Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La revolución peruana: Ideología y práctica política de un gobierno militar, 1968–1975

2005; Duke University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-85-1-175

1527-1900

Daniel Masterson,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Peru’s “Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces,” led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, drew worldwide scholarly attention nearly a generation ago as a result of its sweeping social and economic reforms and its highly idiosyncratic approach to issues of social justice. The torrent of literature seeking to explain the “mentality” of Peru’s military reformers subsided to a mere trickle by the mid-1990s, however. This declining interest in Velasco-led reformism seems clearly related to the later failures of the Peruvian state. Of particular significance were Peru’s 20-year struggle with terrorism, concurrent economic turmoil, and the corruption and authoritarianism of the García and Fujimori regimes. During the Fujimori era, Peru’s armed forces remained largely submissive to his agenda, and the officer corps was damaged by widespread allegations of corruption and human rights violations. After the decline in Sendero Luminoso’s terrorist operations in the mid-1990s and the outbreak of border hostilities with Ecuador in 1995, Peru’s armed forces narrowed their professional mission to assume primarily a border defense function. Even this role is now somewhat marginal, as diplomatic agreements with Ecuador and Chile have substantially lessened border tensions.With these changes in the outlook of Peru’s military, the Velasco reforms can be viewed in a relatively clear historical context. One key unanswered question is whether they were the result of a longstanding commitment to structural reform or a reflection of the views of a transitory but dominant clique within the army.Martín Sánchez’s study of the phenomenon enjoys the advantage of more than a generation of scholarship as a foundation for his analysis. Indeed, this primarily theoretical work does a fine job of summarizing this literature. Unfortunately, the book does not move beyond its theoretical framework to advance our understanding of the inner workings of the military leadership during Velasco’s stewardship. In his concluding chapter, for example, Martín Sánchez relies heavily on an interpretation by Ellen Kay Trimberger, written in 1978, that makes very strained linkages between the Nasserite reformers in Egypt, the Meiji reforms in Japan (1868–1912), and Velasco. Moreover, these supposed historical parallels are stated but not explored. Martín Sánchez argues from the outset that the Velasco regime sought to undertake fundamental structural changes, in keeping with Hannah Arendt’s idea that revolution is largely a response to pressures of modernity. But it also has been argued that these changes were more a result of the Peruvian officer corps’ sophisticated concept of national defense and its desire to blunt popular dissent among the Peruvian masses.Because Martín Sánchez’s research is primarily derivative, we are not offered fresh insights into the very important historical precedents of the October 1968 coup that launched the Velasco government. Such important civil-military events as the 1932 Trujillo insurrection, the 1948 Callao naval revolt, the military government of 1962-63, and the peasant mobilization movement in La Convención Valley near Cuzco are touched upon in passing, but the author does not link them in any convincing way to the army leadership’s reformist impulse after 1968. Post-WWII records from the Ministry of the Navy, for example, have long been available for researchers seeking to examine the origins of the deep ideological gulf between the navy and the army, which divided the leadership of the Velasco government and contributed to his downfall in 1975. Martín Sánchez understands the sharp divisions with the Velasco government and effectively highlights these in a chart that shows the comparative longevity of the individual military leaders in the Velasco government. Key “radical” figures such as Generals Jorge Fernández Maldonado, José Graham Hurtado, and Javier Tantaleán Vanini served nearly the entire period of tenure Velasco’s tenure. Still, General Edgardo Marcado Jarrín, considered to be the leading intellectual in the army by many, and General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who along with Mercado Jarrín urged a more cautious and conservative approach to structural change, remained in Velasco’s government nearly as long as the so-called radicals. A good deal of what Velasco’s government did was more opportunistic than ideological. For example, Fernández Maldonado made a strong argument in the mid-1990s that Velasco’s purchase of Soviet weapons was more a response to Moscow’s attractive prices and servicing arrangements than a leftward foreign policy shift.It is quite apparent that much of the literature suffers from redundancy. Badly needed are biographical studies of Velasco and other such key military figures and Peru’s enlisted ranks. The conservative reaction phase of the military government under Morales Bermúdez (1975-80), which abandoned the military’s reformist goals, needs to be studied just as carefully as the previous regime. Moreover, historians need to look at the roles of the Peruvian military intelligence services to understand not only the Velasco reforms but also the critical failure of the intelligence services to anticipate the terrible campaign of Sendero Luminoso and the widespread human rights abuses in response to terrorism. In the aftermath of the Peruvian Truth Commission’s report on the human costs of Peru’s recent civil war, this might well be the best opportunity for scholars to gain access to the archival sources that have been used by far too few historians.