Lessons from the Left in Lima: Susana Villarán and the Fleeting Return of Progressive Politics to City Hall

• Date: 01 January 2019
• Author: Julia Smith Coyoli,Paul Dosh
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18803877
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 224, Vol. 46 No. 1, January 2019, 263–281

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18803877

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

263

Lessons from the Left in Lima

Susana Villarán and the Fleeting Return

of Progressive Politics to City Hall

by

Paul Dosh and Julia Smith Coyoli

Amid a rightward shift in Latin America, how can the left gain ground in cities char-

acterized by entrenched neoliberalism? The case of Susana Villarán, the progressive mayor

who led Lima, Peru, from 2011 to 2014, illustrates the uphill battle facing the left.

Villarán’s surprise election put a leftist in City Hall for the first time in 25 years. She

confronted unrelenting opposition but defied expectations and beat back a recall election

only to face a punishing defeat in her reelection bid. Weak policy-making capacity and a

lack of party machinery forced her to expend all her political capital on the recall battle,

leaving her with nothing to secure reelection. Her trajectory suggests an important lesson

for progressives in cities where the left is weak: a headline-grabbing win by an individual

leftist is no substitute for a robust left base. Absent the latter, simply electing a progressive

mayor is likely to prove a fleeting victory.

En medio de un movimiento hacia la derecha en América Latina, ¿cómo puede la

izquierda ganar terreno en ciudades caracterizadas por un neoliberalismo atrincherado?

El caso de Susana Villarán, la alcaldesa progresista que gobernó Lima, Perú, de 2011 a

2014, ilustra la batalla cuesta arriba que enfrenta la izquierda. La sorprendente victoria

electoral de Villarán logró colocar a alguien de la izquierda en la alcaldía por primera

vez en 25 años. Ella se enfrentó a una oposición implacable, pero desafió las expectativas

y ganó una revocatoria solo para enfrentar una derrota contundente en su intento por

la reelección. Dado la poca capacidad para crear políticas públicas y la ausencia de una

maquinaria electoral partidista, se vio forzada a gastar todo su capital político en la

batalla por la revocatoria, lo cual la dejó sin recursos para conseguir la reelección. Su

trayectoria presenta una lección importante para los progresistas en ciudades donde la

izquierda es débil: una victoria llamativa por parte de un individuo de la izquierda no

funge como substituto para una base robusta de la izquierda. Lo anterior sugiere que

cuando esta base se encuentra ausente, es probable que el simple acto de elegir un alcalde

progresista sea una victoria efímera.

Paul Dosh is an associate professor of political science at Macalester College and the author of

Demanding the Land: Urban Popular Movements in Peru and Ecuador (2010). Julia Smith Coyoli is a

doctoral student in government at Harvard University, and her articles have been published by

the North American Congress on Latin America. They thank Ximena Rodríguez Medina for excel-

lent assistance with fieldwork and Eduardo Dargent, Diane Davis, César Flores, Benjamin

Goldfrank, Steven Levitsky, and Emilio Pradilla Cobos for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of

this article. Their research was supported by a Wallace International Research Grant and funds

from the North Central Council of Latin Americanists. Unless otherwise indicated, interviews

were conducted in Lima and translations from Spanish are by the authors. Since completing this

article, Paul Dosh has begun to work with Susana Villarán through the nonprofit Building Dignity.

803877LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18803877Latin American PerspectivesDosh and Coyoli / PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN LIMA

research-article2018

264 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Keywords: Lima, Peru, Susana Villarán, Urban politics, Leftist mayors

What lessons does the tenure of Lima’s progressive Mayor Susana Villarán

(2011–2014) offer to the left in Latin America? With the 2015 election of the con-

servative President Mauricio Macri in Argentina and the 2016 impeachment of

the progressive Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, observers note the receding of the

pink tide and a new regional turn to the right. Yet in Bolivia we see Evo

Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS)

strengthening its grip, albeit with more centrist policies (Farthing, 2017), and in

Mexico the freshly minted Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Movement for

National Regeneration—MORENA)—the party of Andrés Manuel López

Obrador—made a swift ascent to prominence not only in the leftist stronghold

of Mexico City but also nationally, capturing the presidency and the majority

of national offices in 2018. From Mexico City to Porto Alegre to Montevideo,

cities have been sites where the left has established a foothold in its climb

toward national standing. In this article we examine Villarán’s short-lived con-

trol of City Hall both to understand why progressive politics fell flat in Lima

and to glean lessons for the left in the region.

In 2010, when voters elected Susana Villarán—Lima’s first leftist mayor in a

quarter-century and its first elected female mayor1—her administration pro-

voked comparison to the last time progressive leaders governed Lima, under

the Izquierda Unida (United Left—IU) administration of Alfonso Barrantes in

1984–1986. The Barrantes administration remains unmatched as the zenith of

left power in Lima, as IU leadership facilitated grassroots consultation and

participation efforts, most famously the Vaso de Leche (Glass of Milk) child

nutrition program. Villarán served as an adviser to Barrantes and helped make

Vaso de Leche a mainstay of City Hall power as it continually ushered in new

participants. But the experience of the Barrantes administration also suggested

two limitations of the left in power in Lima (Schönwälder, 2002: 149; 2004: 21–

30). First, the IU’s rejection of clientelism proved costly when paired with

municipal resources insufficient to keep the promises made to its base. Second,

although the IU base was substantially democratic, it proved too narrow to

sustain IU power, and the party’s ideological commitment hampered efforts to

broaden its appeal. Despite its good run in Lima, the IU proved no match for

the center-left Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular

Revolutionary Alliance—APRA).

With the collapse of Peru’s party system in 1990, the electoral left largely

disappeared in Lima, which was governed by mayors from the center (Ricardo

Belmont, 1990–1996; Alberto Andrade, 1996–2003) and center-right (Luis

Castañeda, 2003–2010) (Dietz, 1998: 219). In the 1990s President Alberto

Fujimori led Peru in a sharply neoliberal direction, and although subsequent

presidents Alejandro Toledo (2001–2006), Alan García (2006–2011), and Ollanta

Humala (2011–2016) occasionally made a show of hand-wringing over neolib-

eralism, none of them deviated from Peru’s neoliberal model. APRA’s García

was a particular disappointment for the left. Whereas he had won the presi-

dency in 1985 with the slogan “My commitment is to all Peruvians,” in 2006 he

emerged as the candidate of the establishment, besting the populist Humala in