path leader and founder Abimael Guzman--and the subsequent dismantling of the terrorist group--seemed only to validate the president's steady concentration of power.

Condemned abroad, the auto-golpe was wildly popular at home, since the legislature was seen as a bastion of self-serving political dinosaurs opposed to reform and modernity. Intoxicated by economic stability and the demise of a terrorist insurgency that had killed thousands of citizens, Peruvians forgot to question the means by which such happy ends had been achieved. In 1993, we handed Fujimori a crucial political thank-you gift. In a national referendum, Peruvians voted in favor of a new constitution that greatly enhanced the power of the president and allowed him to stand for consecutive reelection, a right hitherto denied to the head of state.

Had he left office after this first term, Fujimori would likely have gone down in history as one of Peru's greatest presidents. But, empowered by the "modernized" constitution and a new (and more malleable) legislature, Fujimori easily won a second term, defeating former UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar in the general election of 1995.

While citizens ceded more and more power to the president, Peru's political opposition leaders failed miserably. Their personal antipathy toward the president--rooted in their 1990 defeat and in Fujimori's illegal closure of the legislature two years later--stunted their ability to chart a different course. In the 1993 constitutional referendum and in the elections of 1995 and 2000, the opposition stood for nothing more than its desire to oust Fujimori. Some opposition members even campaigned on the platform of "Fujimorism without Fujimori"--that is, they promised to pursue the same economic and social policies, if only citizens would get rid of that loathsome, ill-spoken incumbent. Faced with such an alternative, the choice for Fujimori was an easy one.

This year, after Fujimori brazenly stole the presidential election--one he probably could have won cleanly--and after his top advisor was caught in egregious criminal wrongdoing, Peruvians have decided that this time, finally, the president has gone too far. But should we have expected anything different? After we failed to produce a viable political alternative?

With a commendable sense of righteousness and civic duty, citizens have taken to the street demanding that Fujimori resign. We want our democracy back. Like a mercenary in peace time, Fujimori is expendable--an embarrassing remnant of a more desperate time. But as we move toward an uncertain new chapter in our volatile politics, we should never forget our own complicity in writing the last one.

Carlos Lozada, a citizen of Peru, is an associate editor of Foreign Policy magazine in Washington, D.C.