Gone with the wind? Exploring Fujimorismo’s decay in contemporary Peru

Date: 

Tuesday, April 16, 2019, 12:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S250, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Alberto Vergara, Professor of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Peru)

Moderator: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University

Political parties are usually depicted as indispensable for democracies. However, Latin American history does not lack of instances of parties playing against democracy. Observing the case of Fuerza Popular (the Peruvian Fujimorista party) will allow us to analyze the ways how a political vehicle might play against the consolidation of a democracy. In empirical terms, we will explain how this relates to the unexpected current Fuerza Popular severe crisis.

Alberto Vergara is a political scientist. He is a professor at the department of Social and Political Sciences at the Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Peru). He holds a Ph.D in political science form University of Montreal. He was a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University. He has lectured on Latin American politics at Harvard’s Department of Government and at Sciences-po in Paris. He has published the books,  La Danza Hostil: Poderes subnacionales y Estado central en Bolivia y Perú (1952-2012); Ciudadanos sin República; Ni Amnésicos ni Irracionales: Las elecciones peruanas de 2006 en perspectiva histórica; and more recently he co-edited with Hillel Soifer the volume Politics after Violence: Legacies of the Shining Path conflict in contemporary Peru (University of Texas Press, 2019). Alberto Vergara’s research has appeared in Latin American Research Review, Current History, Journal of Democracy, Journal of politics in Latin America, among others.