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Peru Peru at the Crossroads
As García took office on July 28, 1985--at thirty-six
the
youngest chief executive to assume power in Peru's
history--he
seemed to awaken hope among Peruvians for the future.
Although he
had no previous experience in elected office, he
possessed, as
his decisive electoral victory illustrated, the necessary
charisma to mobilize Peruvians to confront their problems.
At the
same time, the governing APRA party won a majority in the
new
Congress, assuring the new president support for his
program to
meet the crisis.
The crisis seemed daunting indeed. The foreign debt
stood at
over US$13 billion, real wages had eroded by 30 percent
since
1980, prices for Peru's exports on the world market
remained low,
the economy was gripped in recession, and guerrilla
violence was
spreading. The future of Peru's fledgling
redemocratization now
hinged on García's ability to reverse these trends and, at
bottom, to restore sustained economic growth and
development
(see
The García Government, 1985-90, ch. 4).
* * *
There are a number of good, general histories of Peru.
These
include Magnus Mörner's The Andean Past, David P.
Werlich's Peru: A Short History, and Michael Reid's
Peru: Paths to Poverty. The reader should also
consult the
chapters on Peru in the authoritative, multivolume,
Cambridge
History of Latin America (CHLA), edited by Leslie
Bethell. A
good general introduction to the colonial period is Mark
A.
Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson's Colonial Latin
America.
The works of John V. Murra are seminal on the
pre-Columbian
period, a good introduction being his chapter "Andean
Societies
Before 1532," in the CHLA. Most useful on the Incas and
the
Conquest are the brilliant works of Nathan Wachtel, The
Vision
of the Vanquished, and John Hemming's The Conquest
of the
Incas. A powerful account in defense of the native
population
after conquest is Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala's Letter
to a
King, while the mestizo chronicler Garcilaso de la
Vega's
Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of
Peru constitutes the first truly Peruvian vision of
the
Andes. Particularly incisive works on the colonial system
are
Karen Spalding's Huarochirí: An Andean Society Under
Inca and
Spanish Rule and Steve J. Stern's Peru's Indian
Peoples
and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest.
The postindependence period has received innovative
treatment
in Paul E. Gootenberg's Between Silver and Guano
and Nils
P. Jacobsen's Mirages of Transition. Rosemary Thorp
and
Geoffrey Bertram's Peru 1890-1977 is the standard
source
on twentieth-century economic development. Richard C. Webb
and
Graciela Fernández Baca de Valdéz's Perú en números
provides important statistics on twentieth-century Peru.
Four
chapters in the CHLA cover the 1880-1962 period: Heraclio
Bonilla's "Peru and Bolivia," Peter F. Klarén's "Origins
of
Modern Peru, 1880-1930," Geoffrey Bertram's "Peru:
1930-1962,"
and Julio Cotler's "Peru since 1960." Incisive analyses on
APRA
can be found in Klarén's Modernization, Dislocation,
and
Aprismo,Steve Stein's Populism in Peru, and
Fredrick
B. Pike's The Politics of the Miraculous in Peru.
Relations with the United States are surveyed adroitly by
Pike in
The United States and the Andean Republics. The
military
revolution of 1968 receives important attention from
Cynthia
McClintock and Abraham F. Lowenthal (eds.) in The
Peruvian
Experiment Reconsidered and in Alfred Stepan's The
State
and Society. The crisis of the early 1980s is analyzed
by
José Matos Mar's Un Desborde popular. (For further
information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of September 1992
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