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The
Impact of the Depression and World War II (1930 – 1945)
After
1930 both the military, now firmly allied with the oligarchy, and the
forces of the left, particularly the APRA, became important new actors
in Peruvian politics. This period (1930-68) has been characterised in
political terms by sociologist Dennis Gilbert as operating under
essentially a "tripartite"
political system, with the military often ruling at the behest of
the oligarchy to suppress the "unruly" masses represented by
the “American Popular Revolutionary Alliance”
(APRA) and the Communist Party of Peru (PCP). Lieutenant Colonel Luis
M. Sánchez Cerro and then General Oscar
Benavides led another period of military rule during the turbulent
1930s.
The
Trujillo Rebellion
In
the presidential election of 1931, Sánchez Cerro capitalising on his
popularity from having deposed the autocrat Augusto
Leguía, barely defeated APRA's leader Victor
Raúl Haya de la Torre, who claimed to have been defrauded out of
his first bid for office. In July 1932, APRA rose in a bloody
popular rebellion in Trujillo,
Haya de la Torre's hometown and an APRA stronghold, that resulted in the
execution of some sixty army officers by the insurgents. Enraged, the
army unleashed a brutal suppression that cost the lives of at least
1,000 Apristas (APRA members) and their sympathisers (partly from aerial
bombing, used for the first time in South American history). Thus began
what would become a virtual vendetta between the armed forces and APRA
that would last for at least a generation and on several occasions
prevented the party from coming to power.
Politically,
the Trujillo uprising was followed shortly by another crisis, this time
a border conflict with
Colombia over disputed territory in the Letícia region of the Amazon.
Before it could be settled, Sánchez Cerro was assassinated in April 1933 by a militant Aprista (APRA activist),
and Congress quickly elected former president Óscar
Benavides complete Sánchez Cerro's five-year term. Benavides
managed to settle the thorny Letícia dispute peacefully, with
assistance from the League of
Nations, when a Protocol of Peace, Friendship, and Co-operation was
signed in May 1934 ratifying Colombia's original claim. After a disputed
election in 1936, in which Haya de la Torre was prevented from running
and which Benavides nullified with the reluctant consent of Congress,
Benavides remained in power and extended his term until 1939.
Export-oriented
Growth
During
the 1930s, Peru's economy was one of the least affected by the Great
Depression. Thanks to a relatively diversified range of
exports, led by cotton and new industrial metals (particularly lead and
zinc), the country began a rapid recovery of export earnings as early as
1933. As a result, unlike many other Latin American countries that
adopted Keynesian and import-substitution industrialisation measures to
counteract the decline, Peru's policymakers made relatively few
alterations in their long-term model of export-oriented growth.
Under Sánchez
Cerro, Peru did take measures to reorganise its debt-ridden finances by
inviting Edwin Kemmerer, a well-known United States financial consultant,
to recommend reforms. Following his advice, Peru returned to the gold
standard, but could not avoid declaring a moratorium on its USD 180-million
debt on 01 April 1931. For the next thirty years, Peru was barred from
the United States capital market.
Repression
Against the Left
Benavides's
policies combined strict economic orthodoxy, measures of limited social
reform designed to attract the middle classes away from APRA, and repression against the left,
particularly APRA. For much of the rest of the decade, APRA continued to
be persecuted and remained underground. Almost from the moment APRA
appeared, the party and Haya de la Torre had been attacked by the
oligarchy as antimilitary, anticlerical, and "communistic."
Indeed, the official reason often given for APRA's proscription was its
"internationalism," because the party began as a continent-wide
alliance "against Yankee imperialism" - suggesting that it
was somehow subversively un-Peruvian.
Haya de la Torre had also flirted with the Communists during his exile
in the 1920s, and his early writings were influenced by a number of
radical thinkers, including Marx. Nevertheless, the 1931 APRA program
was essentially reformist,
nationalist, and populist. It called, among other things, for a
redistributive and interventionist state that would move to selectively
nationalise land and industry. Although certainly radical from the
perspective of the oligarchy, the program was designed to correct the
historical inequality of wealth and income in Peru, as well as to reduce
and bring under greater governmental control the large-scale foreign
investment in the country that was high in comparison with other Andean
nations.
The
intensity of the oligarchy's attacks was also a response to the extreme
rhetoric of APRA polemicists and reflected the polarised state of
Peruvian society and politics during the depression. Both sides readily
resorted to force and violence, as the bloody events of the 1930s
readily attested - the 1932 Trujillo revolt, the spate of prominent
political assassinations (including Sánchez Cerro and Antonio Miró
Quesada, publisher of the Lima daily “El Comercio”), and widespread
imprisonment and torture of Apristas and their sympathisers. It also
revealed the oligarchy's apprehension, indeed paranoia, at APRA's
sustained attempt to mobilise the masses for the first time into the
political arena. At bottom, Peru's richest, most powerful “forty
families” perceived a direct challenge to their traditional
privileges and absolute right to rule, a position they were not to yield
easily.
Manuel
Prado’s Second Term – APRA’s Re-emergence
When
Benavides's extended term expired in 1939, Manuel Prado y Ugarteche, a
Lima banker from a prominent family and son of a former president won
the presidency. He was soon confronted with a border conflict with Ecuador
that led to a brief war in
1941. After independence, Ecuador had been left without access to either
the Amazon or the region's other major waterway, the Río Marañón, and
thus without direct access to the Atlantic Ocean. In an effort to assert
its territorial claims in a region near the Río Marañón in the Amazon
Basin, Ecuador occupied militarily the town of Zarumilla along its
southwestern border with Peru. However, the Peruvian Army responded with
a lightning victory against the Ecuadorian Army. At subsequent peace
negotiations in Rio de Janeiro in 1942, Peru's ownership of most of the
contested region was affirmed.
On the
domestic side, Prado gradually moved to soften official opposition to
APRA, as Haya de la Torre moved to moderate
the party's program in response to the changing national and
international environment brought on by World War II. For example, he no
longer proposed to radically redistribute income, but instead proposed
to create new wealth, and he replaced his earlier strident "anti-imperialism"
directed against the United States with more favourable calls
for democracy, foreign
Investment, and hemispheric harmony. As a result, in May 1945, Prado
legalised the party that now re-emerged on the political scene after
thirteen years underground.
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