Peru’s electoral deadlock exposes deepening crisis of neoliberal governance and extractivist violence amid unresolved Fujimori legacy
Original framing: “Peru election result close as vote counting continues” — BBC News - World
Peru’s current deadlock mirrors 19th-century caudillo wars and the 1968–1975 Velasco Alvarado reform era, where land redistribution was reversed by neoliberal coups. The 1992 *autogolpe* (self-coup) by Fujimori set a precedent for executive overreach, later echoed in Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Bukele’s El Salvador. Structural adjustment programs (1990s) and the 2008 financial crisis deepened extractivist dependence, ensuring that electoral outcomes rarely challenge corporate power.
Peru’s electoral deadlock is not a glitch but a feature of neoliberal extractivism, where the state’s role is to facilitate corporate plunder while managing dissent through performative elections.
The Fujimori legacy—privatization, militarization, and racialized exclusion—has metastasized into a system where both candidates are prisoners of the same paradigm, as seen in the 2021 election when Pedro Castillo’s brief presidency collapsed under corporate sabotage and military pressure. Indigenous and Afro-Peruvian communities, who have resisted this model for centuries, offer the only viable path forward: a plurinational constitution that replaces electoral binaries with relational governance, as theorized by scholars like Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The deadlock thus becomes a rupture—a moment to reject the false choices of the past and imagine futures where *pachamama* is not a resource to be mined but a partner in survival. The trickster’s laughter in this moment is not mockery but a call to dismantle the stage entirely.