The World Was Going Our Way by Christopher Andrew

Communism. Alistair Horne wrote in 1972:
     
     
     
    It is not in South-east Asia, the Middle East or Africa that the ideological battle of the seventies seems likely to be waged, but in South America. Here, one feels, may well be the battleground where the orthodoxy of Soviet communism will triumph definitively over Maoism or vice-versa. 4
     
     
     
    That estimate proved to be exaggerated, though at the beginning of the twenty-first century the main vestiges of Maoist revolutionary movements - in particular the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) - were located in Latin America. At the beginning of the 1970s, however, Horne’s prophecy seemed highly plausible.
     
     
    The first ‘progressive’ junta to attract the attention of the Centre in Latin America was in Peru. To Marxist-Leninists, class conflict in Peru seemed to make it ripe for revolution. Since the foundation of the Peruvian Republic in 1821, vast wealth had been concentrated in the hands of an urban élite, while the mass of the rural population - mostly aboriginals - lived in grinding poverty. Land ownership was more unequal than anywhere else in Latin America. In the 1960s 9 per cent of landowners owned 82 per cent of the land, while millions of peasants had none at all. The slums which ringed Lima, mostly inhabited by peasants unable to make a living in the countryside, were among the most wretched on the continent. Half-hearted land reform was halted in the mid-1960s by a hostile, conservative Congress. 5 Dependency theory, which became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, blamed Peru’s backwardness on American imperialism. In order to maintain its own prosperity, the United States was allegedly promoting the ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘dependency’ of Latin America by controlling access to major natural resources, by maintaining financial and military control, and by other methods designed to prevent its southern neighbours escaping from their poverty. The US-owned International Petroleum Company, an Exxon subsidiary which dominated Peru’s petroleum industry, seemed to the Latin American left to symbolize the way in which the power of American capital undermined Peruvian national sovereignty. 6
     
     
    Peru’s political history had been punctuated by military coups. However, the junta headed by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, which seized power in October 1968, broke with precedent. It was the first Peruvian coup led by left-wing radicals, many of them with a background in military intelligence. ‘Intelligence’, claimed one of the radicals, ‘. . . opened our eyes and made us see the urgency for change in our country.’ Within days of his coup, on what became known as ‘National Dignity Day’, Velasco nationalized the International Petroleum Company without compensation, 7 and began preparations for a series of other nationalizations. The junta went on to announce a radical programme of land reform and sought to prevent the flight of capital to Swiss bank accounts by giving itself the power to inspect bank deposits. Its policies combined radical reform with military discipline. The junta banned the riotous annual Lima carnival on the grounds of public safety and arrested those who transgressed traditional standards of sexual propriety in public parks. 8
     
     
    Since the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations with Peru at the time of the coup, it had no embassy or legal residency capable of reporting on the new regime. Nikolai Leonov, who had recently been given accelerated promotion to the post of deputy head of the FCD Second (Latin American) Department, was sent to investigate, staying at a Lima hotel posing as a correspondent of the Novosti Press Agency. With the help of the press office at the Peruvian Foreign Ministry, Leonov succeeded in making contact with a number of members and supporters of the new regime. His stay was none the less a difficult one - chiefly, he believed, because the CIA had revealed his real identity