Keiko Fujimori is building a police state on the bones of her father’s regime. She won by a fraction of a percent—a handful of ballots out of millions—and her first promise is the same one Alberto Fujimori made before the death squads and the prison cell and the flight to Japan with suitcases of state money: the will to use force. She calls them scum. The migrants, the poor, the displaced. She promises judges who will hide their faces behind hoods. She promises maximum-security cages and the expulsion of strangers who cross the line looking for work. She is not asking for your approval to break the law. She is asking you to celebrate the breaking.
The Peruvian Supreme Court convicted her father of crimes against humanity for ordering extrajudicial killings in 1991 and 1992. He suspended Congress, arrested the opposition, stole an election, and turned the barriadas into killing fields while posing as the country’s savior. For his daughter to stand on a stage and promise “law and order”—hooded judges, maximum-security prisons, the purge of the unwanted—is to invoke the very machinery that left those bodies in the outskirts of Lima. She does not need to repeat his crimes to inherit his logic. When a leader calls the poor and the displaced scum, she has already crossed the line into the territory of evil.
The prophets did not mince words for this. Isaiah called it what it is: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” We see the machinery of the state turned against the vulnerable, and we are asked to call it order.
She promises to expel the migrant, to push the stranger back across the line. The Torah commands us to love the stranger, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt—we were the ones fleeing, the ones hunted, the ones told to go back. The commandment appears more times in the law than any other, a repeated drumbeat against the temptation to secure our own borders by closing our own hearts. When we decide that a person is illegal, we are deciding that their humanity is conditional. The migrant standing at the border is not a problem. The migrant is a person. The state that treats them as inventory for the detention center is committing a cruelty the prophets named explicitly.
I will not pretend that Peru’s decade of dysfunction—the tenth president in ten years, the street crime, the economic paralysis—is invented. The fear is real, and it is terrifying. When extortion and cocaine and illegal gold mining have turned your neighborhood into a battlefield, you reach for a strong hand. But the hand you have chosen already has blood under its nails. Alberto Fujimori “smashed” the Maoist insurgency, yes—and he killed far more than insurgents. He killed the wrong people in the wrong places and called it victory. His daughter’s campaign slogan, “Justice won’t be afraid,” is the same promise her father made when he sent masked soldiers into the shantytowns and said the dead were terrorists.
I am complicit in the fear that makes the iron fist look like relief. We who live in quiet towns and expect the police to come when we call, we who demand safety and then look away, knowing the price is paid in the blood of the poor—we are the ones who build the climate for this politics. The fractured center that could not offer a path out of the misery shares in this guilt. But the chaos of the failing state does not excuse the cruelty of the strong one. The fear of the victim does not justify the violence of the executioner.
The Trump administration is already counting her as one of its own. Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue told the Journal, “The Trump administration can say, we got another one in our camp.” There is no surprise in that. Washington has always welcomed right-wing strongmen who promise to crush the left and open the economy, and it has always looked away when those strongmen start lining up the poor. We in the United States who cheer every “ally” south of the border as long as he says the right things about trade and China—we have done this before. Our fingerprints are on Chile’s stadiums, Argentina’s ditches, Central America’s killing fields. Confession of complicity is not abstraction. It is the truth that my own country has helped build the regimes we now tut-tut about.
Madam President-elect, you say you are not your father. You have allies who insist you are “absolutely democratic.” You have promised not to hold a second term. Prove it now, before you take the oath. The proof is not in speeches. It is in what you do with the institutions your father corrupted and your own party has been hollowing out for a decade. The “moral incapacity” clause you and your allies weaponized to oust presidents you did not like—you will now be judged by a standard you yourself helped to impose. If you want to be more than the ghost of your father, you must release the political prisoners your movement has targeted, open the archives on the death squads, and publicly repudiate the extrajudicial killings your last name still celebrates. You must stand where the disappeared were buried and say: this was done in my name, and it cannot be done again.
I carry with me the letter Archbishop Óscar Romero wrote to President Jimmy Carter on February 17, 1980, warning that military aid would only feed the death squads already roaming El Salvador. The White House ignored him. Weeks later, on March 23, Romero climbed into the pulpit and spoke not as a diplomat but as a prophet. “In the name of God,” he said, “and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beseech you, I order you: stop the repression.” The next day, he was shot through the heart while celebrating Mass. His homily was not a policy proposal. It was a judgment, and it was a door held open with his own life. A government that starts by promising to hide judges behind hoods has already chosen the old map. It ends with a body on an altar.
Peru has buried more than sixty-nine thousand of its own in a generation of internal war. The ones who did most of the burying wore uniforms and took orders from the man whose daughter now stands in the palace. You who voted for Keiko Fujimori out of desperation did not choose blood on purpose. But desperation is not absolution. The machinery you handed her runs on the same fuel her father poured into the trenches.
The door is open, Madam President-elect. You can be a president who breaks the cycle, or you can be the sequel that everybody knew you were. The only way out is through the truth your father never told. If you are brave enough to tell it, you may yet surprise the country that barely gave you the keys. If you are not, nothing you build will stand—and the laments of your people, like Romero’s, will keep rising to heaven until they pull the whole thing down.