Foreign Investment and the Privatization of Coercion: A Case Study of the Forza Security Company in Peru

This Article documents the exercise of coercive power by public police services and private security companies in response to the needs of foreign-owned mining companies in an environment of social protest and opposition. It describes how a particular transnational private security company has been confronted with a broad international social movement of human rights and environmental activists who are simultaneously invoking multiple regimes of domestic and international law in an effort to hold the company to account for its actions. Peru offers an important case study with regard to these issues because it is a relatively poor developing country dominated by foreign-owned mining activity. Between 1990 and 2000, former president Alberto Fujimori initiated the neo-liberalization of the Peruvian economy through a series of political and economic legislative reforms that sought to integrate the country into the global economy and reduce the presence of the state in all areas of economic and social policy. In terms of the resource extraction sector, this included the complete privatization of mineral production' and the restructuring of the countrys legal regimes to create favorable conditions for foreign investors. As a result, in 2001 the International Monetary Fund evaluated Peru as one of the national economies most open to foreign investment in the world. Following the fall of Fujimori in 2000, subsequent governments' advanced policies that continued the neo-liberalization of Perus economic and legal order