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Peru Elites
Concentrated in the provincial, departmental, and
national
capitals, Peru's upper class was the other side of the
coin of
peonage. Whereas the Quechua or Aymara native population
was
powerless, submissive, and poor, the regional and national
elites
were Hispanic, dominant, and wealthy. The inheritors of
colonial
power quickly reaffirmed their political, social, and
economic
hegemony over the nation even though the Peruvian state
itself
was a most unstable entity until the presidency of Ramón
Castilla. They continued to strike the posture of
conquerors
toward the native peoples, justifying themselves as
civilized,
culto (cultured), and urbane, as well as gente
decente (decent people), in the customary phrase of
the
provincial town. Such presumption of status is a powerful
but
unwritten code of entitlement. It permits one to expect to
have
obedient servants, to be deferred to by those of lesser
station,
and to be the first to enjoy opportunity, services of the
state,
and whatever resources might be available.
The modern national upper classes of Peru are today a
more
diverse population than was the case even at the end of
the
nineteenth century. They have remained essentially
identified
with the Costa, even though they have controlled extensive
property in the highlands and Selva. Nevertheless, these
elites
are highly conscious of class integrity as social life
unfolds in
the context of private clubs and specialized economic
circles.
The predilection of the upper-class families to show the
strength
of their lineages is revealed not only in the use of full
names,
which always contain both one's father's and mother's last
names
in that order, but also the apellidos (last names)
of
important grandparental generations. Thus, magazine
society pages
report names like José Carlos Prado Fernandini Beltrán de
Espantoso y Ugarteche, in which only Prado is the last
name in
the American sense. Use of the family pedigree to
demonstrate
rank is common among the elite when the names are clearly
associated with wealth and power.
As Peruvians have become more cosmopolitan, foreign
names
from Britain, Italy, Austria, and Germany have appeared
with
increasing frequency among those claiming upper-class
credentials, leading to the conclusion that it is easier
to reach
elite status from outside Peru than to ascend from within
the
society. There are, of course a number of families who can
trace
their lineages to the colonial period. However, families
of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants
constitute
about 40 percent of Peru's most elite sector, indicating a
surprising openness to cosmopolitan mobility. In a 1980s
list of
Peru's national elite containing over 250 family names,
for
example, only one of clearly Quechua origins could be
identified.
The racial composition of the upper class is
predominantly
white, although a few mestizos are represented, especially
at
regional levels. The social structure of the country
follows a
Lima-based model. The national upper class is located
almost
exclusively in the province of Lima, the second strata of
elites
is provincial, residing in the old principal regional
cities,
such as Arequipa, Trujillo, and Cusco, but not in
Huancayo,
Chimbote, or Juliaca, whose populations are predominantly
of
highland mestizo and cholo origins. Upper-class
status in
provincial life generally does not equate with the same
levels in
Lima, but rather to a middle level in the national social
hierarchy.
Traditionally, the upper classes based their power and
wealth
on rural land ownership and secondarily on urban
industrial forms
of investment. This situation has changed in part through
the
rise of business, industry, banking, and political
opportunities,
and also because of the Agrarian Reform Law of 1969, which
forced
dramatic changes in land tenure patterns. It was, however,
a
change as difficult to make as any that could be imagined:
the
fabled landed oligarchy greatly feared any alterations in
its
property rights, which included the colonos and
yanaconas attached to both highland and coastal
estates.
Their control over Peru's power, purse, and peasantry
bordered on
the absolute until the second half of the twentieth
century, when
the great highland migrations took hold of coastal cities
and
industrial growth exploded. Ensuing social and political
demands
could no longer be managed from behind the traditional
scenes of
power.
Vested interests of the landed upper class were
ensconced in
the National Agrarian Association (Sociedad Nacional
Agraria--
SNA). Until the first government of Fernando Belaúnde, it
had
been impossible to discover just what the property and
investment
interests of this group were because government files on
these
subjects were closed and, indeed, had never been publicly
scrutinized. All of this changed abruptly after the
peasant land
invasions of estates in 1963, when the need for solutions
overcame the secrecy. In 1966 economic historian Carlos
Malpica
Silva Santisteban identified the landed oligarchy as a
relatively
small group, with 190 families owning 54 percent of the
irrigated
coast and 36 families or persons holding 63 percent of
titled
land in the Selva, for a total of over 3 million hectares.
In the
highlands, the data were similar in content but hard to
verify.
Although upper-class wealth was founded on rural
properties,
it is evident that elite urban, mining, and industrial
interests
were also extensive. An indefatigable compiler of data on
Peru's
elites, Malpica annotated an extensive catalog of modern
business
and banking concerns showing the concentration of economic
control in the hands of a tiny group of elite families,
many
being familiar traditional members of the oligarchy, now
deprived
of their land base by the agrarian reform. Of the
seventy-nine
families holding significant blocks of shares in the
twelve
principal insurance and banking operations in 1989, almost
50
percent were descended from the aforementioned European
immigrant
groups. Despite this Eurocentric trend, descendants of
Japanese
and Chinese immigrants have also entered the economic
elites, if
not with the equivalent social status. At least one
Chinese-Peruvian family, which holds substantial banking,
commercial, and industrial investments, descends from
immigrants
who arrived as indentured laborers in the nineteenth
century.
Data as of September 1992
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