(4 of 10)
These are the people Belaunde is talking about when he calls for a conquest of Peru by Peruvians. "No other government," says Lima Economist Francis Bregha, "has ever really cared about the Indians or the common man. Belaunde has managed to awaken the campesinos—the millions who live in apathy and misery."
Gold in the Corn. As a model for development, Belaunde has taken the ancient Incas themselves. "The Inca society," he says, "had many defects, but they were not hungry. The Spaniards failed to conserve this high achievement. I will try to re-establish it."
At its peak in the early 16th century, the Inca empire embraced 6,000,000 people and extended from Colombia across 350,000 square miles to northern Argentina. Farmers and shepherds, the Incas organized a collective economy that guaranteed everyone enough to eat; if a man was forced to steal because he was hungry, the village officials were punished for poor administration. The Incas built 10,000 miles of all-weather roads that rivaled the Roman vias, dug elaborate irrigation canals, terraced hill sides for farming, built great stone cities such as Machu Picchu that rank in engineering brilliance with the pyramids, developed a mining industry centered on gold, the "sun metal." They covered their temples with plates of gold, decorated their gardens with stalks of solid-gold corn, gold llamas and gold shepherds.
Gold is what brought the Spaniards. In 1531 Francisco Pizarro led a party of 170 adventurers into Peru. At first, the Incas mistook the bearded, armored white men for gods; the Inca Emperor, Atahualpa, approached them with gifts. Pizarro put him to death at the stake. Then began the systematic sack of the Indian world. By the thousands, Spaniards sailed across to Peru, and the treasure they sent back was in the hundreds of millions. The terrified Indians were enslaved. All material manifesta tions, costumes, traditions, even their family names, were suppressed.
Between 1821 and 1824, Generals éose de San Martin and Simon Bolivar liberated Peru from absentee colonial rule. But the Indians merely exchanged one set of masters for another. Not un til a century later did Peru's masses finally seize on a champion — of sorts —when a fiery, 29-year-old law student named Victor Raul Haya de la Torre formed his American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. APRA's flag was red, its ideology a weird blend of democratic reform, peasant virtue and Marxist discipline. APRA was outlawed almost as soon as it raised its head in Peru. Haya shuttled between prison and exile; his party was ruthlessly driven under ground. But not before staging a series of bloody demonstrations against the military-supported ruling class.
After one 1932 revolt in the coastal city of Trujillo, 26 soldiers were found slaughtered in their barracks. The enraged military rounded up more than 5,000 Apristas, marched them out to the ancient ruins of Chan Chan, ordered them to dig trenches, then mowed them down with machine guns. APRA and the military have remained uncompromising enemies ever since. And gradually, as the party grew older, it began to lose some of its appeal for Peru's impoverished masses. As it did, a new leader—Fernando Belaúnde—presented himself.