Republic of Peru

The country's paradox is that it is rich: minerals, fish, gas and a coastline that has fed Europe since the 1840s. What it has not had, for most of its history, is a state able to tax that wealth, distribute it, or even reach the places where it is produced.

At a glance

How did the viceroyalty become a republic?

Through a war that began without a plan and ended without a settlement. Peru was the strongest royalist position in South America: the viceroyalty of Lima, created in 1542 on the ruins of the Inca Empire,, had the silver of Potosí in its orbit, the port of Callao, and an army that had already crushed the great Andean revolt of Túpac Amaru II in 1780–83. When the rest of the continent rose after 1808, Peru remained the base from which Spain fought back.

The turning point was external. San Martín landed at Paracas on 8 September 1820 with an army raised in Chile and Argentina, and on 28 July 1821 he proclaimed independence in the plaza of Lima. He then spent a year as Protector, unable to take the sierra and unable to govern the coast; his meeting with Bolívar at Guayaquil in July 1822 ended with San Martín withdrawing from politics altogether.

Bolívar took the campaign over. Landing in 1823, he built an army out of Colombian and Peruvian troops, and won the two battles that decided the continent: Junín on 6 August 1824, a cavalry action fought with blades in the dark, and Ayacucho on 9 December 1824, where the royalist army capitulated. The last Spanish garrison held Callao until January 1826, and the Gran Colombian troops who had won the battle went home to a republic that was already breaking up.

Who governed after independence?

Almost nobody, for long. Between 1821 and 1845 Peru had a bewildering succession of presidents, juntas and constitutions — the 1823 constitution, the 1828 constitution written after a Peruvian invasion of Bolivia failed, a short-lived confederation with Bolivia in 1836–39, and repeated coups. The state's revenue collapsed with the mines, the army consumed what remained, and the caudillos of the coast and the sierra fought over the customs houses.

The one thing the republic kept from the viceroyalty was its administrative geography: the intendancies became departments, the corregimientos became provinces, and Lima kept the bureaucracy, the university and the courts. That inheritance mattered later, when the state had money to spend.

What did guano do to the country?

It made it briefly rich, and permanently indebted. From the 1840s the deposits of bird droppings on the Chincha islands were mined and sold to Europe as fertiliser, and for thirty years guano paid for almost everything the Peruvian state did. The revenue financed the abolition of indigenous tribute and of slavery, a railway programme, and the expansion of the bureaucracy.

It also financed a borrowing spree. From 1869 the government mortgaged future guano sales to the French house of Dreyfus, and by 1876 the country was in default. When the guano ran out, the state had railways, a large civil service and no export base to pay for them — a pattern that has recurred in Peruvian history with other commodities.

The labour for the guano islands and the coastal plantations came from China: from 1849 some 100,000 indentured labourers were brought to Peru, a trade whose conditions were notoriously harsh and which ended only in the 1870s.

What was the War of the Pacific?

The catastrophe of the nineteenth century. In 1879 Chile declared war on Peru and Bolivia over the nitrate provinces of the Atacama, and by 1881 Chilean forces had taken Lima. Peru lost the war, lost its nitrate fields, and lost the province of Tarapacá outright under the Treaty of Ancón (20 October 1883); Tacna was returned only in 1929, and Arica never was.

The defeat discredited the military and the old parties, and it produced the first serious attempt to think about what Peru was: a country with a Quechua-speaking majority that the republic had never integrated, governed from a capital that had just been occupied. That question shaped the next century of politics.

Who ruled the republic in the twentieth century?

Oligarchs, then soldiers, then a new kind of politician. The "Aristocratic Republic" of 1895–1919 was a plutocracy of coastal planters, miners and bankers; Augusto Leguía's "Oncenio" (1919–30) modernised the state and borrowed heavily abroad; the 1930 crash ended it. APRA, founded by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in 1924, built the first mass party in the Andes, and its long contest with the army defined Peruvian politics for fifty years.

The army intervened repeatedly: Sánchez Cerro in 1930, Odría in 1948, and then the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces in 1968, when General Juan Velasco Alvarado nationalised the oil industry, expropriated the sugar estates and carried out a land reform that broke the back of the old hacienda system. Velasco was overthrown in 1975 by Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who presided over a transition to civilian rule and the constituent assembly that produced the 1979 constitution.

What was the internal conflict?

The war that the state nearly lost. In 1980 the Maoist movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) began an insurgency in Ayacucho, and by the late 1980s it controlled large parts of the sierra and had reached the outskirts of Lima. The state's response — a counter-insurgency fought largely by peasant patrols and by a military that treated the highlands as enemy territory — produced the worst violence in Peru's modern history.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which reported in 2003, documented some 69,280 dead and disappeared, and concluded that the Shining Path was responsible for about half of them and state forces for about a third. It also found that three-quarters of the victims were Quechua-speaking, and that the violence was worst where the state had never been present.

What has happened since 2000?

A democratic recovery, then a new crisis. Alberto Fujimori, who had won in 1990 and ruled with increasing authoritarianism — the 1992 autogolpe, the 1995 amnesty law, the corruption network uncovered in 2000 — fled the country that year and was later convicted of human rights abuses and corruption. The transition produced a market economy with a mining boom, and between 2001 and 2016 Peru had one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America.

Its politics did not stabilise. Between 2016 and 2022 the country went through six presidents, a dissolution of congress, and a failed self-coup by Pedro Castillo on 7 December 2022, after which Dina Boluarte took office and a state of emergency was declared. The pattern — a fragmented congress, a weak party system, and a permanent contest between the executive and the legislature — has outlasted every individual leader.

How is Peru governed?

By a constitution written in 1993, after Fujimori's dissolution of congress. It created a presidential system with a single-chamber congress, a constitutional tribunal, and a centralised administration in Lima. The 1979 constitution's decentralisation promises were largely abandoned, and the country's 24 departments depend on transfers from the centre.

The state's weakness is structural. Informality employs most of the workforce, the tax base is narrow, and public services in the highlands and the Amazon are thin. The result is a republic that is formally democratic, economically dynamic in its export sectors, and unable to deliver the things — schools, clinics, security — that its citizens most need.

What did the colony leave in the countryside?

A hacienda system and a racial hierarchy that independence did not touch. Under Spanish rule the sierra was organised around the hacienda, the large estate that supplied Lima and the mines, and around the comunidad, the surviving indigenous village with its communal lands. The two were locked together: the estate needed the village's labour, and the village needed access to land that the estate kept taking.

The republic kept the arrangement and made it worse. The tribute that had protected indigenous communities as Crown subjects was abolished in the 1850s, and with it went the legal category that had given them standing; the land they held could then be bought, claimed and enclosed. By the early twentieth century, in the central and southern sierra, a handful of families owned most of the land, and the peasants who worked it were bound by debt, by enganche — the advance that could not be repaid — and by the simple absence of any other way to live.

This is the background to twentieth-century Peruvian politics. The indigenista movement of the 1910s and 1920s, with José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) at its intellectual centre, argued that the Indian question was a land question, and that Peru could not be a nation while it excluded the majority of its people. Mariátegui's answer was socialism; Haya de la Torre's was a broad anti-imperialist front; the landowners' answer was to keep the army close. Velasco's 1969 land reform was, in the end, the state's attempt to pre-empt both.

How did the export economy change after 1880?

From guano to sugar, cotton, copper and oil. The catastrophe of the Pacific war forced a reorganisation: the state lost its main revenue, the creditors took over the guano trade, and the initiative passed to private exporters. On the northern coast, sugar and cotton plantations expanded with capital from the same merchant houses that had handled guano; in the central Andes, the Cerro de Pasco Mining Company, an American concern, bought up mines and became the largest employer in the sierra.

The result was a dual economy: an export enclave on the coast and in the mining centres, connected by railway to the ports, and a subsistence economy in the highlands that supplied it with labour but received almost nothing back. The railway from Lima to La Oroya, completed in 1908 at enormous cost, was built to move ore, not people, and the towns along it grew or withered accordingly.

Oil came later, from the north coast at Talara and from the Amazonian east, and it became the symbol of the argument about foreign capital that dominated the twentieth century: whether Peruvian resources should be developed by foreign companies on their terms, or by the state on the country's. Velasco answered with nationalisation in 1968; the 1990s answered back with privatisation.

What happened in the Amazon?

A rubber boom, a war, and a slow discovery that the east was part of the country. In the 1880s and 1890s Amazonian rubber became a global commodity, and Iquitos grew into a boom town supplied from Europe; the labour was indigenous, recruited by debt and terror, and the Putumayo scandal of 1909–12 exposed the system to an international campaign. The boom collapsed when British plantations in Malaya undercut wild rubber after 1910, and the Amazonian economy with it.

The region's borders were settled by force and by treaty. Peru fought Ecuador in 1941 and won the disputed Amazonian territory, and the Protocol of Rio de Janeiro (1942) fixed a line that Ecuador did not fully accept until 1998, after the brief Cenepa war of 1995. The interior has remained the country's poorest region: oil, gas and timber, scattered towns, and indigenous peoples whose territories were opened to exploration in the 1970s and after.

What is the cultural question?

Whether Peru is an Andean country with a European ruling class, or a mestizo country, or a nation of nations. The question is not academic: it decided who was counted, who was schooled in Spanish, and who was allowed to be a citizen in more than name. The 1876 census counted a Quechua-speaking majority; the twentieth century's official mestizaje — mixing as national identity — promised to dissolve the distinction without giving anyone land.

The literature carries the argument. José María Arguedas, himself bilingual, wrote novels in which the Quechua and Spanish worlds collide, and killed himself in 1969; César Vallejo's poetry made the sierra's suffering a modernist subject; and the anthropologists who followed argued over whether the comunidad was a survival or an invention. Since the 1970s Quechua has been an official language and bilingual education has been policy, but the language is still declining in the cities, and the social distance the colony built has proved remarkably durable.

How do the 1979 and 1993 constitutions differ?

They are the two poles of modern Peruvian politics. The 1979 constitution, written by a constituent assembly elected after the military's retreat, was a social contract: it promised land, education, health, decentralisation, and the state's responsibility for development, and it was drafted with the participation of the left and of APRA.

The 1993 constitution, written by a congress elected after Fujimori's dissolution of the legislature, reversed the balance. It opened the economy to foreign investment, removed the state's development role, weakened labour protection, allowed the president to serve consecutive terms, and made the armed forces the guarantors of the constitutional order. It remains in force, and the argument over whether to replace it — with a constituent assembly, a return to the 1979 model, or something else — has become the central institutional question of Peruvian politics, and one of the reasons congress and the presidency have been in permanent conflict since 2016.

What happened in the 1980s?

Inflation, debt and a state that lost control of the economy. The military government had borrowed heavily against oil and copper, and when commodity prices fell and the United States raised interest rates after 1979, Peru was left with a debt it could not service. Belaúnde's second government (1980–85) tried orthodox adjustment and failed; Alan García's APRA government (1985–90) tried the opposite, capping debt payments and expanding demand, and produced hyperinflation — prices rose by more than 7,000 per cent in 1990 — and empty shelves.

The war made everything worse. Sendero Luminoso's insurgency, the army's counter-insurgency, and the collapse of agricultural prices emptied the sierra; by the end of the decade some 600,000 people had been displaced, most of them Quechua speakers who moved to Lima's shantytowns or to the jungle frontier. The economic and the military crisis were one crisis: a state that could not pay its teachers could not govern its territory.

Fujimori's 1990 stabilisation — the "Fujishock" — ended hyperinflation by freeing prices and cutting subsidies, and his privatisations and debt renegotiation brought the country back into the international financial system. The cost was borne by the poor, and the political cost was paid later, when the corruption network and the death squads were exposed.

What did the Truth Commission conclude?

That the violence was not a war between equals. The Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, appointed in 2001 and reporting in 2003, established that some 69,280 people were killed or disappeared between 1980 and 2000, that the Shining Path was responsible for about half of the deaths and state forces for about a third, and that the remaining deaths came from peasant patrols and unidentified actors.

Its findings about who died were the most important. Three-quarters of the victims spoke Quechua as their first language, and the violence was concentrated in the departments where the state had never been properly present: Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Apurímac. The commission's conclusion — that the republic had sent its poorest and most indigenous citizens to die in a war fought in their name — was an indictment of the state that independence had built, not only of the insurgents.

Its recommendations, including reparations and a memorial, were partly implemented. The search for the disappeared continues, and the debate over the Shining Path's responsibility is still contested by those who see the commission as too even-handed between a terrorist movement and a democracy.

What is Peru's place in the region?

A middle power with an open economy and a closed political system. Peru is a member of the Pacific Alliance with Chile, Colombia and Mexico, and its trade is oriented towards Asia — China is its largest export market — more than towards its neighbours. It belongs to the Andean Community, to APEC, and to the Organisation of American States, and it has been a consistent if cautious participant in regional mediation.

Its relations with its neighbours are shaped by the nineteenth century. The dispute with Chile over the maritime boundary was settled at The Hague in 2014; the border with Ecuador was finally closed in 1998; and the relationship with Bolivia carries the memory of the confederation and of Bolivia's lost coast, for which Peru has offered port facilities at Ilo.

Its soft power is cultural and culinary, and it is real: Peruvian cooking, with its Andean, Spanish, African, Chinese and Japanese strands, became in the 2000s the country's most successful export after minerals, and it did more than any diplomatic initiative to change how Peruvians and outsiders see the country.

How did the 2021 election and 2022 coup unfold?

In the most fragmented party system in the region. The 2021 election put Pedro Castillo, a rural schoolteacher and union leader from Cajamarca, into the presidency by a margin of 44,000 votes, and put a congress in which no party held more than a quarter of the seats against him. The result was two years of institutional warfare: two impeachments survived, a cabinet that changed almost monthly, and a constant contest over whether congress or the president controlled the state.

On 7 December 2022 Castillo attempted to dissolve congress by decree, hours before a third impeachment vote; congress dismissed him the same day and swore in his vice-president, Dina Boluarte. The attempt failed within hours, but the aftermath was violent: protests in the south, particularly in Ayacucho, Puno and Apurímac, were met with lethal force, and some fifty people died. The episode confirmed the pattern rather than breaking it, and the argument over a constituent assembly continued into the next election cycle.

What is the country's central problem now?

A state that cannot tax, deliver or represent. Peru's economy has grown steadily for most of the last twenty-five years, its poverty rate fell sharply between 2004 and 2016, and its fiscal rules are among the more prudent in the region. Yet its politics produces presidents who do not finish their terms, its congress is a collection of personal vehicles, and its citizens' trust in parties and in the legislature is among the lowest measured anywhere.

The causes are structural: a party system destroyed by the 1990s, a constitution that sets the executive and the legislature against each other, a media and a judiciary that have been repeatedly captured, and a geography that leaves half the country beyond the reach of services. The guano, the nitrate and the copper have each, in their turn, paid for a state that never became strong enough to survive the money running out.

How did the republic lose and regain democracy before 1968?

Through a cycle of coups that produced a workable, if exclusionary, arrangement. After Leguía's fall in 1930, the army and APRA fought an open war: APRA was a mass party with an organised base, the army saw it as a threat to the institution, and the result was a series of proscriptions, revolts and massacres — Trujillo in 1932, the 1936 ban on APRA, the 1945 election that APRA won and the 1948 coup that removed it.

Manuel Odría's government (1948–56) was a military dictatorship with an economic boom behind it, and it ended in a negotiated transition: APRA supported the 1956 election of Manuel Prado in exchange for the legalisation of the party. The 1962 election was stolen by the army, the 1963 election brought Fernando Belaúnde to power with a reform programme, and in 1968 Velasco's coup ended the experiment. The pattern was consistent: when a civilian government tried to reform land or the oilfields, the army intervened; when the army ruled too long, it negotiated its own exit.

This is why Velasco matters more than his economic results. He was the first military ruler to carry out the reforms the civilians had promised, and his programme — land, nationalisation, an official role for the Quechua language — permanently changed what Peruvian politics was about, even after his successors reversed the economics.

Why did the land reform not solve the countryside?

Because land without credit, water, roads or markets is not a livelihood. The 1969 reform expropriated the estates and turned them into cooperatives and peasant communities, and within a decade most of the cooperatives had broken up into smallholdings too small to support a family. The beneficiaries got title, and the state got the bill for compensation; the productivity gains that had been promised did not materialise, partly because the reform was administered by the same bureaucracy that had opposed it.

The countryside that emerged was fragmented: a mass of smallholders, a few surviving commercial estates on the coast, and an indigenous peasantry in the south that the reform reached late and badly. Its response, from the 1970s onwards, was migration — to Lima, to the coast, to the Amazon — and the remittances and urban votes that came with it. By the 1990s agriculture accounted for a shrinking share of output, and Peru was importing much of the food it had once grown.

The rural question has not gone away; it has changed shape. The conflicts of the 2000s and 2010s were over water and mining — Cajamarca's Conga project, Espinar, Las Bambas — where peasant communities found that the state would defend a mine's right to water more readily than a village's.

What did independence cost the economy?

The mines, the mint and the mercury supply. Potosí's silver had already been declining before the war, but the fighting destroyed the mita labour system, flooded the shafts and scattered the workforce; Huancavelica's mercury mine, which supplied the refining process, was abandoned. The state lost its principal revenue at the moment it acquired an army and a bureaucracy to pay for.

What replaced it was borrowing and customs duties. The republic lived off the tariff on imported goods, which fell hardest on the poor, and off loans from British merchants at rates that assumed the mines would recover. They did not recover until foreign capital returned in the 1890s, and in the interval the country's economic centre of gravity moved from the sierra to the coast — a shift that has never been reversed.

How did the church and the army shape the state?

As two corporations with their own law, their own property and their own claim on the nation's loyalty. The church owned perhaps a fifth of the arable land at independence, ran the schools and the hospitals, and controlled the registers of birth and death; its wealth was attacked by the liberals of the 1850s, defended by the conservatives, and partly dismantled in the 1970s. The army, for its part, was the institution that decided who governed, and it was paid for by whatever government it allowed to exist.

The result was a state with three centres of authority and no single sovereign. When the church and the army agreed, civilian government was possible; when they did not, it was not. Velasco's reform programme was an attempt to break the alliance by creating a new constituency in the peasantry and a new ideology in the barracks; it failed, but it left the church radicalised and the army divided, and both facts shaped the transition of 1979–80.

What happened to the Chinese labourers and the guano workers?

They paid for the boom with their lives. The coolie trade brought some 100,000 Chinese labourers to Peru between 1849 and 1874, most of them to the guano islands, the coastal plantations and the railways; the mortality on the islands was appalling, and the conditions were the subject of an international scandal in the 1860s and 1870s. The trade ended in 1874, but the community stayed, and it became one of the strands of coastal Peruvian culture.

The guano workers themselves were a mixture of convicts, army deserters, Chinese indentured labourers and highland migrants, working in heat and dust on islands covered in the droppings they were digging. When the deposits were exhausted, the islands were abandoned, and the workforce moved to the plantations and the cities. Their history is one of the reasons the guano boom is remembered in Peru less as a windfall than as a warning.

Common myths about Peru

Timeline of Peru

What the map shows next

At 1932 on the map the republic has lost Tarapacá and Arica, and Chile holds the nitrate coast.

At 2000 on the map the Fujimori era is ending, and Bolivia is about to lose its own president to protest.