Word: apra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MOST VIABLE force in Peruvian politics has been, traditionally, its hugely popular left-wing political party, APRA, or the Alianze Popular Revolucionaria Americana for short. (APRA is also sometimes known as the Partido Apristo Peruano--that...
...started out as violent and seriously revolutionary in the 1920s, under the leadership of your standard Latin American charismatic type, Haya de la Torre--known affectionately as "el Jefe." EI Jefe's messianic Marxism and anti-imperialism found a receptive audience in underdeveloped Peru, forging what Peruvians call APRA's "mistica...
...Jefe's firebreathing brand of leftist politics soon led APRA into perpetual and sometimes violent conflict with the conservative government, which in its turn carried out in 1932 a rather horrendous massacre of Apristas in Trujillo. By the 1950s, APRA had finally calmed down, and spent the next two decades sucking up to the conservative establishment. But there was a sense that when it gave up on el Jefe's revolt, APRA had sold out, lost its soul...
With the military still leery of APRA, a more moderate politician, Fernando Belaunde Terry of the Accion Popular, came to power. Belaunde is the Herbert Hoover of Peruvian politics--the economy took one look at him and promptly plunged into chaotic inflation. When he messily nationalized an oil company and the exteme left started clearing its throat in the wings, the military threw him out of power and took over themselves...
THEN IT GOT really weird. What you might expect to be the usual sordid rightist military junta actually went on to implement, of all things, an APRA progressive reform agenda. The regime courted the Church, sympathized with the landless peasants, stressed social justice and generally confused the life out of every political scientist in the world. In 1980 the brass realized Peruvians were getting sick of them and returned power to--of all people--the befuddled Belaunde...