Examines Alberto Fujimori's corrupt presidency, and the thin line between democracy and dictatorship, demonstrating how closely they can resemble one another. Analyzes how public institutions can empower dictators and also bring them down.

Catherine M. Conaghan is professor of political science at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research has included fieldwork in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. She is the author of Fujimori's Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere and Restructuring Domination: Industrialists and the State in Ecuador, and is the coauthor of Unsettling Statecraft: Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Central Andes. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Miami, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the University of San Diego, the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, American University, and the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-Ecuador. In 2013 she was appointed as the Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Latin American Politics.