MAY 21, 1970

E.J. Hobsbawm
The Unrevolutionary Society: The Power of Latin American Conservatism in a Changing
World
by John Mander
Knopf, 331 pp., $6.95
The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective
by Stanley J. Stein, by Barbara H. Stein
Oxford, 222 pp., $5.00
Pressure Groups and Power Elites in Peruvian Politics
by Carlos A. Astiz
Cornell, 316 pp., $12.00
Politics in the Altiplano: The Dynamics of Change in Rural Peru
by Edward Dew
Texas, 216 pp., $6.00
Peru 1965: Notes on a Guerrilla Experience
by Hector Bjar
Monthly Review, 142 pp., $6.00
For the past ten years writing about Latin America has been one of the growth industries of
literature. The immediate stimulus for this growth was Fidel Castro, who transformed the
traditional gringo view of what a Latin American revolution was supposed to be, and with it
also the conventional European view that what happened south of the Rio Grande was
politically negligible to the rest of the world. Latin America ceased to be an object of history
and became a subject. As it did not immediately erupt into general social revolution, and no
longer posed significant problems of constitutional decolonizationmost of it has long been
politically independent though economically colonialthere has recently been a tendency to
assume that it was all a false alarm. John Mander calls his new book The Unrevolutionary
Society, and stresses the power of Latin American conservatism in a changing world.
Another of the authors under review, Carlos Astiz, concludes with the statement that
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the present distribution of power in Peru shows a remarkable tendency to remain
essentially as it is and has been for a long time. Neither revolution from above nor
revolution from below seems to be around the corner.
A view he does not modify in a hurried postscript about the present military junta.
Such are the pitfalls of writing history on the journalists (or the diplomats, the visiting
experts, the intelligence officers, the social science Ph.Ds) time scale. Matters that
determine the future of a continent do not oscillate at the same rate as our changing
short-term hopes, fears, and political assessments. Whatever may actually happen in Latin
America, a number of facts about it are undeniable. Most of it is changing with great rapidity.
More especially, its rates of population growth and urbanization are higher than those of any
comparable area of the world. Unless something unexpected occurs, its rate of economic
growth is lower, or at least no higher, than that of its population growth. Compared to the
developed countries it is for the most part becoming relatively poorer and more backward,
though probably in this respect its lag is somewhat less dramatic than that of other parts of the
Third World. Finally, its political superstructures remain notoriously unstable. All this does
not look like the setting for a scenario of unchanging conservative stability.
In fact, the layman is much more likely to sympathize with the late Irene Nicholson, the
author of the well-written study, The Liberators^*, who says: In the next few decades
Spanish America will either grow into maturity, or explode into anarchy. The pressures within
and without it, and its own extraordinary energies, make any midterm impossible. Whatever
that may mean exactly, it feels a lot more like reality than phrases about changelessness,
conservatism, and the like.
But ought we to talk about Latin America as such anyway? Historically, of course, it makes
a good deal of sense, allowing for the obvious limits of wide generalizations; more sense than
talking about Europe. In the sense used by, e.g., Stanley and Barbara Steins very useful
survey of The Colonial Heritage of Latin America, the term is not only legitimate but
necessary and precise. The value of this book lies in the demonstration that the peculiar form
of direct colonial dependence of Latin America (which served the needs of the developing
capitalism in western Europe through the formal empires of Spain and Portugal) was almost
inevitably succeeded by the neocolonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This,
the authors argue, never provided an adequate basis for its development, but on the contrary,
by permeating the continent, made a systematic breakthrough to modernization impossible.
Without fundamental structural changes, Latin America therefore seemed doomed, like
Brazil the country about which the authors know most, to remain the land of a great future
which never quite arrives.
This approach is reasonable, for the continent was, after all, with the exception of Brazil,
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colonized by a single power for three centuries, and linguistically, culturally, and in religion
and some other institutions, unified as no region of the same size had ever been before.
Thereafter Latin America became (including Brazil) the economic colony of another single
powerBritainfor another century, and has since been in a similar relationship to yet
another, the US.
To this day pan-Latin Americanism, based on this common past and reinforced within the
Spanish area by common language, is a stronger ideological force in this area than similar
beliefs anywhere else, except among the Arabs. A group of New Yorkers setting up a
guerrilla base in Queensland, or a group of Guineans in Rhodesia, on the ground that theirs is
a pan-Anglo-Saxon or pan-African revolutionary movement, is hard to imagine; yet this is
precisely what Che Guevara and his little band of Cubans did in Bolivia.
On the other hand it may be time to give Latin America as a unit a temporary rest, except for
purposes of global economic analysis. Politically independent Latin America never was a unit
nor did it even look like becoming one. Apart from the common fact of underdevelopment,
which affects different parts of it in widely varying ways, the unity which Latin America has
and had is one imposed from outside. At present it is, for the Latins, the common fear of and
dislike for the domination of the US, and conversely, for the US, the habit of considering all
these republics collectively as its imperial back yard. The rest of the world is where even a
world power negotiates, draws lines of demarcation, compromises, or even fights local wars,
because there are other interests to be considered. Latin America is where nobody else has
any political or military business and the US merely intervenes, when not scaring outsiders
off by the threat of nuclear war. As every politician between California and Patagonia knows,
God, Russia, and China (not to mention Britain, France, Germany, and Japan) are far away.
Only the US is near.
John Manders The Unrevolutionary Society suggests that its author, a contributing editor of
Encounter, interprets Latin America in this imperial sense. Formally this is a travelogue
written by a politico-literary journalist, and ranging over such subjects as machismo, the
Indians, local anti-Americanism, Macchu Picchu, Borges, Niemeyer, and the rest of what the
intelligent dinner guest should today know about Latin America. As such it suffers from too
much reading of that Iberian genre, the dashing essay of national introspectionnot a good
influence on anyone, even Iberiansand from a desire to explain why Latin Americans
behave so oddly. In brief it suffers from the Northern Tourist syndrome. Informally it is, not
to beat about the bush, a defense of US policy.
As such it does not require much argument. All the essential questions are begged by anyone
who believes that the relation of the US to Latin America is simply that of the elephantby
nature a peaceable vegetarian beast who nevertheless cannot lie down in the jungle without
crushing a number of lesser beasts or that the real charge against America is not that she is
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sometimes insolent and maladroit, but that she is muddled in her basic aspirations. The
issue is not the economic power of the US, but the paramountcy which this is believed to
imply, and which makes US private and public behavior toward Bolivia and Chile different
from that toward, say, Spain and Ireland, two countries which are relatively at least as weak,
and considerably closer to Washington as the jet plane flies. It is not size or tact, but
domination and empire.
John Mander knows this quite well. Indeed, he quotes Joseph Conrads famous passage from
Nostromo as an epigraph to one of his chapters: We shall be giving the word for everything:
industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics and religion from Cape Horn clear over to
Smiths Soundwe shall run the worlds business whether the world likes it or not. He
must know that in Latin America the US is not less interfering than those whose mantle she
has inherited, namely the British, who confined their interest in that continent so exclusively
to money that, with the exception of some natural history and a little marginal belles-lettres, a
century of their informal empire produced less scholarship about it than any couple of
decades of their rule in India. US relations to Latin America are similar to British relations to
the Middle East in the first half of this century, except that the American power elite seems
never to have produced its equivalent of that curious phenomenon, the passionately pro-Arab
upper-class Englishman. Latin America is (with the Pacific) the traditional region of North
American imperial dreams and realities, and its inhabitants know it.
Nevertheless, common victimization does not exhaust the characteristics of a continent and a
half. Fortunately there are signs that, for a variety of reasons, general discussions of Latin
America are being increasingly supplemented by books on particular Latin American
countries. It happens to be a convenient accident that several of the volumes under review
deal with Peru, though all of them were written before the coup of 1968, which has, to
everyones surprise, placed that country in the center of political interest.
In many respects Peru is a classic example of informal empire (or in modern terms,
neocolonialism), that is to say, of the symbiosis of local exploitation and foreign capital. The
local exploitation, since the 1920s, has come from the oligarchy, a combination of coastal
estate operators, compradors, and other racketeers involved in international business, grafted
upon an older stock of quasi-feudal landowners such as still maintain themselves in power in
the highlands, and hence assimilated to the social and political status of landed patricians.
The foreign capital is now predominantly North American. Politically and economically the
country divides into a relatively modernized coastal strip and the vast Indian hinterland of the
mountains, with their haciendas, serfs, communidades, mines, poverty, and backwardness.
Alone among Latin American ruling classes the Peruvian oligarchy retained its passionate
attachment to free trade and no government interference in economic matters, which
expressed not only its acute reluctance to pay taxes but its conviction that the domination of
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foreign capital was a fact of nature, like the Humboldt current. (Even the early and
revolutionary APRA party planned to replace the older quasifeudalism by a modernized state
capitalism through and not against American investment.) In no country has it been more
pointless to seek for a national bourgeoisie, or even a significant sector of native
manufactures. The foreigners bought Perus primary products, built and ran the installations
for their operation. The foreigners increasingly exploited the domestic market for
manufactured goods. In return a few hundred Creole families received the large incomes
which they traditionally spent in Paris, and the right to oppress their Indians any way they
liked or, if on the coast, to run the country any way they liked. A rather larger middle stratum
on the coastal strip received their more modest slices of pork out of the barrel.
The results of more than a century of this collaboration were until recently unimpressive,
though they managed to keep central Lima largely intact as a colonial capital, until it was
systematically destroyed in the property boom of the 1960s. It produced a few spectacular
mountain railroads, monuments to Victorian British engineering, a number of extremely
efficient cotton and sugar estates on coastal oases, a relatively modest percentage of the world
output of some metals, a lot of fishmeal, and for its size and population the most backward
country in Latin America. Except for a few mines, the foreigners took no serious interest in
the Indian highlands, which contained two-thirds of the population, but even the coastal
population was no great advertisement for the benefits of economic development through
foreign investment. Peru was a country whose social injustice and plain misery made the
blood run cold. If ever a country needed, and needs, a revolution, it was this. But none
seemed likely.
Indignation, contempt for the Peruvian ruling class, and pessimism have shaped the book of
Carlos Astiz, an intelligent Argentinian. Like other observers, he is equally struck by the
countrys vast potentialities, the modesty of its achievements, its dependence on the US, and
the apparent impossibility of achieving any major political change. Where is it to come from?
From the feeble middle strata, content to ape the foreigners and the oligarchs on whom they
depend, not least for jobs in the swelling civil and military bureaucracy which, as in all
underdeveloped countries, exists to provide jobs for them? From the favored minority of
organized plantation and industrial workers, who can bargain within the system? From the
APRA, long a part of the political racket and sold to the US? From the weak, isolated, and
increasingly fissiparous revolutionary left?
Yet his pessimism is patently mistaken, for since 1968 there have been dramatic changes
which this book would not have allowed us to predict or even to expect. They are no doubt,
so far, changes of style rather than of substance. It is too early to hail the achievements, as
distinct from the intentions, of the agrarian reform, though also (skeptics should be reminded)
too early to write off the anti-imperialism of the generals. Still, there have been some
startling changes. Who would have expected any Peruvian administration to provoke a
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confrontation with the US, even if its purpose was only to make a better bargain? (Carlos
Astiz, for instance, has been unable to discover a single issue of foreign policy in the
twentieth century on which Lima disagreed with Washington.) Who would have expected the
Peruvian army to expropriate the sugar estates, not only of Grace and Gildemeister, but of the
great oligarchic families themselves? In Peruvian politics the takeover of Hacienda Tumn
was as extraordinary a step as the nationalization of the Schenectady works of General
Electric would be in US politics. Who would have expected a Peruvian government to hand
over newspapers to cooperatives and seriously to consider, as this one is doing, giving votes
to illiterates?
The new factor in Perus politics is not simply the conversion of army leaders to
anti-imperialist nationalism and desarrollismo, for this is no longer uncommon among Latin
American officers, a middle-class group which is today far from the old stereotypes of the
aristocrat or the roughneck aspirant caudillo. It is the emergence of the forgotten majority of
Peruviansthe Indian peasantry, at home or in emigrationinto politics. Their actual role in
national life was potentially always decisive, though in practice it was generally negligible.
The weak point of the regime always lay in the instability of its domination over the sullen,
powerless, unreconciled Indian masses, whose frequent rebellions are virtually unrecorded by
historians. Like Tsarist Russia, oligarchic Peru lived on a volcano. Only the lack of leaders,
and the localization, brevity, and political irrelevance of the peasant revolts, kept it secure.
Conversely, the Left knew the importance of the Indians, though it failed to mobilize them
effectively. Fifty years ago the first major shift in the Peruvian colonial economythe victory
of the coastal, American-oriented sector over the highland, quasi-feudal, and British-oriented
sector under Leguia (1919-1930)produced the first appearance of the masses as a serious
factor in Peruvian politics. It was sufficient to stimulate two unique phenomena in Latin
America: the home-grown (though Italian-influenced) Marxism of Jos Maria Mariategui, the
most original socialist thinker of the continent, and the first genuine left-wing mass party,
Haya de la Torres APRA. But neither APRA nor Mariateguis much smaller Communist
Party succeeded in breaking into the highland Indian masses, though the C.P. established a
few bridgeheads in the South (especially in that bastion of Indian tradition, Cuzco) which
were to be the bases of a later and wider peasant movement. The Indians remained outside
the nation, outside citizenshippeople not merely forgotten, but politically almost invisible.
The social earthquakes of the 1950s and 1960s have provided a firmer basis for their political
mobilization. For the first time in history the highland society was breaking up, as
demonstrated most vividly by the mass migration of Indians to the coastal cities. In Lima the
number of inhabitants living in the shantytowns increased, between 1956 and 1961, from ca.
120,000 (10 percent) to ca. 400,000 (26 percent). The crucial phenomenon of this period was
the mass insurrection of the highland peasants, mainly through a series of decentralized
invasions of land, which began at the end of the 1950s and reached their peak in 1963-64.
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At this stage something like 300,000 peasants in all but one of the highland departments were
involved in it.
Less dramatic, but politically no less significant, was the emergence of the cholos, an Indian
petty-bourgeoisie distinct from the traditional ruling class of mestizos and the rare whites,
which for the first time provided a cadre of political leaders (or political bosses) for the local
peasantry. Edward Dews Politics in the Altiplano is a remarkably interesting study of the
rise of this stratum in the much researched department of Puno, and especially of the career
of the Caceres brothers, whose Frente Sindical Campesino swept the municipal elections in
most provinces of this department. Mr. Dews book has no high ambitions, but he has been
lucky to observe the grassroots politics of an important region of dense Indian settlement at
the moment of social awakening, and we can benefit from his observation.
With the emergence of the Indians into political visibility in the 1960s, the parameters of
Peruvian politics changed. For the first time the rumblings of the social volcano had to be
taken seriously: it had shown that it could erupt. At the same time, the possibility of
by-passing the political system now existed, and with it the possibility of hauling Peru out of
its state of backward dependence, an aim with which all except the oligarchy sympathized.
The Belaunde regime of 1962-68 failed, largely because it allowed itself to be paralyzed by a
system of which it was a part. The army, which had installed it, eventually took over. There
was nobody else to do so.
Unlike the Brazilian generals coup of 1964, the Peruvian takeover was not the response to
an immediate revolutionary danger, real or imagined. The army was certainly not afraid of the
APRA, that thinnest of paper tigers, which so often threatened to win elections and invariably
yielded to the army veto. It was not frightened by the revolutionary Left, which had
demonstrated its impotence outside the universities. In 1958-64 the Left had been unable to
do more than detonate peasant movements, which it had not the resources to control, and in
1965 it had utterly failed to launch an effective rural guerrilla movement, as Hector Bjars
little book tragically demonstrates. Mr. Bjar, the leader of a small guerrilla movement which
took part of the abortive risings of 1965, has had the leisure while in jail (where he still is) to
reflect on the failure of the 1965 experience, and to provide an invaluable account of his own
groups unhappy experiences in one region of the Andes. His book is a precious addition to
the still exiguous literature about the concrete guerrilla experiences of his continent in the
1960s, though we need to remind ourselves (preferably by publishing an English translation
of Jabobo Arenass recent Colombie, Guerillas du Peuple, Paris, 1969) that not all such
movements have been as amateurish or unsuccessful as the Peruvian ones.
The generals were and are afraid of a social revolution which might one day be led by the
Left, foras Bjar also showsthe potential peasant support for insurrection was
substantial. But they had and have time to cut the ground from under such a revolution by
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agrarian reform, which, as every Peruvian intellectual since Mariategui and Haya de la Torre
knows, would also destroy the political power of the oligarchy.
The generals came to power at a time of political calm. They still enjoy this tranquillity,
perhaps fortunately for their political cohesion, less fortunately for their prospects. Even
progressive generals tend to be happier if the civilians keep quiet, but progressive generals
may well be saved from reactionary ones by the readiness of the civilians to come out on the
streets on their behalf. Only very recently have the workers of the great American mining
corporation of Cerro de Pasco begun to mobilize en masse with consequences which cannot
yet be foreseen.
What are the generals trying to do? One of them has explained their aims fairly recently (Le
Monde, February 20):
We discovered the deeper reasons for the guerrilla insurrection of 1965: poverty, the
scandalous exploitation of the masses, the social injustice of archaic structures.
Communism is no solution for Peru. So our objective is clear: we must fight against
foreign dependence, which is at the root of underdevelopment. This implies that we
must confront the foreign interests, mainly North American, which do not bother about
Perus interests. This again implies that we must fight against the local oligarchy, which
is closely linked with the foreigners.
In other words, their negative aim is to avoid a social explosion by well-timed reform, and
more immediately and superficially, to break up their old antagonist, the APRA; their positive
aim, to develop the countrys resources by a planned state capitalism, acquiring foreign aid on
more favorable terms, and for purposes more directly useful to the Peruvian economy than in
the past.
Whether they or anyone else have a clear idea of how to achieve these aims is another
question. Politically they have played a strong hand well inside Peru, a weak hand carefully in
international relations. At home, since there is no effective opposition or alternative, their
main problem is how far they can go without mobilizing their potential mass support, which
they have so far not attempted to do either by building up any leaders charisma (which might
cause trouble among his colleagues), or by organizing any mass movement or party (which
might create enemies by creating friends). Internationally, they are extremely vulnerable to
US pressure, e.g., the withdrawal of the sugar quota, all the more so as they are naturally
reluctant to face economic disruption. But they probably would face it, if pressed too far, and
the threat to move sharply to the left is their major diplomatic asset.
The US does not want big trouble in a country remote from the area of quick and cheap
military interventions, especially as plenty of Latin Americans are already looking to Lima for
the demonstration effect of militant anti-imperialism, including influential officers in various
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countries, whose political views look no more incendiary today than the Peruvians did three
years ago. Who can forget where Castro and Nasser went when pushed too hard? Hence
Washington and the junta are both cautious. They are playing for time. Both would be happy
to find a formula which avoided conflict.
Is such a formula possible? In theory it is. The US is prepared to write off the present
oligarchy and the backward agrarian system of the highlands. The Peruvian generals are
patently in favor of North American investment and technical development, on terms which,
as the recent Cuajone copper deal shows, are not unacceptable to US investors. Nobody will
plan to send in the marines just because any American property is taken over, especially as
sending the marines is not so easy. If the Kennedy policy (which failed) was to encourage
anticommunist but economically realistic democratic reformers such as APRA-type leaders
and Christian Democrats, why should not the Nixon policy be to encourage reforming
military governments, which is at any rate better for publicity than backing the Brazilian
torturers?
The prospect may be acceptable to Washington. The trouble about it is that it offers no
immediate answers to the economic, social, and political problems of Peruvian backwardness,
which are unusually acute. It offers time, which is valuable to a regime which is still (and
inevitably) improvising and feeling its way. It offers agrarian reform (or rather the breakup of
the large highland haciendas, the transfer of ownership of the agro-industrial plantations on
the coast), but this in itself, however welcome, is not an adequate solution to the problems of
Indian Peru.
The agrarian problem is no longer the only significant problem of the country, nor can it be
isolated nowadays from the other problems of Peruvian society with which it is intertwined.
For these the formula would merely offer yet another, updated, version of the theory that
somehow imperialism can be the first stage of a national capitalism in an underdeveloped
country. The history of Peru does not encourage confidence in this theory. It suggests rather
that the combination of economic liberalism and foreign dependence must be broken, if
relative underdevelopment is not to be perpetually regenerated.
Peruvian reformers, in and out of uniform, know this perfectly well. US interests and
Peruvian interests do not coincide. However tactfully the confrontation is conducted on both
sidesand if the generals carry out their program, it is likely to generate an internal dynamic
which will get in the way of mutual politenessit will have to be a confrontation. If it is not,
President Velasco and his colleagues will fail to achieve what they have set out to achieve.
And Peru will still need and cry out for that social revolution, peaceful or violent, which is
long overdue.
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