[1883–1980] Reconstruction and 20th Century Turmoil

The year is 1883. The smoke has cleared from the battlefields of the War of the Pacific, but the stench of defeat hangs heavy over Peru. Lima, the proud City of Kings, has been occupied and looted. The nation is bankrupt, its profitable nitrate fields in the southern province of Tarapacá now belong to Chile, and its spirit is shattered. From this wreckage rises a figure of national resistance, General Andrés Avelino Cáceres, a hero of the Andean campaign. His presidency marks the beginning of a period known as the National Reconstruction. This era, often called the “Aristocratic Republic,” was dominated by a tight-knit oligarchy of coastal elites, who rebuilt the nation not on the lost nitrates, but on sugar and cotton plantations and the extraction of copper and silver. British capital poured in, financing railways that snaked into the Andes, not to unite the country, but to pull its resources out to port. For the indigenous majority in the highlands, little changed; they remained tied to the haciendas, vast estates owned by powerful landlords, their lives a world away from the political maneuvering in Lima.

While the coast and highlands grappled with this new order, a different kind of frenzy was gripping the Amazon rainforest: the rubber boom. In the humid, treacherous jungles of the northeast, men like Julio César Arana became unimaginably wealthy. His Peruvian Amazon Company, headquartered in London, fed the voracious global demand for rubber needed for bicycle and automobile tires. But this wealth was built on a foundation of unimaginable horror. Arana’s agents systematically enslaved, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of indigenous people, particularly the Bora and Witoto communities. They were forced into debt peonage, their days filled with the grueling work of tapping rubber trees, their nights with the terror of the lash and the rifle butt. The “civilized” world saw only the profits, until the horrific truth was exposed, a dark stain on the nation's conscience that revealed the brutal disconnect between the capital and its vast, untamed interior.

By 1919, a new kind of strongman seized power, promising a “Patria Nueva,” or New Fatherland. Augusto B. Leguía, a charismatic and authoritarian figure, began an eleven-year rule known as the 'Oncenio'. He broke the power of the old oligarchy and opened the floodgates to American investment. Lima was transformed. Grand avenues like the Avenida Arequipa were carved through the city, opulent hotels and social clubs were built, and the capital was given a modern, cosmopolitan facelift. It was a dazzling performance, but it was a facade built on a mountain of debt. Leguía’s rule was propped up by massive loans from New York banks, and his vision of progress did not include political dissent. Opponents were jailed, exiled, or simply disappeared. The ambitious modernization masked a deepening dependency and a brutal suppression of liberties. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred, the flow of American money dried up, and Leguía’s glittering regime crumbled overnight, overthrown by a military coup in 1930.

The collapse of the 'Oncenio' unleashed the powerful ideological forces that had been brewing beneath the surface. Two figures would come to define Peruvian political thought for the next half-century. The first was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the founder of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA. A magnetic orator, he preached a populist, anti-imperialist message that electrified the burgeoning middle classes, students, and organized labor. For decades, APRA would be the country’s largest and most organized political party, yet Haya de la Torre, constantly hounded by the military and the elite who feared his mass appeal, would never be allowed to become president. His foil was the brilliant, frail Marxist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui. In his seminal 1928 work, 'Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality', Mariátegui argued that any true revolution in Peru must be rooted in the indigenous communities and their communal traditions, what he termed “Inca communism.” His early death in 1930 left a void, but his ideas would inspire generations of thinkers and revolutionaries to come. The clash between APRA’s populism and more radical leftist ideologies, with the conservative oligarchy and its military allies playing the arbiter, set the stage for fifty years of political violence and instability.

The decades that followed were a whirlwind of fragile democracies, military interventions, and simmering social conflict. The military, viewing itself as the ultimate guardian of the nation, repeatedly stepped in to block APRA from power, most notably in the bloody Trujillo Revolution of 1932 where Aprista militants and government forces clashed violently. All the while, a profound social transformation was underway. Lured by the promise of work and a better life, hundreds of thousands of Peruvians began migrating from the impoverished Andes to the coast. They settled on the arid hills surrounding Lima, building sprawling informal settlements known as 'pueblos jóvenes', or “young towns.” These communities, constructed from straw mats, cardboard, and adobe bricks, lacked basic services like water, electricity, or sanitation, yet they pulsed with a vibrant, resilient culture and forever changed the face of the capital, turning a predominantly criollo city into a mestizo metropolis.

On October 3, 1968, the cycle of coups took a shocking and unprecedented turn. Tanks rolled up to the Presidential Palace, not to install another conservative general, but to bring to power a leftist military junta led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado. This was not a coup for the oligarchy; it was a coup against it. Announcing a “Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces,” Velasco swiftly nationalized the American-owned International Petroleum Company, a move of immense popular appeal. But his signature policy was the Agrarian Reform of 1969, the most radical land redistribution in Latin American history outside of Cuba. With the thunderous slogan, '“Campesino, el patrón no comerá más de tu pobreza!”' (“Peasant, the boss will no longer feed on your poverty!”), Velasco’s government expropriated the vast coastal plantations and Andean haciendas, dismantling a semi-feudal system that had existed for centuries. The land was turned over to worker-run cooperatives. For many, it was a moment of liberation and historical justice, but the policy was plagued by mismanagement and a lack of technical support, ultimately disrupting agricultural production and failing to solve rural poverty.

The revolutionary experiment began to wane by the mid-1970s. Velasco, ailing from serious health problems, was pushed out in a palace coup by a more moderate general in 1975. The government, burdened by foreign debt and economic stagnation, began to undo some of the more radical reforms. The nation had also been rocked by a catastrophic natural disaster; the 1970 Ancash earthquake, the worst in Peru’s history, triggered a massive landslide from Mount Huascarán that completely buried the town of Yungay, killing an estimated 70,000 people across the region. It was a moment of profound national grief that overshadowed the political turmoil. By the end of the decade, the military’s energy was spent. They drafted a new constitution in 1979 and prepared to hand power back to civilians. As 1980 dawned, Peru was on the verge of returning to democracy, but the deep wounds of the century—the chasm between rich and poor, coast and highlands, and the failure of both capitalist and socialist models to forge a truly inclusive nation—remained unhealed, setting a dangerous stage for the conflicts to come.