Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
When Alberto Fujimori campaigned for president of Peru W i n 1990, he ran on a platform in which he promised to institute a moderate program of gradual economic stabilization, including the privatization of certain state-owned enterprises. These promises were instrumental in his scoring an upset victory over writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who had been the odds-on favorite to win just three months earlier — and, thus, to become Peru's third popularly elected president in his country's ten years of continuous democracy.
Nevertheless, soon after Alán García relinquished the presidential office, in July 1990, to the newly-elected president, those election promises underwent a dramatic reversal. On the grounds that he had inherited a bankrupt country which left him no alternative (no habia otra cosa que hacef), the new president moved quickly to establish a stabilization program of classic orthodoxy in August 1990 (Fujimori, 1990).