The Struggle to Develop
Faced with overwhelming popular opposition, Peru's military rulers handed over the reins ofgovernment to a civilian administration onJuly 28, 1980, after a dozen years in power. In a rather...
...On learning that Peruvians hadjust re-elected Belainde, one Latin American was overheard to remark, "My God...
...Stein, Populism, p. 181...
...Labor greeted the incoming regime with no less than 30 strikes in its first month...
...Those gigantic arms that never closed return open with the hunger of holding yours...
...On January 15, PresidentJose Pardo issued a decree recognizing the 8-hour day...
...As entrepreneurs were to lament throughout the nineteenth century, Peru was a nation without a large body of free wage laborers...
...They gave new attention to the crucial role of a vanguard political party and the need to build a worker-peasant alliance through long-term organizing...
...journalist John Gerassi...
...they blamed the populist rhetoric of President Guillermo Billinghurst for having "aroused" the workers...
...Whereas most military regimes assume power to thwart the ascendancy of progressive forces and a militant labor movement, in 1980 the Peruvian military was forced out by just such a movement-one that hardly existed when the military began its rule twelve years earlier...
...His followers rapidly began to build organizations to recruit members of the urban proletariat, recent migrants to the capital and university students...
...The press had a field day exposing scandals and government corruption, and the president himself became a laughing stock...
...Sanchez Cerro's regime was rife with naval mutinies, assassination attempts and, finally, an APRA-led insurrection in the northern province of Trujillo which was brutally crushed...
...family, founded AP in 1956 as a moderate, reformist organization...
...The socialist current was led by Jos6 Carlos MariAtegui, one of Latin America's most dynamic writers, a journalist and theorist who met an untimely death at age 35...
...6. Jose Carlos Mariitegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin: University of Texas Press), 1971...
...NovlDec 1980 56 NACLA Report INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICAL POWER Throughout the 1930s, the labor movement was repressed, divided and lacking a national confederation...
...Shanty towns (barriadas) sprang up in a ring around Lima and other cities to house this new urban class...
...Machines could be imported from Europe, but unless potential workers were "free" from any other means of survival, it would not be possible to coax them into the noisy, dangerous factories to set those machines into motion...
...ambassador to write that Haya was "in the pay of the Soviets," Haya had abruptly dropped his anti-imperialist line by the 1930s.13 While careful to hide his new views from most of his supporters in Peru, Haya was candid with North Americans...
...Besides military strategy and tactics, officers at CAEM studied sociology and economic development strategies with advisors like Luigi Einaudi, then the Rand Corporation's specialist on the Cuban Revolution and the Latin American military...
...But, there have been important transformations in twelve years-in the economy, in the social structure and in political consciousness.For example, for those concerned that the elections might diffuse an increasingly militant labor movement, there seems little evidence...
...Others reopened some of the old mines of the central and southern sierra...
...The landed oligarchy saw the handwriting on the wall: agrarian reform could no longer be postponed...
...45-69, and Organized Labor in Latin America (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp...
...Within the Left, "clasista" is also used to distinguish those workers and unions which have in recent years broken from the economist orientation of the PCP's CGTP lead- ership...
...Yet power was returned to the same group of civilians in 1980 with little prospect that they will improve on their previous record...
...The strike is not a right," one liberal writer fumed, "it is a weapon of the workers, and to say that there is a right to strike is tantamount to saying that all citizens have the right to go out on the street with a revolver, dagger or rifle...
...2 To make matters worse, with only traditionbound Church schools controlling education, there was no public system to train the mechanics or bookkeepers needed to accompany any process of industrialization...
...Factory owners stood firm and the government unleashed Peru's first major wave of repression against organized workers...
...Sulmont, Historia, pp...
...Through much of this period, APRA controlled the textile workers and northern sugar estate workers while the illegal PCP maintained its strong following among teamsters, construction workers and labor federations in the southern cities of Cuzco and Arequipa...
...2 7 IPC, Peru's largest private complex, had been embroiled in a dispute with the Peruvian government for a number of years over control of subsoil rights at its La Brea and Parifias oil fields...
...38-39...
...This cynical parliamentary alliance effectively sabotaged Belafinde's agrarian reform and other programs, but increasingly cost Haya support in the working class...
...Mariftegui's best known work, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, still stands as one of the most important books ever written about Peru...
...For an overview of modern Peruvian history and the uneven course of the nation's capitalist development, see William Bollinger, "The Bourgeois Revolution in Peru: A Conception of Peruvian History," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...The generals overthrew Belafinde in 1968 because the civilian government seemed incapable of meeting its own goals or governing effectively...
...Ibid., p. 212...
...The CGTP, the congress resolved, would end the 30-year old split in the labor movement: "The formation of a new confederation with a clasista orientation will end the monopoly imposed by the CTP leadership under which pro-management and traitorous policies have prospered, and will accelerate the process of unification of the labor movement under a line which forthrightly defends workers...
...8 NACLA ReportNovlDec 1980 9 The workers also abandoned Aprismo as it became widely known that the APRA-controlled CTP was acting as a tool of the U.S...
...The required reform was perhaps less than threatening for many landowners who had begun to find that feudal tenancy systems simply weren't paying off...
...Dozens of new factories were erected and the Lima-Callao area Lima textile mill, 1890s...
...THE STRUGGLE TO DEVELOP 1. The best one-volume history of early capitalist development in Peru is Ernest Yepes del Castillo, Peri, 1820-1920: Un siglo de desarollo capitalista (Lima: IEP, 1972...
...Sulmont, Historia, pp...
...The Peruviansjumped up twelve years ago and theyjust came back down in the same spot...
...Sulmont, Historia, pp...
...IV, no...
...To cap it all, the CTP refused to back up its workers' wage demands during the economic crisis which was to bring down the Belafinde regime in 1968...
...1 7 Finally, the growth of peasant struggles was to lead to some of the most massive mobilizations against the state...
...316-17...
...The history of AIFLD's links to Peru are well documented in the official publication of AIFLD, AIFLD Report (Washington, DC) from 1963 on...
...The exportoriented oligarchy preferred to maintain low tariffs and a fairly weak currency which would bring them more soles for ever dollar of exports sold abroad...
...Although it is true that merchants and corrupt officials squandered a good part of their new income on luxury imports and foreign travel, many bought coastal property on which they developed sugar plantations and installed modern mills...
...The Left...
...The Belafinde government had reached the end of the road...
...Congress, he added, should immediately correct this "grammatical error...
...202-213...
...3 (Summer 1977), p. 59...
...2 Haya therefore sought an alliance in the new congress with his former hated rival, General Manuel Odrfa, and some notorious landowning reactionaries such as Pedro Beltran...
...by mid-1967, the matter was still hanging fire...
...2 ' BELAUNDE BOWS OUT Belafinde had entered the government, with the support of the military, on the basis of a broad-based reform program...
...Grace invested in paper and chemicals, that Goodyear built Peru's first tire factory and that Carnation developed a canned milk industry in Arequipa...
...And in this struggle, his strongest weapon was often himself- a charismatic, popularly exalted leader...
...Contractors dug 12 million tons of the nitrogenous bird droppings off the cliffs of coastal islands and sold them to a soil-depleted Europe for 65 million.' Peru thereby reversed a century-long decline from the heady days when Andean silver mines made Lima one of the two great centers of Spain's empire...
...Secondly, the flood of migrants that followed in the wake of Lima's industrial development provided the base for another political force--the Popular Action party (AP) of Fernando Beladnde Terry--which would successfully defeat APRA in the 1962 presidential elections.' 6 Beladnde, a liberal architect from an established Arequipa * Unions and labor organizations exist at four levels in Peru: 1) the local plant union, where much of the collective bargaining takes place...
...In 1895, development-oriented capitalists were able to secure a measure of control over the central government which allowed them to pass laws favoring local industry...
...The coastal plantation owners relied on African slaves until the abolition of slavery in 1854, then eased the continuing labor shortage by importing more than 100,000 indentured Chinese workers...
...David Collier, "Squatter Settlements and Policy Innovation in Peru," in Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Peruvian Experiment: Continuity and Change under Military Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 130...
...Yet capitalist development encountered some formidable obstacles...
...This in turn raised the costs for industrial firms (their exports cost even more) and restricted their internal market (workers were forced to pay higher prices for imported food and therefore could afford few other purchases...
...2 2 Even after AIFLD's links with the CIA were made known, Aprista trade unionists continued to commute to meetings and seminars in the United States...
...In the most general sense "clasista" refers to a militant and class-conscious working class posture vis-a-vis management, in distinction to a "pro-patronal" labor bur- eaucracy characteristic of APRA's CTP leadership...
...With the capital city totally paralyzed, factory owners agreed to negotiate...
...5 THE ROAD DIVIDES: MARIATEGUI AND HAYA DE LA TORRE Two new ideological perspectives emerged in the Peruvian labor movement in the 1920s: 4 NACLA ReportNovlDec 1980 5 socialism and populism...
...Industry's expansion had required an everincreasing proportion of imports in the form of capital and intermediate goods...
...3.For an argument that this was a significant period of "autonomous development" in Peru, see Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram, Peru, 1890-1977: Growth and Policy in an Open Economy (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp...
...Changing attitudes developed within the military as well, particularly among the majors and colonels who had attended the Center of Advanced Military Studies (CAEM...
...The PCP's successes would, however, be shortlived...
...By contrast, the number of non-agricultural wage laborers more than doubled, while salaried white-collar employees increased almost 7-fold...
...A similar struggle occurred among bank employees...
...Our only fight is against communism...
...Belainde was forced to devalue the sol...
...its conflicts and struggles in the 1960s effected a significant shift of rankand-file workers away from the Aprista leadership of the trade union movement...
...At the urging of the Third (Communist) International, the PS changed its name to the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) and concentrated its organizing efforts in the Andean mining districts...
...Ibid., p. 171-2...
...24-37...
...These two tendencies have competed bitterly for influence to the present day...
...8. Steve Stein, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 10...
...Proletarian Peru: Rise to your feet" gushed La Tribuna, the party's paper, in 1931...
...Philip, The Rise and Fall of the Peruvian Military Radicals, 1968-1976 (London: Athlone Press, 1978), pp...
...State policies and financial resources remained largely controlled by the traditional oligarchy of cotton and sugar barons, mining capitalists and their foreign allies...
...Confederations tend to represent the workers politically rather than in direct negotiation with the employer...
...116-145...
...The traditional agro-mineral exporters, on the other hand, benefitted from the devaluation since they received more local currency for every dollar of commodities sold abroad...
...While his image as a radical would prompt one U.S...
...He has lived for five years in Peru and has written extensively on that country for the Guardian and other publications...
...By the mid-1960s, sectors of rank-and-file workers opposed Aprista leadership in several major labor federations...
...To control the situation, Billinghurst issued a decree permitting the state to intervene in labor disputes and generally discouraging strike activity...
...The Convenci6n struggle generally involved colonos, peasant tenants on haciendas who had been given a plot of land to till in exchange for a portion of their crop or work on the hacendado's lands...
...Although the party became mechanically dependent on the direction of the Third International, it was highly successful in organizing mineworkers at the U.S.-based Cerro de Pasco Corporation in the central sierra...
...2 C a a a .o c a o 9 s underwent its first period of proletarianization...
...Union newspapers and progressive magazines were banned, while police fired into the ranks of demonstrators...
...In the late 1950s, comuneros, members of Indian communities, led literally hundreds of invasions of haciendas, particularly around Pasco and Junln provinces...
...particularly after World War II, it was transformed into a predominantly capitalist country...
...2 3 The economic crisis of 1967 deepened the schism between Aprista and clasista workers, and in July 1968, the CGTP was again brought to life in a founding congress with representation from 140,000 workers...
...Inspired by the Cuban revolution, a section of APRA calling itself "APRA Rebelde" broke away from the increasingly conservative party...
...The state used its guano revenues to embark upon an4 NACLA Report ambitious railroad construction program designed to push capitalist penetration into the Andean heartland...
...Only during the repressive dictatorship of General Manuel Odria (1948-1955) did the trend toward greater unionization reverse itself...
...A bout the Author William Bollinger is an editor of Latin American Perspectives and teaches Latin American history in Los Angeles...
...56-72...
...The main periodicals consulted were Marka, Actualidad Econ6mica, Jornal and Amauta since, until recently, all daily newspapers were under military control...
...The landowners had not become a bourgeoisie, and what industrial capitalist development had taken place arose primarily through the efforts of foreigners...
...Illusions about an easy victory through the guerrilla foco vanished when the MIR leadership was wiped out, and leftists turned again to the examination of theoretical and strategic questions...
...While these varied sectors were taking stock, the labor movement was undergoing rapid political change...
...The average working day was between 10 and 16 hours, and the living conditions of this nascent proletariat had actually deteriorated from the days when they had been artisans and small merchants...
...Agriculture's share of naTable 1 EMPLOYMENT IN PERU, 1940-1972 (Thousands) 1940 1961 1972 Agricultural* 1,546 1,556 1,520 Wage Laborers 501 467 320 Salaried Employees 5 16 23 Non-Agricultural 929 1,569 2,052 Wage Laborers* 267 517 562 Salaried Employees 128 328 702 Source: William Bollinger, "The Bourgeois Revolution in Peru: A Conception of Peruvian History," Latin American Perspectives, IV, 3 (Summer 1977), pp...
...Grace and the British firm of Duncan Fox, for example, dominated the nascent textile industry...
...In their seminars, the officers elaborated a new "integral" conception of national defense which stressed the responsibility of the military for the resolution of serious internal domestic contradictions.19 If civilian politicians proved incapable of facing up to the social and economic problems confronting the nation, the military was developing its political capacity to intervene...
...From 1940 to 1961, the population of Lima - where most industry was centered - increased almost three-fold, from 500,000 to 1.5 million...
...The industrialists desired high tariff protection for import-substitution industries, subsidies on food imports to feed a growing working class and a strong Peruvian currency that would enable them to import large amounts of machinery and consumer goods...
...6 Mariitegui argued that Peru was still a semifeudal country which lacked a "true capitalist class...
...Although APRA and AP shared a similar approach on many issues, Haya focused on the threat posed by Belafinde's party to APRA's base of support...
...Haya's drive to power in the 1931 elections was derailed by what were widely regarded as fraudulent elections...
...recent migrants, nonunionized workers, the urban and rural middle sectors, the Catholic Church, sectors of the bourgeoisie favoring industrialization, and-no less important-a military still anxious to keep Haya from power...
...Nor was this the only unusual aspect of the last 12 years: * In a country where the military normally intervenes to defend the ruling oligarchy, in 1968 the Peruvian Armed Forces stepped in to overthrow such an oligarchy...
...The Military...
...7. Ibid., pp...
...See Table 1) As the subsistence economy of the Andean highlands was undermined, displaced peasants, artisans and others from the provinces began to migrate to the cities in large numbers...
...Peru's population almost doubled between 1940 and 1972 to 14 million...
...16-20...
...in the same 20-year period Lima's barriadas grew from less than 5,000 people to an estimated 320,000.1Z More and more Peruvian capital entered industry, and some major sugar and cotton growers moved into the manufacture of metal parts, paint, glass, shoes and textiles, almost all of which was destined for the growing internal market...
...As none of the peasant struggles had been linked to the urban working class, it was only the subsequent trials and imprisonment of leaders like Hugo Blanco which etched their names in the general consciousness...
...6 (October 1969), pp...
...Michael Locker, "Perspective on the Peruvian MiliNovlDec 1980 33 34 NACLA Report tary-Part 2," NACLA Newsletter, Vol...
...Yet, with a conservative government in Washington intent on turning back the clock in Latin America and a center/right government in Lima threatening to emulate the Chilean economy, Peru's workers and progressive forces will have to rely on all the lessons learned in Latin America in the past dozen years to maintain their victories and move ahead...
...80-1, 100-104...
...Their leader was a young Trotskyist student, Hugo Blanco...
...The government quickly moved to smash a mineworkers' congress meeting in La Oroya in November 1930, arresting labor organizers and massacring mineworkers...
...Emergency U.S...
...IV, no...
...31-2...
...Imperialism is necessary for Latin America's development," he once told U.S...
...For a history of the IPC dispute, see Richard Goodwin, "Letter from Peru," The New Yorker, May 17, 1969...
...31-76...
...parties of the Left into a single coalition, Left Unity, for the November 23 municipal elections...
...4 (Winter 1976), pp...
...Hampered by a series of political and organizational weaknesses, the MIR further undercut its prospects by attempting to launch guerrilla fronts simultaneously in four different regions of the country in 1965...
...They had come to understand a fundamental political reality identified by a Brazilian politician who once wrote, "We must make the revolution before it is made by the people...
...In a rather unexpected turn of events, the new president, Fernando Belafinde Terry ofthe centrist Popular Action party, was the very same manforced out of office by the military in 1968...
...Foreign capital, which had been heavily concentrated in the agro-mineral export sectors, also began some modest investment in industry...
...This 1913 law remained on the books, however, and in 1975 the military regime revived it to apply its limitations on the right to strike...
...2 6 This economic crisis hastened the political degeneration of the Belafinde regime...
...Yet APRA and the Communists continued to move in opposite directions, and it was not long before the Apristas had solidified their control over the CTP and used it against the more progressive sectors of the labor movement...
...III, no...
...When Beladinde took office, he promised to resolve the matter within 90 days...
...Characteristic of populist movements everywhere, Haya worked to develop an ideology that would appeal to the middle sectors and which explicitly rejected the notion of class conflict...
...III, no...
...2 0 A number of new political parties developed around this perspective,'including Revolutionary Vanguard (VR), founded in 1965...
...Most importantly, the guano trade provided an impetus to capitalist development in Peru...
...The CGTP, Peru's first national labor confederation, was a grouping of the principal federations already in existence (textiles, brewery, stevedores, newspapers, teamsters and railway workers...
...251-281...
...The first of three factors had to do with APRA's opportunist participation in national politics...
...In the midst of a supposedly historic announcement by Belaicnde that IPC had agreed to cede the subsoil rights, his chief negotiator resigned, charging that, in fact, the regime had conspired with IPC to defraud the Peruvian nation...
...Banco Central de la Reserva del Peri data in Elizabeth Dore and John Weeks, "The Intensification of the Assault Against the Working Class in 'Revolutionary' Peru," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...18-56...
...Sanchez Cerro was assassinated in 1933...
...tional output declined steadily through the 1950s and was finally surpassed by manufacturing in 1965...
...Blanco's own version of these events is in his Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972...
...John Gerassi, The Great Fear in Latin America (New York: Collier, 1965), pp...
...The rebels joined with other adherents of a "foco" theory of guerrilla warfare to NovlDec 1980 7a NACLA Report form the Peruvian Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), led by agrarian reform advocate Luis de la Puente Uceda and the Frenchtrained intellectual Guillermo Lobat6n...
...VR broke from a strict adherence to the lines of either China or the Soviet Union and, although it would undergo a number of internal schisms itself, the party has played a major role in the struggle to develop the revolutionary leadership of the workers' and peasants' movements...
...1 0 In the same year Haya transformed APRA into a political party and then launched himself as its presidential candidate...
...Advancing the romantic notion of somehow reuniting "Indoamerica," he wanted to form an electoral coalition embracing all classes in a drive to take over the existing state without a major reordering of society...
...Legal recognition of these organizations is a difficult bureaucratic process which can often take years of worker negotiations with the Ministry of Labor...
...Yet the labor force itself was undergoing critical changes...
...See Table 2) In 1944 a new national labor confederation was formed, the first since the banning of the CGTP in 1930.* The Workers' Confederation of Peru (CTP) arose during a momentary period of cooperation between APRA and the 6 NACLA ReportNovlDec 1980 7 PCP...
...George D.E...
...references A general note on sources: This study owes a great debt to the work of Denis Sulmont, particularly his seminal work, Historia del movimiento obrero peruano (1890-1977) (Lima: Tarea, 1977), which has been used as a basic reference work throughout...
...2) sectoral federations (which can be formed by five or more unions in the same industrial sector...
...Nevertheless, the events were fundamentally important for the lessons which different sectors of Peruvian society drew from them...
...Over three decades, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the party suffered long periods of repression at their hands...
...Jorge Basadre, the dean of Peruvian historians who recently died, wrote the 11 volume Historia de la repaiblica del Peril, 5th ed...
...137-8...
...In the midst of considerable strike activity in 1964, the Metalworkers' Federation which represented many of the most important industrial unions in Lima, split into a clasista * majority and an APRA minority which remained in the CTP...
...Lima: Historia y Universitaria, 1961-68...
...7 Victor Raul Haya de la Torre (1895-1979), led the rival populist political current, Atprismo, as it has become known in Peru, after his political party, APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance...
...and Latin American Labor: The Dynamics of Imperialist Control," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...In the neighboring province of Cuzco, peasant militants began a massive union organizing drive in the valley of La Convenci6n...
...For the next 16 months, the country teetered on the brink of a civil war...
...In the first place, the declining economic importance of the agro-exporters of the north finally began to reflect itself in the decline of their political power...
...In January 1919, the Local Workers' Federation of Lima, an anarchist-led organization, called a general strike which was joined by even the relatively conservative federation of artisan guilds...
...Peru's major banks, for example, remained firmly in the hands of the agro-mineral exporters (both foreign and national), and the proportion of credit going to industry actually declined during the Belafinde administration...
...Interviews with Hugo Blanco in the island prison at El Front6n...
...VIII, no...
...III, no...
...3 (Summer 1977), pp...
...By accident of geography and the mysterious flows of the Humboldt Current, Peru in the mid-nineteenth century found itself sole owner of the world's most precious fertilizer--guano...
...But the industrialists did not see it that way...
...1 (Winter 1976), pp...
...Where organization held no success, paternalism brought a following...
...From his cell in the island prison of El Front6n, Hugo Blanco argued that the revolutionary initiative would probably shift during the coming years from the peasantry to the urban working class...
...Blanco's peasant struggle ultimately matured into a full-blown regional insurrection which was violently put down by the armed forces during 1961-63.Is Organizing activities among the peasantry by urban-based political groups also increased dramatically...
...2 (Spring 1976), p. 62...
...For a study of the anarchosindicalist period in Peruvian labor history, see Piedad Pareja, Anarquismo y sindicalismo en el Perti (1904-1929) (Lima: Rikchay, 1978...
...9. Victor Villanueva, "The Petty-Bourgeois Ideology of the Peruvian Aprista Party," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...The economic causes of the 1968 coup are discussed in John Weeks, "Crisis and Accumulation in the Peruvian Economy, 1967-1975," Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol...
...26-38...
...To understand this politicization of Peruvian society, it is necessary to understand the his- torical forces which produced and shaped the unusual twelve-year rule of the "Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces...
...2. Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage m Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849-1874 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1951...
...Although the two collaborated politically during the early 1920s, and Haya initially adopted a strong anti-imperialist line, their paths soon divided...
...THE GROWTH OF TRADE UNIONISM The spread of industrialization revitalized the union movement...
...To many, that may appear to be the case...
...In 1965, the Peruvian Communist Party abandoned its efforts to reform the CTP from within and began to cooperate with other left forces, especially VR in an attempt to reestablish Mariitegui's original confederation, the CGTP...
...Instead, he placed his hopes on the workers and peasants, organized in a socialist party, as the only force capable of developing Peru...
...On the employment of women, see David Chaplin, The Peruvian Industrial Labor Force (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp...
...4 But the young labor movement pressed on in the struggle for the 8-hour day...
...But labor in the cities still remained in short supply, so factory owners turned to women and children.' In 1912-13, a wave of strikes spread from Lima-Callao to the oil fields and sugar estates on the northern coast, with workers demanding an 8-hour day and higher wages...
...THE WRITING ON THE WALL The defeat of the four guerrilla fronts and successful repression of the peasant movements marked a turning point in modern Peruvian history, although it was difficult to perceive this at the time...
...Like Mariategui, Haya de la Torre came to maturity during the 1913-1919 period of initial labor militancy...
...and 4) confederations (which can be formed by ten or more unions...
...On Belafmde and Acci6n Popular, see Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, Peruvian Democracy under Economic Stress: An Account of the Belainde Administration, 1963-1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp...
...For background on AIFLD, see, among others, Hobart Spalding, Jr., "U.S...
...APRA DROPS ITS ANTI-IMPERIALISM Historically, APRA had its main support among the plantation workers of the north coast, and thereby won the enmity of Peru's most powerful oligarchs...
...5. Sulmont, Historia, p. 34...
...Ironically, the same law inadvertently recognized the workers' right to strike, an oversight which hardly improved Billinghurst's reputation with the factory owners, and led to his ouster by the military...
...1 4 Given Haya's increasingly cozy relations with Washington, it is not surprising that the CTP became the spearhead of a U.S.-sponsored anticommunist labor movement in Latin America!s POPULISM UNDER ATTACK By the late 1950s, the structural changes in the economy had begun to have their effect on the political stage as well...
...A flurry of strikes broke out in 1918 as war-time inflation ate away the workers' earnings...
...9 While Haya searched for a cross-class base of support for Aprismo, Mariitegui more consistently geared his work to the labor movement...
...Although it was never the well-organized political machine APRA was, Belafnde was able to garner the support of the Table 2 FORMATION OF LABOR UNIONS IN PERU (New Unions Registered with the Ministry of Labor) Political Period 1936-39 Benavides 1940-44 Prado 1945-47 Bustamante 1948-55 Odria 1956-61 Prado 1962-68 Belafinde 1969-75 Velasco Manufacturing All Sectors 4 37 78 29 147 462 941 33 118 264 78 396 1248 1987 Source: Denis Sulmont S., Historia del movimiento obrero peruano (1890-1977), Lima: Tarea, 1977, pp...
...moreover, the country was suffering an economic crisis that proved far more damaging to Peru's industrialists than to its traditional exporting oligarchy...
...forms still had not materialized...
...This import explosion, combined with a drop in the volume of traditional agricultural exports (cotton and sugar) and newer exports (fishmeal), produced a sizeable negative balance of trade...
...In 1962, Fernando Belafinde Terry was elected president in a hard-fought campaign against Haya de la Torre...
...4. Variedades, February 1, 1913...
...Some landowners abandoned their land to their tenants while others tried to sell it off in small parcels...
...See Marka, October 16, 1975...
...The Landed Oligarchy...
...The highlands remained predominantly feudal as, even after independence from Spain, local officials continued to exact the odious contribuci6n de indigenas - an annual head tax on every Indian peasant-which tied them to the haciendas...
...Belatinde's mishandling of the nationalization of the International Petroleum Company (IPC) became the perfect pretext for his ouster...
...He founded the Socialist Party (PS) in 1928 and the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) the following year...
...military assistance, including counterinsurgency advisors, was rushed to Peru, and the International Petroleum Company, Peruvian subsidiary of Exxon (then known as Standard Oil of New Jersey), helped the local military produce napalm that was used to attack De la Puente's base near Cuzco...
...8 He founded APRA in 1924 as a "single international front of manual and intellectual workers...
...3) regional federations...
...Equally impressive, within a period of months a. new leftist daily, El Diario de Marka, has become the country's second most influential paper, with a daily circulation of more than 60, 000...
...In fact, it was clear that while the new industrialists controlled a much more dynamic sector of the economy, the traditional oligarchy still exercised considerable control...
...although Haya outlived Cerro by more than 35 years, he was never to realize his supreme ambition of wearing the presidential sash...
...Arguing that "the moral, political and psychological elements of capitalism do not appear to have found a propitious climate here," Mariftegui expected little from the traditional ruling class...
...Peru was no longer the semifeudal nation described by MariAtegui in the 1920s...
...The CGTP was banned and the PCP paralyzed and driven underground...
...Yet the number of small landowners and tenant farmers remained constant and the number of wage earners on farms declined significantly due to increased mechanization and the development of capitalist relations in the rural areas...
...It was during this period, for example, that W.R...
...Some of my analysis is based upon personal interviews with political figures, industrialists, rank-and-file union leaders, and Peruvian scholars conducted between 1968 and 1980...
...By 1967, the re* Clasista is used in the Peruvian labor movement in two contexts...
...See the excellent study of the CAEM and its importance within the Peruvian military by Vfctor Villanueva, El CAEM y la revoluci6n de la Fuerza Armada (Lima: IEP, 1973...
...Independent producers, unpaid family workers, capitalists, landowners employing other labor, and household servants are included in the agricultural and non-agricultural totals but not separately enumerated...
...Your guide has arrived: VICTOR RAUL HAYA DE LA TORREI His armst...
...Yet, unlike the fluid shift of funds into industry, there was no concomitant flow of political power into the hands of the industrialists...
...As the Depression swept through Peru, the Legula government was overthrown by a military regime headed by Luls Sanchez Cerro, whose first order of business, it seemed, was the destruction of that party...
...government through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD...
...Profitable opportunities in industry were emerging and investment in the sugar estates began to fall off...
...Furthermore, insufficient domestic food production forced the importation of high-priced foodstuffs...
Vol. 14 • November 1980 • No. 6
