I think what you've said is really crucial because in our case we don't even talk about property rights: we talk about property and business rights. That's the way we've packaged it together to be understood. In other words, wherever we go and we're hired—we're a not-for-profit organization—we think it doesn't make any sense to let people have fungible assets if what they're going to face is a system that can't sort out exchanges and unfair exchanges and can't help women defend their rights. So we put the whole thing together.
We also knew that this was crucial because the way we were born in Peru is that we were able to get our reforms through at the time that we were fighting the Shining Path, a terrorist system that prevailed in Peru in the 1980s, and we drew up the strategy, the civilian strategy, that ultimately helped us beat them, which was that we found out that the Shining Path did not simply educate people in Marxism; Marxism is 56 volumes, a lot of them very hard to understand even if you're well educated, and half of them have never been translated from German to Spanish--or even English. So what was it that they did to preserve the loyalty of people? Well, we found out that what they did, essentially, was protect the property rights, especially in the coca farms from which cocaine is derived, and secondly, settle committal disputes...in other words, put in commercial law.
In 1990, one of the first things that actually occurred with the government of Fujimori, which is now very discredited...but you know, like all discredited governments, there's a sunny side and there's a dark side. The sunny side was that we went in and titled them and gave them the rules. In a matter of about one year, we actually brought down Peru's total contribution to the production of the coca leaf from somewhere around 70% to 26%. The reason was that the farmers were kept in this tight ring simply because, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, from what you tell me, and probably like terrorist movements all over the place, they gave a service, and that service had to do with how the farmers carried out day-to-day business and how they settled property or territorial disputes. It's that simple.
So we went in and we brought a mechanism into place, which is what we do in whatever country we're called into. We've actually been to Canada a few times, because we thought it was an ideal place to find a joint venture partner. Among other things, I don't know of any other country that is versed both in Roman law and in the Anglo common law. We work in both kinds of countries, and in the end, it really doesn't matter which you use, provided you use them well.
So you can do an awful lot about it, but there's a way to look at it, we have found, and it may be useful to you. If one simply talks about, in our case, property rights or business rights, they'll ask, “Do you like Newt Gingrich or do you like Obama?” It's that kind of thing. In other words, that's the way you're going to be placed. You have to get out of that, because once you're in that you're in a game that's not going to go anywhere, at least not in developing countries. The idea is to stick it into an issue.
In the case of Afghanistan, we've been called in various times. We've had missions come over here. We're just Peru and we don't have the money to do it, but they've come in because we know how to title in conditions of war, and we know that the war has a lot to do with who is solving day-to-day problems. That's not going to be broken as long as the property records and the rules that refer to how you settle property disputes or any transaction disputes remain in the hands of the warlords, because if the Taliban doesn't do it, the warlords will. If the warlords don't do it, the Taliban will.
In the end, the rule of law means that you are going to replace various little fragments of systems that could be called anarchic with one law. That's the rule of law: when there is one system and there's one standard for the whole nation. It's just like when you brought in electricity—I think it was in the United States—it was very hard to do anything until one person who I think was called Marconi, came around and said we're going to create.... There were about 300 voltages and 32 plugs in the United States, and he said there would be one voltage system, one plug, and one nation.
Once you put all of that together, you put the Taliban out of business, you put the rebels out of business, you put the oligarchs out of business, and you put the government back into business, which is where it should be. Because it's sovereign, it should decide how property rights will be awarded.