Word: apra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...euphoria and ill-defined promises. For the first time in 40 years, an elected Peruvian government was in the process of handing over power to another elected government. Although the official results will not be announced for a month, Garcia, leader of the center-left Popular American Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), unofficially captured 48.7% of the vote, a better than 2-to-l lead over his only significant rival, Lima's Marxist Mayor Alfonso Barrantes Lingán, who headed the ticket of the United Left, an agglomeration of eight leftist and Communist parties. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the Popular Action Party...
...guerrillas in the central Andes city of Huancayo, killed two children and wounded four other people. But a call by Sendero Luminoso to boycott the election went unheeded, and voter participation in the Andean regions was believed to be heavier than ever before. Said Writer Mario Vargas Llosa: "APRA was seen by many as the best defense against the extreme left...
This can work. When the Catholic Church or APRA offers itself as a viable political option, Senderistas run scared. (Actually, that's not entirely true. Sendero has also been known to react by shooting nuns...
...THIS leaves two legacies for Peruvian politics. First, steadily decreasing legitimacy, to the point that now even APRA isn't respected. (That didn't stop Fujimoro from jailing or harassing the top Apristas, although Garcia himself may have escaped...
...Second, APRA left a taste for messianic solutions to the endemic problems of underdevelopment and poverty that plague Peru. Sendero plays off of that quite handily--indeed, some Apristas have a certain grudging sympathy for Sendero. After all, they considered violent solutions...