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¶Peru's coast is even more paradoxical than its mountains: it is a desert that blooms, an air-conditioned strand in the tropics. Only 10 to 100 miles wide, the coastland stretches for 1,400 miles. Rain is virtually unknown there, but 52 well-fed rivers poke down the plunging mountains. Dammed and channeled, this water turns the valleys green with sugar cane, ripens grapes for Peru's famed pisco brandy, grows the fine, long-staple cotton that is king of the country's exports. The Humboldt Current cools the whole coast, and as a crowning convenience serves up the anchovies that feed the seabirds that provide the guano (droppings) used to fertilize the soil. In the coastal north are oilfields that make Peru an oil exporter (though output is dropping).
Rise of Apra. Can Peru go on indefinitely with its 2,000,000 coastal population in the 20th century and its mountain people still in the 16th? Yes, say the country's conservatives, who center around the so-called "Forty Families"—the old, cultured, inward-looking class who own the coastal haciendas and most of the businesses and industries of Lima. But in the '20s, a group of left-wingers at San Marcos University (which is 85 years older than Harvard) saw in the national division the makings of an extremist mass party. A silver-tongued intellectual named Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre thereupon founded a movement called Apra (from the Spanish initials of Popular Revolutionary Alliance of America).
Haya, a brilliant theorist, gave Apra a philosophy dizzyingly compounded of anti-U.S. nationalism, Marxism, reverence for the Incas, Nazi symbolism and even Einstein's theory of relativity as applied by Haya to history. Fighting back bloodily against the suppressive tactics of a series of dictators, Apra earned mass support and the hatred of the rich rightists and the army. Finally, in 1945, retiring President Manuel Prado allowed a free election. José Luis Bustamante, an Apra-supported but non-Aprista President, was chosen, and Apra had working control of Congress.
Haya emerged from eleven years of hiding to become Peru's unofficial strongman. He first tightened socialistic controls on prices and currency exchange, a move every bit as alarming as the conservatives had feared. They boycotted Congress, paralyzing it. Then came violence: the assassination of the editor of La Prensa, the Apra-hating newspaper owned by conservative Cotton Exporter Pedro Beltrán. Apristas were blamed; President Bustamante called for a soldier to take charge of public order. His choice: gimlet-eyed Colonel Manuel Odria, then chief of staff.
Frustrated, confused and angry, Apristas with navy help revolted violently one Sunday at dawn in Callao, but were speedily put down by the army at a cost of 100 killed. The government promptly outlawed the party. Less than a month later, Odria, by then convinced of his mission, seized power in a military junta. Haya took asylum in Lima's Colombian Embassy, became the world's most celebrated refugee before Odria freed and exiled him last year (he now lives in Belgium).