Peru Historical Setting
Machupicchu ruins
AS THE CRADLE of South America's most advanced native
American
civilizations, Peru has a rich and unique heritage among
the
nations of the southern continent. It encompasses a past
that
reaches back over 10,000 years in one of the most harsh
and
inhospitable, if spectacular, environments in the
world--the high
Andes of South America. The culmination of Andean
civilization
was the construction by the Incas, in little more than one
hundred years, of an empire that spanned a third of the
South
American continent and achieved a level of general
material wellbeing and cultural sophistication that rivaled and
surpassed many
of the great empires in world history.
Paradoxically, Peruvian history is also unique in
another,
less glorious, way. The Andean peoples engaged the
invading
Spaniards in 1532 in one of the first clashes between
Western and
non-Western civilizations in history. The ensuing Spanish
conquest and colonialism rent the rich fabric of Andean
society
and created the enormous gulf between victors and
vanquished that
has characterized Peru down through the centuries. Indeed,
Peru's
postconquest, colonial past established a historic
division--a
unique Andean "dualism"--that formed the hallmark of its
subsequent underdevelopment. Peru, like its geography,
became
divided economically, socially, and politically between a
semifeudal, largely native American highland interior and
a more
modernized, capitalistic, urbanized, and
mestizo (see Glossary)
coast. At the apex of its social structure, a small,
wealthy,
educated elite came to dominate the vast majority of
Peruvians
who, by contrast, subsisted in poverty, isolation,
ignorance, and
disease. The persistence of this dualism and the inability
of the
Peruvian state in more recent times to overcome it have
prevented
not only the development but also the effective
integration and
consolidation of the Peruvian nation to this day.
Another unique feature of Peru is the role that
outsiders
have played in its history. Peru's formal independence
from Spain
in 1824 (proclaimed on July 28, 1821) was largely the work
of
"outsiders," such as the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar Palacios
and
the Argentine José de San Martín. In 1879 Chile invaded
Peru,
precipitating the War of the Pacific (1879-83), and
destroyed or
carried off much of its wealth, as well as annexing a
portion of
its territory. Foreigners have also exploited Peru's
natural
resources, from silver in the colonial period to guano and
nitrates in the nineteenth century and copper, oil, and
various
industrial metals in the twentieth century. This
exploitation,
among other things, led advocates of the dependency theory
to
argue that Peru's export-dependent economy was created and
manipulated by foreign interests in a nefarious alliance
with a
domestic oligarchy.
Although foreigners have played controversial roles
throughout Peruvian history, internal demographic changes
since
the middle of the twentieth century have shaped
contemporary Peru
in other fundamental ways. For example, the total
population grew
almost threefold from over 7 million in 1950 to nearly 20
million
in 1985, despite slowing down in the 1970s. This reflected
a
sharp jump after World War II in fertility rates that led
to an
average annual increase in the population of 2.5 percent.
At the
same time, a great wave of out-migration swept the Sierra.
Over
the next quarter century, Peru moved from a rural to an
essentially urban society. In 1980 over 60 percent of its
work
force was located in towns and cities, principally the
capital,
Lima (one-third of the total population), and the coast
(threefifths ). This monumental population shift resulted in a
dramatic
increase in the informal economy, as Peru's formal economy
was
unable to expand fast enough to accommodate the newcomers.
In
1985 half of Lima's nearly 7 million inhabitants lived in
informal housing, and at least half of the country's
population
was employed or underemployed in the informal sector.
These demographic changes during the previous quarter
century
led anthropologist José Matos Mar to describe the 1980s as
a
great desborde popular (overflowing of the masses).
Once
the proud bastion of the dominant creole (American born)
classes,
Lima became increasingly Andeanized in ways that have made
it
virtually unrecognizable to a previous generation of
inhabitants.
In some ways, this trend of Andeanization suggests that
the old
dualism may now be beginning to erode, at least in an
ethnic
sense. Urbanization and desborde popular also
tended to
overwhelm the capacity of the state, already weak by
historical
standards, to deliver even the basic minimum of
governmental
services to the vast majority of the population.
As these demographic changes unfolded, Peru experienced
an
increasing "hegemonic" crisis--the dispersion of power
away from
the traditional triumvirate of oligarchy, church, and
armed
forces. This occurred when the longstanding power of the
oligarchy came to an abrupt end in the 1968 military
"revolution." The ensuing agrarian reform of 1969
destroyed the
economic base of both the export elite and the
gamonales
(sing. gamonal; rural bosses--see Glossary) in the
Sierra.
Then, after more than a decade, the military, in growing
public
disfavor, returned to the barracks, opening the way, once
again,
to the democratic process.
With the resumption of elections in 1980, a process
that was
reaffirmed in 1985 (and again in 1990),
"redemocratization"
confronted a number of problems. The end of military rule
left in
its wake an enormous political vacuum that the political
parties-
-absent for twelve years and historically weak--and a
proliferating number of new groups were hard-pressed to
fill.
Even under the best of circumstances, given Peru's highly
fragmented and heterogeneous society, as well as its long
history
of authoritarian and oligarchical rule, effective
democratic
government would have been difficult to accomplish. Even
more
serious, redemocratization faced an increasingly grave
threat
from a deepening economic crisis that began in the
mid-1960s.
Various economic factors caused the country's main engine
for
sustained economic growth to stall. As a result of the
ensuing
economic stagnation and decline, real wages by 1985
approached
mid-1960 levels.
Finally, redemocratization was also threatened from
another
quarter--the emergence, also in 1980, of the Shining Path
(Sendero Luminoso--SL) guerilla movement, Latin America's
most
violent and radical ongoing insurgency. By 1985 its
so-called
"people's war" had claimed about 6,000 victims, most of
them
innocent civilians killed by the guerrillas or the army.
Resorting to extraordinarily violent means, the Shining
Path
succeeded in challenging the authority of the state,
particularly
in the more remote areas of the interior, where the
presence of
the state had always been tenuous--the more so now because
of the
absence of the gamonal class. Violence, however,
was a
thread that ran throughout Andean history, from Inca
expansion,
the Spanish conquest and colonialism, and countless native
American insurrections and their suppression to the
struggle for
independence in the 1820s, the War of the Pacific, and the
longterm nature of underdevelopment itself.
Data as of September 1992
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