Delia
Revoredo Marsano
“The Jurisdiction of Peru’s Constitutional Court”
January
24, 2005 |
Fujimori’s Quiet Coup d’Etat and the Restoration
of Peru’s Constitutional Court
By Veronica Herrera
In 1997, President Alberto Fujimori of Peru initiated
a campaign to have Article 112 of the Peruvian constitution
reinterpreted.
The effect of the change would be to allow Fujimori to continue
in office for a third term. Three members of the constitutional
court, Peru’s highest judicial authority, ruled against
any change to Article 112. They were immediately dismissed and
exiled. All three judges were subsequently reinstated after Fujimori’s
resignation in 2000 following a major corruption scandal. In
a talk co-sponsored by CLAS and Boalt Hall School of Law, one
of those judges, Justice Delia Revoredo Marsano, spoke about
the Fujimori years and the re-democratization process that followed
them.
Peru Under Siege
When Fujimori took office following a run-off
election in 1990, he inherited a broken country. Hyperinflation
was at more than
7,000 percent per annum. Tax revenues were below 4 percent of
GNP. The unemployment and underemployment rate was more than
70 percent. Peru’s infrastructure was also extremely weak.
Against this backdrop, the new president leveraged his position
as a political “outsider” to promote an image of
an honest, effective, hardworking technician. Fujimori also raised
the stakes in the state’s armed conflict with the violent
Shining Path revolutionaries, using his successes in that battle
to consolidate public support during a time of heightened public
fear. Behind the scenes, Fujimori also began dismantling Peru’s
political and legal institutions, bribing or blackmailing members
of congress, the judiciary, the media and other influential actors
on the national stage.
Fujimori reduced congress to a single 120-member
chamber representing a single national electoral district.
This new arrangement erased
the accountability of legislators to their constituents and reinforced
Fujimori’s control over congress. Congress members who
could not be bought were blackmailed, including through the videotaping
of some in compromising situations. Most thus voted in favor
of all of Fujimori’s reforms. Justice Revoredo also recalled
the “cell-phone” votes, where Fujimori’s secretive
security chief Vladimiro Montesinos would call members of congress
moments before an issue was to be decided and tell them how to
vote. The dismantling of the legal and legislative system was
so intricately orchestrated that it was not apparent to anyone,
not even those recruited by Fujimori, exactly how the laws were
being manipulated to favor Fujimori.
By 1996, all government institutions had effectively
been co-opted by new, rewritten laws; Justice Revoredo commented: “What
can look more legitimate than the law?” The Public Ministry
(Peru’s ministry of justice), the National Council of Magistrates
(which selects judges and prosecutors in Peru), public and private
universities, the bar association and the Constitutional Court
were all under Fujimori’s thumb. The president even abolished
the guarantees of tenure for judges, making it possible for the
executive to instantly dismiss judicial appointees without explanation.
At this point Fujimori had control of all of the judges at all
levels of jurisdiction. Revoredo recalled: “Montesinos
had planned everything.”
Article 112
The Constitutional Court has seven acting members
with the autonomy to decide the limits of their own jurisdiction.
The
three main functions of the court, according to Justice Revoredo,
are judicial review, deciding jurisdictional conflicts between
congress and the judiciary and acting as final arbitrator when
a citizen’s constitutional rights have allegedly been violated.
In 1997, Fujimori was in the middle of his second term in office.
In an attempt to pave the way for a third presidential run, Fujimori
proposed a re-interpretation of Article 112 of the 1993 Peruvian
constitution, drawn up after the president’s autogolpe
(self-coup) of April 1992. The article allows for two consecutive
presidential terms, with each term lasting five years. Fujimori
wanted his second term to be counted as his first, arguing that
he had begun ruling the country as president under the 1979 constitution
rather than the 1993 constitution. According to this interpretation,
a 2000-2005 term for Fujimori would be permissible even though
he would have ruled continuously since 1990.
When the re-interpretation of Article 112 was
presented to the Constitutional Court, Fujimori and Montesinos
knew that they
could count on the votes of two of its members, whom they had
already successfully bought. Two other justices, buckling under
pressure, decided to abstain from voting. Only three justices,
Manuel Aguirre Roca, Guillermo Rey Terry, and Delia Revoredo,
had the independence and courage to rule that a third term for
Fujimori would be unconstitutional. Justice Aguirre led the trio
in voting under a special clause that allows for a simple majority
to rule a law unconstitutional. Because the other two justices
had abstained from voting, Aguirre, Rey and Revoredo had the
majority they needed to prevent Fujimori’s constitutional
sleight-of-hand. Fujimori’s response was swift and uncompromising:
The three justices were immediately dismissed by Congress for
alleged wrongdoing.
The three justices were later exiled, with Justice
Revoredo seeking shelter in Costa Rica. However, Fujimori’s corruption
was soon made public. Videos of Montesinos handing out more than
$3 million in return for congressional votes were later distributed
to the small number of media outlets that had not been co-opted
by the regime and remained impartial. Revoredo recalled that
moment: “The international community woke up. All of a
sudden, we were heroes.” She also remembered a visit to
the Peruvian countryside, where Fujimori had been so popular
for the previous 10 years: One evening she heard a crowd and
noticed a huge fire. Revoredo looked out the window and saw a
makeshift coffin ablaze, an effigy of the president’s coffin.
This moment marked the beginning of the end for Fujimori, said
Revoredo. The justice joked that she had felt like Evita Peron.
The broadcast, on September 14, 2000, of a video showing Montesinos
handing cash to legislators, precipitated the end of Fujimori’s
regime. Apparently a wronged lover of Montesinos sent the tapes
to the media after he left her
for another woman. Fujimori and Montesinos fled the country in November and
a transitional government was installed. Fujimori, who had dual Peruvian-Japanese
nationality, sent a short fax from Japan announcing his resignation as president.
The three exiled justices were reinstated and
today sit once again on Peru’s Constitutional Court. Justice Revoredo,
as Constitutional Justice, occupies a privileged position from
which to discuss Fujimori’s rise and fall, and the legacy
of dictatorship: “Coup d’etats are not only [undertaken]
with tanks and brute force, but can also be [undertaken] silently,
almost in secret, through the law, without anyone realizing…until
it’s too late.”
Justice Revoredo Marsano sits on Peru’s Constitutional
Court, the country’s highest judicial body. She is also
Professor of Family and International Law at Peru’s Papal
Catholic University in Lima and the University of Lima.
Veronica
Herrera is a graduate student in the Political Science Department.
