Word: bela
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Belaúnde intends to bridge the gulfs not so much by taking from the rich but by giving the peasant masses a stake in their country through massive social reforms and self-help development programs. He offers more food, better jobs, new roads, schools, hospitals, industries. He reminds the Indians of the Inca civilization that once flourished in Peru, talks of "a new renaissance," and challenges them to enlist in what he calls "the conquest of Peru by Peruvians...
Disgusted at the ever-expanding Lima slums and impatient for swifter reforms, Belaúnde finally decided to form his own political party a few months before the 1956 presidential elections. He named it Accion Popular, a catch phrase suggesting that the best help is selfhelp. No one would help the peasants unless they awoke from their coca-chewing lethargy and helped themselves-in the same cooperative, community spirit of their Inca forefathers. Working together, they could build roads and schools and hospitals -Belaúnde would see that they got the tools. "This was the philosophical idea," he says...
Ranging through the slums and into the hills, Belaúnde found himself attracting crowds in the thousands. "Following this winding road among the mountains," he cried, "I ask once more: Who made this road? And again, resounding in my ears like a triumphal march, I hear in these elegant words the history of all Peru's yesterdays, its present, the prophecy for its future: 'the people built...
Army General Manuel Odria, then in power, scoffed at the upstart architect and declared Belaúnde's candidacy illegal for lack of enough petition signatures. Belaúnde called a protest demonstration in downtown Lima, raised high a Peruvian flag, and shouting "Adelante!", led a mob of 1,000 toward the President's palace. Waiting police hurled tear gas. His eyes streaming, Belaúnde delivered an ultimatum: "I will wait half an hour. If by then I have not been inscribed, we will march." Odria grudgingly let him run. In the voting, Belaúnde lost...
...shout him down. One morning in 1957, he fought a clanging saber duel atop a Lima airport building with a Congressman who had called him a "demagogue and conscious liar" (both were slightly nicked). A year later, his wife left him for another man. and the scandal rocked Lima. Belaúnde won a legal separation, was awarded custody of their three children-and plunged on with his Ace ion Popular. He published a book pleading for the integration of the highland Indian in the national economy. "This," he wrote, "is the great battle that still has not been fought...