[1930 - 1980] Decades of Turmoil and Reform

Between 1930 and 1980, Peru was a nation caught in a storm. The fifty-year period began with the world economy in freefall and a sharp military boot kicking out the long-serving president, Augusto Leguía. The relative stability of his eleven-year rule, the 'Oncenio,' shattered, leaving a power vacuum that would be filled, time and again, by force. The primary forces destined to clash for decades were now set. On one side, the traditional oligarchy, the wealthy families of the coast who controlled the nation's sugar and cotton exports, backed by a politically ambitious military. On the other, a new and electrifying political movement: the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA. Led by the charismatic and controversial Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, APRA championed the rights of the indigenous, the working class, and the poor, terrifying the established order. The 1930s descended into a brutal cycle of elections, accusations of fraud, and violent suppression. A 1932 Aprista uprising in the northern city of Trujillo was met with overwhelming military force, culminating in mass executions of party members, an event that would poison Peruvian politics with a deep-seated enmity between the armed forces and APRA for half a century. The mid-century decades offered little respite, swinging between fragile democratic springs and iron-fisted military rule. When civilian presidents like José Bustamante y Rivero attempted to govern in the late 1940s, they found themselves squeezed between an intransigent congress controlled by the oligarchy and the unyielding demands of the newly empowered masses. The result was deadlock, followed inevitably by another coup. In 1948, General Manuel Odría seized power, ushering in eight years of rule known as the 'Ochenio.' Odría was a classic strongman of his era: he brutally suppressed dissent, jailing or exiling his political opponents, while simultaneously embarking on a massive populist public works campaign. A boom in raw material exports, fueled by the Korean War, filled government coffers. Grand stadiums, hospitals, and housing projects appeared, especially in Lima. This was the era when the great migration began. Thousands of families from the impoverished Andean highlands, the Sierra, began pouring into the capital, seeking work and a better life. They settled on the arid, dusty hillsides surrounding the city, constructing makeshift homes of straw mats and scrap metal. These sprawling shantytowns, the 'barriadas,' changed the face of Lima forever, creating a new, vibrant, and desperate urban class that politicians could no longer ignore. In the homes of the middle class, the radio brought the world closer, carrying the sounds of mambo, American swing, and the endless drama of political rhetoric. By the 1960s, the pressure for fundamental change was becoming unbearable. The old land-tenure system, where a few hundred families owned vast haciendas worked by millions of landless indigenous peasants in near-feudal conditions, was seen as the root of Peru's inequality. In 1963, the nation elected Fernando Belaúnde Terry, a thoughtful, American-educated architect who promised a 'conquest of Peru by Peruvians.' He envisioned a modern nation connected by infrastructure, launching ambitious projects like the 'Carretera Marginal de la Selva,' a highway designed to open up the Amazon basin for settlement and development. His style was moderate, a stark contrast to the military men before him. He often traveled to remote villages in a poncho, promising progress. But his attempts at land reform were too timid for the left and too threatening for the right. They were hobbled by a hostile congress, and the changes were too slow to quell the rising tide of discontent. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, small guerrilla movements, like the MIR, emerged in the Andes. Though quickly crushed by the army, their existence sent a shockwave through the country. The feeling was palpable on the streets of Lima and in the mountain communities: moderate reform had failed. Something more radical was coming. That something arrived on October 3, 1968. In a swift, bloodless overnight coup, tanks rolled up to the Presidential Palace and deposed Belaúnde. But this was no ordinary coup to preserve the status quo. This was the 'Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces,' a uniquely leftist military junta led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado. Their mission was not to protect the oligarchy, but to destroy it. Six days after taking power, Velasco nationalized the American-owned International Petroleum Company, a wildly popular move that was declared a 'Day of National Dignity.' This was just the beginning. In 1969, Velasco announced the most sweeping Agrarian Reform in the nation's history under the powerful slogan, 'Campesino, el patrón ya no comerá más de tu pobreza' ('Peasant, the master will no longer eat from your poverty'). The law effectively dismantled the hacienda system overnight, expropriating nearly 11 million hectares of land. The centuries-old power of the landed aristocracy was broken in a single stroke. The government took over mining, fishing, and other key industries, promoting a message of fierce nationalism and anti-imperialism. For the first time, Quechua, the language of the Inca and millions of indigenous Peruvians, was made an official language alongside Spanish. It was a time of breathtaking, top-down change that upended the entire social structure of the nation. But the revolution had a dark side. While it broke the chains of the old system, the state-run agricultural cooperatives that replaced the haciendas were often inefficient and mismanaged, leading to drops in food production. The massive state-led economy became bloated and racked by foreign debt. Velasco, his health failing from a severe circulatory illness that led to the amputation of his leg, grew more isolated and authoritarian. By 1975, with the economy in crisis and social unrest growing, the revolution consumed its own. In a palace coup from within the military, a more moderate general, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, took power, promising a 'Second Phase' of the revolution. This new phase was essentially a managed retreat. Morales Bermúdez began to roll back Velasco's more radical policies and, under pressure from widespread strikes and a dire economic situation, initiated a slow return to civilian rule. A Constituent Assembly was convened in 1978 to write a new constitution. In a moment of profound historical irony, the Assembly's presidency was won by an aging Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the man the military had barred from power his entire life. He signed the new constitution but died in 1979, before he could see his ultimate dream of becoming Peru's president realized. In 1980, Peruvians went to the polls and re-elected Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the very man the military had overthrown twelve years earlier. The fifty-year storm of coups and revolution was over, but the ground had been irrevocably altered. As a fragile democracy returned, new, far more violent shadows were already gathering in the highlands, preparing to plunge the nation into its darkest chapter yet.