ABSTRACT
By 1990, A Sine Qua Non For Collaboration Between the United States and a Latin American nation was free-market reform. President Alan Garcia challenged the international financial community’s principles, which in Peru at the time were called economic “orthodoxy”. The Garcia government’s response was to expropriate Belco’s offshore oil fields and transfer them to a new state enterprise, called Petromar. Leftist political tides were flowing strongly in Peru, and Garcia’s “heterodox” policy was popular. The upshot of the Garcia government’s policies was “one of the worst economic performances in modern history”. Despite Albert Fujimori's campaign promise of “gradual” economic reform, he was not knowledgeable about economics and was not sure of his economic policy course upon his election in June 1990. The Fujimori government was also widely considered ineffective in its negotiation of the most important foreign investment of the 1998–2000 period, the investment for the development of the giant Camisea gas fields in the jungle in eastern Peru.
