Peru: APRA's Show of Weakness

Beaten in general elections last June, Peru's worker-peasant APRA Party last week fell back on a familiar maneuver: a 24-hour general strike. The occasion proclaimed by leaders of APRA's 500,000-member Confederation of Labor was "indignation" over the dismissal of 300 workers at a Lima ceramics factory and police killings of two Indian peasant squatters in the backlands. Neither seemed quite enough to justify a nationwide strike, and few Peruvians were taken in. The strike was obviously intended to show President Fernando Belaunde Terry that APRA, though outvoted, was still too powerful a...

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