Word: nde
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lima presidential palace, Belaúnde has turned the ornate, wood-paneled state dining room into a wall-to-wall showcase for his housing, road and irrigation projects. Huge maps cover the walls, and dozens of scale-model projects are lined up neatly on tables. "This one will open in July," he says, pointing to a housing project. "We've just broken ground on that one over there." He turns to the maps with their probing lines thrusting east from the Pacific. "You know," he mutters, putting his finger on a village deep in the towering Andes, "that used...
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...