Juan Velasco Alvarado - Military Revolution and Dictatorship (1968-1975)

Military Revolution and Dictatorship (1968-1975)

The coup leaders named their administration the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces, with Velasco at its helm as President. Velasco's rule was driven by a desire to give justice to the poor and became known as Peruanismo. It was characterized by left-leaning policies, as he nationalised entire industries, expropriated companies in a wide range of activities from fisheries to mining to telecommunications to power production and consolidated them into single industry-centric government-run entities (PescaPeru, MineroPeru, Petroperú, SiderPeru,Centromin Peru, ElectroPeru, Enapu, EnatruPeru, Enafer, Compañia Peruana de Telefonos (CPT), EntelPeru, Correos del Peru, etc.), and increased government control over economic activity by enforcing those entities as monopolies and preventing any private activity in those sectors. The media became more open to left-wing intellectuals and politicos. A root and branch education reform was in march looking to include all Peruvians and move them towards to a new national thinking and feeling; the poor and the most excluded were vindicated and the Día del Indio or Peruvian Indian's day name was changed to Día del Campesino or Peruvian Peasant's day every June 24, a traditional holiday of the land, the day of winter solstice.

The education reform of 1972 provided for bilingual education of the indigenous people of the Andes and the Amazon, which consisted nearly half of the population. In 1975 the Velasco government enacted a law making Quechua an official language of Peru equal to Spanish. Thus, Peru was the first Latin American country to officialize an indigenous language. However, this law was never enforced and ceased to be valid when the 1979 constitution became effective, according to which Quechua and Aymara are official only where they predominate, as mandated by law - a law that was never enacted.

It was also characterised by the increasing use of authoritarian powers, as the administration grew away from tolerating any level of dissent, periodically jailing, deporting and harassing suspected political opponents and repeatedly closing and censoring broadcast and print news media, finally expropriating all of the newspapers in 1974 and sending the publishers into exile.

A cornerstone of his political and economic strategy was the implementation by dictat of an agrarian reform program to expropriate farms and diversify land ownership, much of which had been concentrated in Haciendas' owned by a small percentage of the population who previously had acted like feudal lords and paid starvation wages to the surrounding campesinos who worked on the haciendas; these owners who opposed his program claimed that the expropriation was more akin to confiscation, as they were paid in non-tradable bonds that would eventually become worthless by the government's inflationary policies. Needless to say that only less than 2% of the Peruvian territory is farmable land; 98% of the territory is arid desert with little rain; harsh mountains with very steep terrain; or wild amazon forest.

The deposed Belaúnde administration had attempted to implement a milder agrarian reform program, but it had been defeated in Congress by the APRA-UNO coalition with support of the major landowners. Within this framework, the Velasco administration engaged in an aggressive program of import substitution industrialization, imposing tight foreign exchange and trade controls.

In foreign policy, in contrast with his 1970s Latin American contemporaries, which were mostly right-wing military dictatorships, he pursued a partnership with the Soviet bloc, tightening relations with Cuba and Fidel Castro and undertaking major purchases of Soviet military hardware.

Relations between the United States and Peru were tense during Velasco's time in government beginning with the expropriation of the International Petroleum Company (IPC), a subsidiary of Standard Oil, five days after Velasco seized power in 1968. Although the claims over the IPC were ultimately resolved in negotiations between the two governments, disagreements continued over such issues as Peru's claim to 200 mile fishing limit that resulted in the seizure of several US commercial fishing boats and the expropriation of the American copper mining company Cerro de Pasco Corporation. In 1973, Velasco announced during a press conference when questioned about Soviet military advisors in Peru, that the United States Peace Corps was being expelled from Peru.

Economically, the Velasco administration's policies were ultimately unsuccessful. The government ran deeper into debt and was forced to devalue the currency and ran inflationary policies.

Fisheries and agriculture were particularly visible failures; PescaPeru aggressively overfished the anchoveta, a fish used primarily as material for fishmeal production and a key element in the Peruvian sea ecosystem, which resulted in record production for a couple of years but combined with an El Niño event in 1972 led to an absolute collapse that would take over a decade to partially recover, while the badly mismanaged agrarian reform resulted in the creation of thousands of capital-poor and mostly uneducated small farmers whose production and distribution capacity fell substantially short of the pre-reform production. This, coupled with the trade restrictions, led to periodic shortages, rationing, and increased social unrest.