“We have been getting killed from the very beginning,” Clara Mongé said, reflecting on contemporary Peru from her home in Delray Beach, FL. She left her native country decades ago, but her walls still display a colorful blend of Spanish and Peruvian decorations, including an enlarged Tumi head, antique Spanish chairs, Catholic prayer candles whose plastic coverings show images of an eerily European Jesus, rosaries, holy water, and beautiful Spanish figure paintings. Her pantry contains Peruvian classics like chicha morada, inca cola, leftover milanesa, and pisco.
Born in 1944, Mongé is a living history. She is part of a fading generation of Peruvians who witnessed the country’s revolutionary attempt at relieving the symptoms of colonialism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Despite unprecedented policy reforms, Peru has not yet completely healed from its troubled past and remnants of colonization continue to seep into every aspect of Peruvian life. “The legacy of colonialism exists everywhere…Everything we have been doing has just been a response to colonialism,” Mongé said. As a country whose history is inextricably woven into the fabric of Spanish subjugation, Peru’s contemporary issues—namely, rural-led protests—should be viewed through a lens that reckons with the inauguration of Spanish rule and the nearly 500 years of exploitation that followed.
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Peru’s internal strife is rooted in colonial power relations and remains an integral part of the country’s political identity. “Ever since colonization,” Mongé said, “it has been very difficult to maintain the peace between native Peruvians and the Spanish.” Fluent in both the indigenous language of Peru—Quechua—and the language of the colonizer—Spanish—Mongé understands this divide personally; it has affected every aspect of her life, imposing language standards and mystifying her own relationship to native Peruvian culture.
Juan Velasco Alvarado, who served as Peru’s president from 1968 to 1975, sought to erase the strict boundary between the groups. His administration is perhaps best remembered for its striking defiance of the West’s influence. Alvarado reclaimed some of Peru’s oil fields, which limited American access to the coast and to the country’s thriving fishing industry. He famously said, “let them send the Marines as they did in Santo Domingo. We will defend ourselves with rocks if necessary.” And at home, he ignited a wave of agrarian reforms that, according to the FRD of the Library of Congress, sought to transfer ownership of agrarian land to rural laborers.
Alvarado’s deprivatization policy significantly altered Peru’s land politics. In response to 16th century reforms that facilitated the Spaniards’ control over native lands and paved the path for an agricultural oligarchy, the president attempted to usurp the neocolonial throne that separated the urban elites and the agrarians. Despite the transfer of ownership, social divides persist. Manuel Figallo, the son of Clara Mongé, explained this limitation of Alvarado’s policy, saying “the coastal elites—people from Lima, where I was born—would feel more comfortable [talking to] a Spaniard than an Andean peasant.”
But Alvarado did not resign to pessimism. He intended to heal the wound of colonialism by dismantling the glaringly unequal distribution of wealth and thus the ghost of Spanish colonialism. According to Figallo, he “gave people in the Andes a taste of democracy, and they wanted more.”
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Dr. Anna Cant, a Latin American historian at the London School of Economics, agrees. “Land reform,” she said, “was about much more than just a distribution of assets. It was an intensely political and cultural process in which new forms of politics emerged.” In her book Land Without Masters, however, Cant explains the policies’ controversial role in Peruvian history as people attempt to control their narrative. Many conservatives, for example, have framed the reforms as an economic disaster that devastated the agricultural sector. Other commentators hold the view that their unequal implementation between rural areas in addition to Alvarado’s declining health prevented the reforms from reaching their full potential.
This group of scholars argue that the agrarian reforms partially curbed support for Maoist insurgents who helped inaugurate years of internal violence—a group called the Shining Path. Others maintain that the reforms were isolated to specific regions. As a result, there was an unequal distribution of benefits, leading some Peruvians to the Shining Path. Despite the heavily contentious scholarship, one thing is clear: the development of the Shining Path alongside a period of economic stagnation (the “Lost Decade”) had a disastrous effect on the agrarian reforms’ place in Peruvian political consciousness.
“Velasco Alvarado talked about making politics more than just the interests of Lima elites,” Cant said. The reforms heavily affected rural areas that endured unrelenting abuse from the government through over-policing and “a wider silencing of historical narratives that celebrated reform as a moment of peasant empowerment,” as Cant wrote. This, coupled with the decrease of redistribution under President Bermúdez in the 1970s and the privatization of rural land under President Fujimori in the 1990s, halted the progress of agrarian Peru.
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Pedro Castillo, elected as the Peruvian president in 2021, initially offered a promising alternative. His beginnings were quite modest. He was raised in the town of Puña, one of Peru’s most economically distraught areas, as the son of two farmers—his father a recipient of the benefits of Alvarado’s reforms. An elementary school teacher and union leader, Castillo ran on a populist platform with the slogan “no more poor people in a rich country,” sporting a signature white hat and comically large pencil on the campaign trail. He embodied a spirit of political possibility as someone who not only sympathized with rural poverty, but lived through and endured it. The Guardian dubbed him the “Son of the soil,” and rightfully so. He represented something rural Peruvians have longed for since the days of Alvarado: a serious, legitimate place in the state.
“There’s…a hunger for a government that would take seriously the demands of rural communities,” Cant said. Figallo echoed the desire “to be a part of a democratic system.”
However, after waves of corruption charges, an unusually unstable cabinet, and multiple impeachment attempts, Castillo’s presidency was wracked with internal conflicts that undercut his campaign promises. Things escalated when, just before the third impeachment attempt, Castillo announced his intention to suspend Congress and rule by decree, a move that resulted in his swift removal. Figallo described the frustration of the continuous struggle: “When he failed, a lot of rural Peruvians felt like they had been cheated out of true democracy once again.”
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Since the introduction of the Spanish colonizers, Peru has been grappling with an intersectional division between indigenous rural workers and the urban elites. When met with serial policy failure, this gap manifests as intractable social unrest. Mongé described a fundamental lack of trust between the government and native Peruvians. After all, it wasn’t until 1979 that illiterate Peruvians were granted suffrage, and even that was followed by the emergence of the Shining Path, waves of violence that hit rural areas hardest, and a crackdown on indigenous communities. Figallo recalled a personal story about the devastating effects of this violence: “Tío Pepe’s nephew was kidnapped by the Peruvian military police when they were cracking down…They drove him to the outskirts of Lima, wrapped him in dynamite, and blew him up.”
Castillo is only the latest in a long line of historical injustices that have eroded rural and other impoverished Peruvians’ faith in the nation’s institutions. The advances made in the mid-twentieth century under Alvarado were short-lived. Peru’s death rate during the COVID-19 pandemic was the highest in the world, and the country’s health-care system lacks basic medical supplies. Food insecurity plagues the population, and Castillo’s administration crumbled before Peruvians less than a year after he took office.
Dina Boluarte was sworn into the president’s office following Castillo’s imprisonment as his supporters ignited protests. The unrest quickly transformed into a larger movement against the marginalization of rural Peruvians. Since then, she has called the demonstrations a form of “terrorism,” as if the Peruvian police were not throwing tear gas and firing military-grade guns at unarmed protesters. Though this reaction from a high-ranking government official might seem insignificant, the word “terrorism” carries a particular weight in Peru and its usage signifies a devastating misunderstanding of the protests. As Cant explained, “terruqueo” traces its roots to Peru’s internal conflict in the ’80s and ’90s, in which many rural Peruvians were accused of being members of the Shining Path. Since then, the word has adopted racial undertones and often refers to the “radical leftism” emerging from indigenous communities in rural areas, which delegitimizes activists and obfuscates their demands.
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“It’s history repeating itself,” said Figallo from his home in Washington, D.C. as he sat on his living room couch. “There’s tension between the people in the Andes and the coastal elites, and it’s a result of race, history, socioeconomic classes, the haves and the have-notes.”
Interestingly, Boluarte—like Castillo—was born in rural Peru. She understands what it is like to be constantly ignored and exploited by elitist politicians. So, the surge of protests should not be surprising.
Rural and impoverished Peruvians have been dealing with governmental hypocrisy for centuries, and the widespread distrust of institutions is an inevitable consequence of exclusion from the collective political sphere. As the approval rating of Peru’s Congress continues to plummet and protests envelop the country, the question of what to do next grows more pressing. Some have called for a complete overhaul of Peru’s constitution, guaranteed protection over the right to protest, the removal of Boluarte, and new elections.
The next steps seem frighteningly uncertain in the context of the unprecedented scope and scale of the protests. But, amidst this internal strife, there is at least one bright spot: this could arguably become Peru’s best chance at remedying its deep colonial wounds and bridging the gap between the elites and the agrarians.
As Mongé said as she sipped her chicha morada at lunch with her niece, “In spite of divisions, the inhabitants of Peru have always been strong.”