Fujimori's Peru : a case study of state-corporate corruption and its implications for the good governance agenda

Abstract

During the 1990s, democracy became a central theme in the development discourse, dominating the good governance agenda. However, so many conditions have been named that the term good governance has become almost obsolete. If the practice is the opposite of bad governance, perhaps a better understanding of the conditions facilitating the latter will lead to prioritize the reforms to be encouraged. An example of bad governance is the regime of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), which despite its successes in fixing the economy, did so through authoritarian means and was combined with unprecedented levels of corruption. This thesis seeks to explore the structural conditions that facilitated this form of bad governance using the state crime model. It argues that these conditions consisted of the centralization of power and the absence of checks and balances, and served to create an opportunity structure for organizational deviance to occur.