The War Decrees

This publication compiles material produced by an IDS working group between November 1991 and February 1992 in response to the enactment and subsequent congressional debate on the decrees issued by the government of engineer Alberto Fujimori under the legislative powers granted to him in matters of pacification. Many things have changed since then, with the incredible speed that currently characterizes political and social life in Peru. However, we consider the publication of this material to be pertinent for two fundamental reasons. The first is the importance that the debate surrounding those legislative decrees ultimately had in defining the country's political course. In his speech before the special OAS foreign ministers' meeting following the April 5 coup, Peru's then-Foreign Minister, Augusto Blacker Millar, seeking to explain why engineer Fujimori dissolved Congress, cited as one of the main reasons the fact that the pacification decrees had been modified during the regular legislative session and then during an extraordinary one. The second consideration that moves us to publish this material is the fact that the debates of that period served as an incentive to finalize a series of institutional reform models that the IDS had been developing for some time as part of its effort to conceive and design a peace proposal as an alternative to the strategies that had been applied since 1980 to combat terrorist subversion. (Excerpt from the preface).