In her book, Catherine M. Conaghan traces the major events of the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, starting in 1990 with his rise to power out of political obscurity and continuing through his departure from office in disgrace in 2000 after winning a highly controversial third term. The author characterizes the Fujimori regime as a “permanent coup,” whereby government officials repeatedly eviscerated the country's constitution and subverted the rule of law. A central theme of the book is the Fujimori government's inability through various unsuccessful attempts to completely dominate the political discourse despite persistent and sophisticated efforts to control the public sphere. As Conaghan writes, “The history of the Fujimori presidency is a chronicle of wrongdoing and complicity, but it is also a story about resistance and the limits of public deception in modern politics” (p. 13). The book is enriched with excellent primary sources and recent investigative reports that became available only after the collapse of the regime, and which had not previously been so cohesively compiled into one comprehensive narrative.

The book recounts the numerous actions that the Fujimori regime undertook to remain in power, the most significant of which was the widely publicized 1992 auto-golpe. Other important measures included the 1993 constitutional referendum, which helped to “formalize” the authoritarian tendencies of the postcoup regime and allowed for Fujimori's first reelection in 1995; the approval of a new law that allowed the then president to seek a third presidential term; the dismantling of the Tribunal Constitucional because the majority of its members opposed Fujimori's third electoral bid; and the referendum initiative on the reelection, which was stopped by his congressional majority.

The analysis of these events shows that Fujimori initially was personally and directly involved in sabotaging the country's democratic order, whereas in the later years of his presidency, other institutions (e.g., Congress, the Supreme Court, the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones, etc.) would help to further orchestrate alterations to Peru's constitution and other laws in order to consolidate this “permanent coup.” Fujimori followed these alterations from the sidelines, and cleverly defended the autonomy of the other institutions, which were, of course, controlled by his government. Moreover, in contrast to his first reelection in 1995, which was largely staged within the Congreso Constituyente Democrático (CCD), his second reelection in 2000 was a much more elaborate scheme. Key to these actions was the work of Vladimiro Montesinos, who served as Fujimori's longtime national intelligence advisor. Montesinos was the “go-to guy” whose chief mission was to secure Fujimori's third reelection (p. 224). Montesinos “paid off everyone who mattered” (e.g., legislators, judges, election officials, media executives, etc.) and his bags of money proved hard to refuse for many (p. 13). On this subject, the chapter that deals with media collusion is an interesting novelty of the book. This is a subject that has received little systematic attention by students of Peru, and as Conaghan elaborates, not all of the media owners sold out to Montesinos's wallet (p. 160). There were important exceptions to the widespread corruption that ended up crippling the Fujimori regime.

Equally important is the author's analysis of the major steps that the “opposition” took to challenge the increasing power of the Fujimori regime. She notes that Peru's opposition was not in any shape or form similar to Chile's Concertación or Poland's Solidarity (p. 247). Instead, it was small, dispersed, and lacking a unified strategy. Many authors who have studied the Fujimori regime have simply chosen to write off the existence of this opposition because of its ineffectiveness in quelling Fujimori's authoritarian project. But Conaghan does an excellent job of tracing several events that highlight its importance. The efforts of the opposition to unmask the regime were constant, but so was the intimidation and selective repression by the government against those who dared to speak up.

The concluding chapter poses an interesting proposition that is worth mentioning. Conaghan cites one of the main conclusions of the report prepared by the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), which was created in 2001 and investigated Peru's counterinsurgency war of the 1980s and 1990s. The CVR report concludes that Peru's internal conflict “was a major contributor to the country's ‘moral decay’ that culminated during the Fujimori administration” (p. 253). In Conaghan's words, “The conflict created a tolerance for authoritarian measures, a willingness to sacrifice legality, an indifference to the abuse of authority, and an overarching sense of impunity” (pp. 253–54). The political violence desensitized both elites and the masses, and made them prone to disregard the importance of democracy and the rule of law. The elites who could have stopped Fujimori and Montesinos “opted to cash in or to accommodate and just keep quiet” (p. 254), which the author identifies as an “elite failure” (p. 253), a problem that is certainly not a novelty in Latin American history. The Fujimori story is compelling and intensely disturbing because of the extent to which the consolidation of the regime rested on “an astounding collapse in public ethics, morals and common sense” (p. 253). In this analysis, the counterinsurgency and “old-fashioned avarice” were important factors in the collective collapse, but the author also suggests that neoliberal economic reforms in Peru may have created a situation in which not only the lower classes but also the middle and upper classes became “unhinged and atomized” and more likely to “play along” as a coping strategy in the face of the intense job and financial insecurities of the 1990s (p. 254). This is an interesting observation and worthy of future analysis.

In all, Fujimori's Peru is an excellent book. It is a must-read for students of Peruvian politics and Latin American democracy. It clearly enhances the scholarly understanding of the challenges of democratic rule in the developing world.