From: Michael Coppedge

Date: Tue, May 3, 2011 at 5:04 PM

Subject: documentation
To: Gustavo Gorriti

Dear Sr. Gorriti:

 1. The text that was plagiarized by someone at ILD was not the work I did under contract
in 1992, but my doctoral dissertation, which I had sent to Hernando De Soto two years
earlier. Charles Kenney’s systematic comparison of these texts shows that almost all of the
copied text in the speech came from the dissertation. Only one similar sentence can be
found in the contracted work--and it was not about Peru!

 2. I did not give Hernando De Soto permission to copy any of my texts without attribution.

 3. When I was working under contract, I was not aware that De Soto or his colleagues were
writing a speech for Fujimori, and I had no intention of helping to justify the autogolpe. De
Soto told me that he opposed it himself and that he was pushing Fujimori to create a more
democratic system. I believed that my work, if it had any impact at all, was completely in
favor of democracy, and I feel betrayed by the way it was misused.

 4. I was very clear with De Soto that Peruvian parties were very different from Venezuelan
parties. The draft book chapters I sent said, for example, that “Peru’s APRA used to
maintain a strong grass-roots organization, but it was the only party in the system to do so
and it has been greatly weakened in recent years” (p. 175 of the book) and “[P]artyarchy is
more extreme in Venezuela than elsewhere” (p. 176).

 5. All of my advice was solidly in favor of democracy; more specifically, in favor of a
vigorous, participatory democracy with some elements of direct democracy. I consistently
argued that parties, especially opposition parties, are essential and desirable actors in any
democratic regime. I advocated institutions that I believed would help citizens make
parties--either existing parties or new parties--more responsive to their needs. No one who
reads my work can possibly interpret it as an endorsement of Fujimori’s authoritarian
project.

 Michael Coppedge

Professor, Department of Political Science

Faculty Fellow, Kellogg Institute
Kellogg Institute, Hesburgh Center
University of Notre Dame