[1930–1968] Mid-20th Century Instability and Military Juntas

The years between 1930 and 1968 in Peru were a crucible, a turbulent, nearly four-decade-long argument over the very soul of the nation. It was an era not of steady progress, but of violent lurches between fragile civilian rule and the iron fist of the military junta, a rhythm of hope and repression that defined the lives of millions. Our story begins in the dust and chaos of 1930. The eleven-year rule of President Augusto B. Leguía, a period of forced modernization financed by massive American loans, had crumbled under the weight of the Great Depression. As the world’s economy seized, so did Peru’s. From the southern city of Arequipa, a charismatic, dark-skinned commander named Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro rose in revolt. His coup was swift. Leguía, the once-invincible autocrat, would die in a prison hospital, a stark warning to all who would follow. Sánchez Cerro embodied the raw, populist anger of the moment. But he had a powerful, organized rival: the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA. Led from exile and then from hiding by the magnetic intellectual Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, APRA was more than a party; it was a movement. It promised land for the peasants, rights for the indigenous, and an end to the dominance of foreign capital and the domestic elite. To the powerful—the coastal landowners, the bankers, the military brass, the so-called "Forty Families" who ran Peru like a private estate—APRA was a terrifying, communist-adjacent threat. The collision was inevitable and bloody. In 1932, in the northern coastal city of Trujillo, a hotbed of APRA support, party loyalists rose up, seizing an army barracks. Sánchez Cerro's response was merciless. He sent in the army and, for the first time in South American history, used military aviation to bomb a city held by its own citizens. After the rebellion was crushed, a wave of reprisals followed. Thousands of *apristas* were rounded up. Many were taken to the pre-Inca ruins of Chan Chan, forced to dig their own graves, and executed. The Trujillo Massacre, as it became known, carved a wound of hatred between the military and APRA that would fester for generations. The following year, at a horse race in Lima, an *aprista* assassin stepped out of the crowd and shot President Sánchez Cerro dead. This cycle of violence set the pattern for the next thirty years. The oligarchy, terrified of popular reform, would consistently turn to the military as its protector. A brief democratic spring from 1945 to 1948, under the scholarly President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, saw APRA legalized and participating in government. But it was a tense cohabitation. When economic troubles mounted and strikes paralyzed the country, the military once again saw its moment. In 1948, General Manuel A. Odría seized power, launching an eight-year dictatorship known as the *Ochenio*. Odría was a different kind of strongman. He was brutally repressive, outlawing APRA once again and using his secret police to hunt down, imprison, or exile his opponents. Haya de la Torre famously sought asylum in the Colombian embassy in Lima, where he would remain trapped for five long years, a prisoner in a diplomatic mansion. Yet, Odría’s rule coincided with an unexpected economic windfall. The Korean War drove up global prices for Peru’s exports—cotton, sugar, copper, and lead. Money flooded into the treasury. Odría used it on a massive public works program, determined to build a "New Peru." In Lima, colossal, imposing ministry buildings in the stark, modernist style shot up, symbols of state power and progress. He built hospitals, schools, and grand national stadiums. He also courted the urban poor, a strategy of bread and circuses. He subsidized food, sanctioned land invasions on the barren hills surrounding Lima, and his popular wife, María Delgado de Odría, personally handed out sewing machines and toys to the poor. This was the era when Lima began to explode. Drawn by the promise of jobs and a better life, endless streams of migrants poured in from the Andean highlands. They settled in vast, sprawling shantytowns, the *pueblos jóvenes*, building makeshift homes from straw mats, cardboard, and corrugated tin. Life here was a daily struggle for water, electricity, and a foothold in the city. By 1960, nearly one-third of Lima's population lived in these improvised communities, a stark, visual testament to the country's profound social inequalities. While a wealthy few in districts like Miraflores and San Isidro enjoyed new American cars and the latest fashions, the majority of the country remained locked in a near-feudal state. In the Sierra, indigenous communities, speaking Quechua or Aymara, still worked the vast estates, or *haciendas*, of absentee landlords, often for little more than the right to cultivate a small plot of land for their own survival. The Odría dictatorship eventually gave way to a managed democracy in 1956 under Manuel Prado, an urbane banker from one of Peru’s most powerful families. In a stunning political reversal, Prado won the presidency with the backing of the once-persecuted APRA. This pragmatic alliance, known as *La Convivencia* or "The Coexistence," saw Haya de la Torre and his party trade their revolutionary fervor for a seat at the table. They had grown older, perhaps weary of the wilderness. But the old guard had not forgotten. In the 1962 elections, Haya de la Torre himself won the presidency by the slimmest of pluralities. It was the moment he had worked toward for forty years. But the military, which had been founded on a bedrock of anti-*aprismo*, refused to stomach it. Claiming fraud, the chiefs of the armed forces simply annulled the election. Tanks rolled through Lima’s streets, a military junta took power, and the democratic process was once again discarded. A year later, new elections brought a new kind of leader to power: Fernando Belaúnde Terry. A charismatic, U.S.-trained architect, Belaúnde represented hope for a middle way—a "Peru as a doctrine." He traveled tirelessly into the most remote corners of the Andes and the Amazon, promising to "conquer Peru through its own geography" with roads, schools, and development. He launched ambitious projects, most notably the *Carretera Marginal de la Selva*, a highway intended to open up the jungle. But Belaúnde’s vision was paralyzed. He lacked a majority in Congress, which was controlled by an unholy alliance of his old rivals: APRA and Odría’s party. They blocked his most crucial proposal: a meaningful land reform program that would break up the *haciendas* and address the simmering peasant anger in the highlands. As the economy soured and guerrilla movements sparked to life in the countryside, the country felt adrift. The breaking point came in 1968 over a sordid deal with the American-owned International Petroleum Company. For a growing faction of nationalist officers within the military, this was the final straw. They no longer saw themselves as the watchdogs of the oligarchy but as the only institution capable of enacting the deep, structural changes the politicians had failed to deliver. In the pre-dawn hours of October 3, 1968, tanks surrounded the Presidential Palace. It was not a negotiation. Soldiers stormed the building, and General Juan Velasco Alvarado, a grim, brooding officer who had witnessed poverty firsthand as a child, seized control. President Belaúnde was unceremoniously forced onto a plane to Argentina, reportedly still in his pajamas. This was not just another coup. It was a revolution from above, a dramatic, definitive end to the era of oligarchic rule and the start of one of Latin America's most radical military experiments. The old Peru, with its deep-seated conflicts and broken promises, was about to be irrevocably transformed.