Peru’s Other Path: Revisiting Neoliberal Populism (1978-2000)

In this paper, I revisit the concept of “neoliberal populism” as it was employed to describe the peculiarities of Peru’s market reforms under Alberto Fujimori’s government in the 1990s. Political scientists have argued that Fujimori’s reforms challenged the conventional opposition between profligate populist politics and austere neoliberal reforms. While I agree that populism was central to Peru’s path to neoliberalism, I contend that this interpretation remains incomplete. By locating the populist element solely in Fujimori’s political style, scholars assumed that the neoliberal content constituted a predefined policy package imported from abroad that merely found a receptive host in domestic populism. Through careful examination of neoliberal intellectual history and Peru’s political processes in the 1980s, I offer an alternative reading that foregrounds internal political and intellectual dynamics on the emergence of an economic populist argument crucial to Peruvian neoliberalism. I analyze the intellectual articulation around Hernando de Soto’s ideas on a capitalist revolution predicated in the entrepreneurial energies of the informal economy. While De Soto has been studied primarily as an enabler of Washington Consensus reforms, I argue that his arguments—in terms of both substance and rhetoric—emerged from Peru’s specific political and ideological conditions in the 1980s, particularly the significant though brief ascendancy of left-wing populism. Through a historical reconstruction based on extensive archival research, I demonstrate that De Soto’s arguments were shaped by the interaction between international neoliberal influences, previous local neoliberal traditions, and a large repertoire of participatory, cooperative, bottom-up economic utopias that the Peruvian Left had developed since the 1970s. De Soto successfully rechanneled these elements toward a reimagined neoliberalism, one that eschewed fiscal and monetary “macroeconomic populism” but embraced “microeconomic populism” based on promises around property ownership and financialized futures.