Peru's Ambiguous Revolution

Abraham F. Lowenthal

Peru's "Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces" has now completed its first six years in power, the equivalent of a presidential term under the country's constitution. Headed by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, the army's top-ranking officer when he led the October 1968 coup which toppled President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the Peruvian regime has already attracted considerable attention. Military officers and civilian politicians in countries as different as Argentina and Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Colombia, have expressed their interest in (and usually their admiration for) the Peruvian experiment. Fidel Castro has acclaimed the Peruvian undertaking; Juan Peron extolled it. Peruanista factions have been identified, and have sometimes identified themselves, in the armed forces of several South American countries.

The Peruvian regime is generally seen not as the typical Latin American caudillo government but rather as an essentially institutional effort. Although a government of force, it is widely regarded as relatively unrepressive. Although led by staunchly anti-Communist officers, many with considerable training in the United States, the Peruvian government has established friendly relations with several Communist nations as part of its campaign to escape external "domination," particularly by the United States.

Most important, although it is the nation's force for order, the Peruvian military has promoted substantial change. Through a burst of laws and decrees unprecedented in Peru, the military regime has set out to transform many basic areas of national life. Major structural reforms have affected land tenure and water rights, labor-management relations, the educational system, the state's role in the economy and in the communications media, the role of foreign enterprise in Peru's economy, and even fundamental concepts of economic and political relationships. Particularly noteworthy has been the regime's announced determination to move steadily away from capitalist principles by creating a new "social property" economic sector (based on collective ownership of the means of production), destined to become the "predominant" mode of economic organization. And the Peruvian regime ha