Corruption Now and Them: Managing Threats to the Nation in the Twentieth-Centry Peru

The author compares current neoliberal concerns with corruption and anti-corruption with the concerns of an earlier period dating back to the mid-twentieth century. Through taking the case of Peruvian government responses in the 1950s to the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana – an underground political party- the author identifies the features of the earlier response to the corruption/anti-corruption complex. The author argues that in the earlier period, the private domain was regarded as being under direct threat from an emergent global public as opposed to the current period, where national governments play a key role in reconfiguring the public/private divide. The author analyses the construction of the notion of corruption by the ruling party, and compares it with the neoliberal notion of corruption. The major differences between both periods are the concern with the domain of the private in the earlier period as opposed to the public domain nowadays, and in variations in the typography of corruption in both periods.