The Peruvian military junta, officially named the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (), was a military dictatorship that ruled Peru from 1968 to 1980 after a successful coup d'état by the Peruvian Armed Forces, then led by Juan Velasco Alvarado. Velasco led the Revolutionary Junta, which promoted revolutionary nationalism and left-wing reforms across the country. Among the policies promoted were major agrarian reform, the official recognition of Quechua as a national language, an increase of worker's rights, and the empowerment of workers' unions and indigenous Peruvians. Other measures included the nationalization of natural resources and the expropriation of companies and the media.
As a result of the reforms, the economy went through a severe crisis and the country was subject to international isolation. In response, Velasco Alvarado was overthrown in 1975 by his prime minister Francisco Morales Bermúdez who took power to undo the socialist-leaning measures taken by his predecessor. In a shift from Velasco's close ties to the Eastern Bloc, Morales Bermúdez led the Peruvian military to participate in Operation Condor alongside other right-wing military dictatorships in South America. In 1978, the new government convened a Constituent Assembly, who wrote a new constitution in 1979 and proceeded with democratic elections in 1980. The dictatorship officially ended that same year, with Fernando Belaúnde returning to power after being deposed twelve years prior.
Background In the 1950s, several nationalist governments in Latin America began processes of social and economic modernization, promoting the economic theory of developmentalism, which promoted agrarian reforms, industrialization through import substitution and the use of income sourced from the exploitation of natural resources. Such was the case of the New National Ideology in Venezuela, the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, the second government of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in Chile, the National Development Plan of Juscelino Kubitschek in Brazil, among others.
In Peru, the electoral victory in 1962 of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, head of the Peruvian Aprista Party, was annulled by a coup. The APRA government program proposed a transformation of the country, betting on agrarian reform to end the servitude regime on the indigenous people that still existed on the haciendas. The Military Junta of 1962 called for new elections for the following year, in which Fernando Belaunde was victorious, who defeated Haya, with a government plan that also proposed to reform the country and establish new contracts on the exploitation of natural resources, especially oil.
Despite the determined support of the Armed Forces for the reforms promised by the new government, Belaúnde was unable to fulfill the promise of agrarian reform or to resolve the conflict over the ownership of Peruvian oil, among other reasons, due to the fierce parliamentary opposition from APRA and the right-wing Odriist National Union, led by Manuel Odría.
In addition, Belaúnde had to face the peasant mobilization in Cusco led by Hugo Blanco and the irruption of two guerrilla forces in the country inspired by the victory of the Cuban Revolution: the National Liberation Army (ELN) commanded by Héctor Béjar and Javier Heraud, and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), led by an APRA militant, Luis de la Puente Uceda, and Guillermo Lobatón.
The Armed Forces, especially the Peruvian Army, quickly and forcefully defeated the ELN and MIR guerrillas. However, they realized the urgency of social and economic reforms in a country where there was still an oligarchic elite and huge marginalized groups of the poor and indigenous. Faced with the failure of the Belaundista reformism in democracy, the military decided to make the changes themselves with the idea of "starting the revolution from above to prevent it from being started from below."
First phase
The first phase of the dictatorship, calling itself the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces, began with the de facto presidency of the Army Commander General, Major General Juan Velasco Alvarado, who overthrew President Fernando Belaúnde, after the Talara Act and the Page 11 scandals, through a coup d'état, on October 3, 1968. The coup was soon followed by the military takeover of La Brea y Pariñas oil complex on October 9, which helped the new government in its consolidation of power in the country.
Velasco's administration articulated a desire to give justice to the poor through a regime of nationalization and corporatism known as Peruanismo. Velasco's rule was characterized by left-leaning policies, which aimed to create a strong national industry to increase the international independence of Peru. To that end, 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 and increased government control over economic activity by enforcing those entities as monopolies and disincentivized private activity in those sectors. Most reforms were planned by left-leaning intellectuals of the time, and some of them successfully improved the Peruvian quality of life.
Among the state-owned companies created by the government were: PescaPeru: dedicated to the fishing industry. MineroPeru: dedicated to the mineral industry. PetroPerú: dedicated to the petroleum industry. SiderPerú: dedicated to the steel and iron industry. Centromin Perú: dedicated to the mining industry. ElectroPerú: dedicated to the electric power industry. Enapu: dedicated to the country's ports. EnatruPerú: dedicated to urban transport. Enafer: dedicated to rail transport. Compañía Peruana de Teléfonos: dedicated to telecommunications. EntelPerú: dedicated to telecommunications. Correos del Perú: dedicated to mail.
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 prioritized in this system and the name of the Peruvian Indian Day (), celebrated every June 24, was changed to Peruvian Peasant's day ().
Velasco saw the revolution as one that was opposed to both capitalism and communism, stating in a 1970 address that
In 1971, the country celebrated its 150th anniversary since its independence. As a result, the Revolutionary Government established the National Commission for the Sesquicentennial of the Independence of Peru () to manage the celebrations.
The education reform of 1972 provided for bilingual education for 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.
Peruanismo was also characterized by authoritarianism, 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 Velasco's political and economic strategy was the implementation by dictate of an agrarian reform program to expropriate farms and diversify land ownership. In its first ten years in power, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA) expropriated 15,000 properties (totaling nine million hectares) and benefited some 300,000 families.Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. The former landlords who opposed this program believed that they did not receive adequate compensation for their confiscated assets and lamented that the state officials and peasant beneficiaries mismanaged their properties after the expropriation.Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform. Durham:Duke University Press, 2009.
On February 5, 1975, there was a police strike that generated riots and looting in the historic center of Lima, which created a massive increase of crime and general unrest in the capital and precipitated the fall of Velasco. This event would be later known as the Limazo. Months later, the Tacnazo occurred, a coup by which General Francisco Morales Bermúdez became de facto president on August 29, 1975, beginning the second phase of the Revolutionary Government.
Second phase Velasco Alvarado was overthrown in 1975 by his prime minister Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who overturned many of Velasco Alvarado's pro-Socialist reforms and joined Operation Condor. His government repressed the protests that surged as a result of inflation.
The Morales Bermudez administration assumed a country in a serious economic crisis after Velasco's reforms. The economy failed to improve amid rising inflation and recession, as well as rising unemployment. This situation led to high social discontent, where many people of the working class, particularly those closest to the labor unions, came to see in each government action a reversal of the military revolution towards submission to the International Monetary Fund, as it proved unable to continue with the original leftist military government program, instead continuing with Morales Bermudez's program, such as the replacement of the Inca Plan with the Tupac Amaru Plan.
Two general strikes were called by unions such as the Workers' General Confederation of Peru as a result of social discontent. The first strike was held on July 19, 1977, the objective of which was to demand an improvement in the employment and salary situation, and the second in May of the following year, with a broader list of claims.
Morales Bermudez was forced to call a Constitutional Assembly, which was led by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and new elections. The Revolutionary Government came to an end after Fernando Belaunde was reelected.
At the end of the military dictatorship, the growing problems with the payment of the foreign debt and the ineffectiveness of the State administration led to the appearance of symptoms of economic crisis and the incubation of social problems that in later years would increase.
Art and culture During the First Phase of the Revolutionary Government, there was a strong impulse of Peruvian cinema and literature. During this period, young Peruvian writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Alfredo Bryce Echenique and Julio Ramón Ribeyro, reached international recognition. In addition, important initiatives appeared that spread reading in Peru such as the Populibros Peruanos collection, which published more than seventy titles of universal and Peruvian literature, or the Peruvian Library of PEISA, which reissued books on history and current national affairs.
On the other hand, Peruvian cinema had a boom with indigenous themes thanks to the financing of the revolutionary government through the National Mobilization Support System (SINAMOS). Movies such as Runan Caycu (1973) by Nora de Izcue and the docudrama Kuntur Wachana (1977) by Federico García Hurtado stand out.
The Peruvian plastic arts were also influenced by the Peruvian revolution, the Directorate for the Promotion and Diffusion of the Agrarian Reform sponsored the birth of artist Jesús Ruiz Durand's achorado pop. Ruiz created posters, logos and even comics where the peasant, the worker and the Indigenous people are protagonists, taking the aesthetics of pop art and representing the "achorado" Peruvian Indian as a synonym of defiance and insolence.
Foreign relations