PERU: THE EVOLUTION OF A CRISIS

Peru: The Evolution of a Crisis

Peru: The Evolution of a Crisis

Introduction

Peru's political panorama in the mid-1980s was unique in Latin America. Like many South American countries, Peru had recently returned to democratic rule, and Lima, at least, enjoyed great freedom for non-violent political and intellectual activity. But unlike countries like Argentina or Uruguay, the consolidation of Peruvian democracy was not accompanied by political moderation, pact-making, or timidity. Instead, Peru witnessed an unprecedented explosion of popular participation, with a strong and militant left rather more akin to its counterparts in Central America (Fitzgerald, 1976 and Goodman et al., 1990).

The empire of the Incas was a great, although brief, period in Peru's colourful past. There were many differing tribes that inhabited the land pre-Inca empire. However, the last of the people to inhabit Peru (pre-Spanish Invasion) constructed a vast empire that homogenized the tribes, and replaced the differences with a highly developed kind of welfare state. The Wari, Chankas, and Chan are just a few of the other peoples that had populated Peru at various times. It would be a difficult task to list the many tribes that existed in ancient Peru, seeing as how none of them kept any written records. This is due to the fact that a written language didn't even exist in Peru until the invasion of the Spaniards, and that is when we get the most initial information of the Inca civilization (Cameron, 1995).

The Evolution of a Crisis

The Shining Path insurgency was growing, while at the same time a coalition of legal Marxist parties had become the second electoral force in the country, able to capture several key mayor ships, including that of Lima. Bucking the neo-liberal orthodoxy elsewhere, the Aprista government of Alan Garcia embarked on a populist economic program of price controls and wage raises, financed by his decision to make only a fraction of Peru's scheduled debt payments. And from the southern Andes to the teeming shantytowns of greater Lima, the poor had erupted onto the political scene as never before in Peruvian history. Demanding land, demanding drinking water, demanding affordable food, and demanding to be treated for once like citizens of their own nation, Peru's poor cholo masses were no longer to be ignored (Berry, 1990).

The uniquely progressive regime of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (the so-called "Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces"), inadvertently brought about a new social consciousness when it called upon Peruvians to participate in the collective enterprise of social change but succeeded neither in controlling that participation nor in satisfying raised expectations. Readers who are unfamiliar with Peruvian debate on the legacy of the Velasco years will find this part of the paper fascinating. On the one hand, it provides nice insight into how Velasco tried to build "a more participatory yet loyal political base" (Bourque, 1989) in Independencia, why he failed, and the result of that failure. This process makes an interesting point about the pitfalls of state corporatism: sponsoring one organization in a shantytown ...