Word: jefe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Guess what? The economy, still allergic to Belaunde, went blooey again. When the kinder, gentler APRA went head to head with Belaunde in 1985, it thrashed him. APRA's Alan Garcia, a populist who was liked but not as revered as el Jefe had been, campaigned on such perennially crowd-pleasing issues as screwing the International Monetary Fund and not paying off Peru's debts...