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Peru The Eleven-Year Rule, 1919-30
The immediate political beneficiary of this turmoil,
however,
was a dissident Civilista, former president Augusto B.
Leguía y
Salcedo (1908-12, 1919-30), who had left the party after
his
first term. He ran as an independent in the 1919 elections
on a
reform platform that appealed to the emerging new middle
and
working classes. When he perceived a plot by the
Civilistas to
deny him the election, the diminutive but boundlessly
energetic
Leguía (he stood only 1.5 meters tall and weighed a little
over
45 kilograms) staged a preemptive coup and assumed the
presidency.
Leguía's eleven-year rule, known as the oncenio
(1919-
30), began auspiciously enough with a progressive, new
constitution in 1920 that enhanced the power of the state
to
carry out a number of popular social and economic reforms.
The
regime weathered a brief postwar recession and then
generated
considerable economic growth by opening the country to a
flood of
foreign loans and investment. This allowed Leguía to
replace the
Civilista oligarchy with a new, if plutocratic,
middle-class
political base that prospered from state contracts and
expansion
of the government bureaucracy. However, it was not long
into his
regime that Leguía's authoritarian and dictatorial
tendencies
appeared. He cracked down on labor and student militancy,
purged
the Congress of opposition, and amended the constitution
so that
he could run, unopposed, for reelection in 1924 and again
in
1929.
Leguía's popularity was further eroded as a result of a
border dispute between Peru and Colombia involving
territory in
the rubber-tapping region between the Río Caquetá and the
northern watershed of the Río Napo. Under the United
Statesmediated Salomón-Lozano Treaty of March 1922, which
favored
Colombia, the Río Putumayo was established as the boundary
between Colombia and Peru
(see
fig. 4). Pressured by the
United
States to accept the unpopular treaty, Leguía finally
submitted
the document to the Peruvian Congress in December 1927,
and it
was ratified. The treaty was also unpopular with Ecuador,
which
found itself surrounded on the east by Peru.
The orgy of financial excesses, which included
widespread
corruption and the massive build-up of the foreign debt,
was
brought to a sudden end by the Wall Street stock market
crash of
1929 and ensuing worldwide depression. Leguía's
eleven-year rule,
the longest in Peruvian history, collapsed a year later.
Once
again, the military intervened and overthrew Leguía, who
died in
prison in 1932.
Meanwhile, the onset of the Great Depression galvanized
the
forces of the left. Before he died prematurely at the age
of
thirty-five in 1930, Mariátegui founded the Peruvian
Socialist
Party (Partido Socialista Peruano--PSP), shortly to become
the
Peruvian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Peruano--PCP),
which
set about the task of political organizing after Leguía's
fall
from power. Although a staunch Marxist who believed in the
class
struggle and the revolutionary role of the proletariat,
Mariátegui's main contribution was to recognize the
revolutionary
potential of Peru's native peasantry. He argued that
Marxism
could be welded to an indigenous Andean revolutionary
tradition
that included indigenismo, the long history of
Andean
peasant rebellion, and the labor movement.
Haya de la Torre returned to Peru from a long exile to
organize the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance
(Alianza
Popular Revolucionaria Americana--APRA), an
anti-imperialist,
continent-wide, revolutionary alliance, founded in Mexico
in
1924. For Haya de la Torre, capitalism was still in its
infancy
in Peru and the proletariat too small and undeveloped to
bring
about a revolution against the Civilista oligarchy. For
that to
happen, he argued, the working classes must be joined to
radicalized sectors of the new middle classes in a
cross-class,
revolutionary alliance akin to populism. Both parties--one
from a
Marxist and the other from a populist perspective--sought
to
organize and lead the new middle and working classes, now
further
dislocated and radicalized by the Great Depression. With
his
oratorical brilliance, personal magnetism, and
national-populist
message, Haya de la Torre was able to capture the bulk of
these
classes and to become a major figure in Peruvian politics
until
his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-six.
Data as of September 1992
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