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We can assure your majesty that it
is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would even be remarkable in
Spain.
---Francisco
Pizarro, describing
Cuzco
in a letter to King Charles V of Spain.
Peru
is South America's third largest country, and can be divided into three distinct
geographic regions. The best known of these is the central high sierra of the
Andes, with its massive peaks, steep canyons, and extraordinary pre Columbian
archaeological sites. The Andes are still one of the world's most unstable
mountain ranges, with frequent earthquakes, landslides, and flash floods.
Despite such instability, the Andes are also the site of the most fascinating
pre-Columbian cities of South America-like the great city of the clouds,
Machu
Picchu.
Peru's narrow, lowland coastal
region, a northern extension of the
Atacama
Desert.
Although the Atacama is generally known as the most
arid region on the planet, the climate along Peru's shores is made cooler and
less dry by La Garuùa, a dense fog created by the
collision of the frigid waters of the Humboldt Current with the heated sands of
the Atacama. Lima, Trujillo, and
Chiclayo,
three of Peru's major population centres, are
located along this coastal desert.
Peru's third great region is the dense forest that surrounds the headwaters of
the Amazon beneath the eastern slopes of the Andes. This part of the country is
so inaccessible that the region's capital of
Iquitos,
a city of 400,000, is accessible only by air or by boat up the Amazon.
Official Name: Republic
of Peru (República del
Perú).
Short Name: Peru.
Term for Citizens: Peruvian(s).
Capital: Lima.
Date of Independence: Declared July 28, 1821, from Spain; achieved, 1824.
Religion: Predominantly (92.5 percent) Roman Catholic. Protestantism, including Mormonism growing rapidly among urban poor and some indigenous tribes, although accounting for only about 4.5 percent of Peruvians in 1990. Other denominations in 1990 included the Anglican Communion; the Methodist Church, with about 4,200 adherents; and the Bahai Faith.
Official language: Spanish
GEOGRAPHY .jpg)
Size: 1,285,216 square kilometers.
Topography: Western coast (Costa) mountainous and arid. Andes mountains in center (Andean highlands or Sierra) high and rugged. Less than one-fourth of Sierra, which includes cold, high-altitude grasslands (the puna), natural pasture. Puna widens into extensive plateau, Altiplano, adjoining Bolivia in southern Sierra. Eastern lowlands consist of semi-tropical and rugged cloud forests of eastern slopes (Montaña), lying between 800 and 3,800 meters; and jungle (Selva), which includes high jungle (selva alta), lying between 400 and 800 meters, and tropical low jungle (selva baja) of Amazon Basin, lying between 80 and 400 meters. Land use: 3 percent arable, 21 percent meadows and pastures, 55 percent forest and woodland, and 21 percent other, including 1 percent irrigated.
Climate: Varies from dry in western coastal desert to temperate in highland valleys; harsh, chilly conditions on puna and western Andean slopes; semi-tropical in Montaña; tropical in Selva. Uninhabited areas over 5,500 meters high have arctic climate. Rainy winter season runs from October through April; dry summer in remaining months.
History & Culture
Peru
is best known as the heart of the Inca empire, but it
was home to many diverse indigenous cultures long before the Incas arrived.
Although there is evidence of human habitation in Peru as long ago as the eighth
millennium BC , there is little evidence of organized
village life until about 2500 BC. It was at about this time that climatic
changes in the coastal regions prompted Peru's early inhabitants to move toward
the more fertile interior river valleys. For the next 1500 years, Peruvian
civilization developed into a number of organized cultures, including the
Chavìn and the Sechìn.
The Chavìn are best known for their stylized
religious iconography, which included striking figurative depictions of various
animals (the jaguar in particular) and which exercised considerable influence
over the entire coastal region. The Sechìn are
remembered more for their military hegemony than for their cultural achievement.
The decline of the Chavìn and
Sechìn cultures around the 5th century BC gave rise to a number of
distinctive regional cultures. Some of these, including the
Saliner and the Paracas, are celebrated for
artistic and technological advances such as kiln-fired ceramics and
sophisticated weaving techniques. From the Paracas
arose the Nazca, whose legacy includes the immense
and cryptic Nazca Lines. However,
the accomplish- ments of
these and other early Peruvian civilizations seem today to pale in comparison to
the robust pre-Columbian civilization of the Inca.
The most startling feature of the great Inca empire
was its brevity. In 1430, the realm of the Inca consisted of little more than
the river valley around
Cuzco.
Less than a century later, through conquest and a canny policy of incorporating
the best features of the societies they subjugated, the Incas controlled a vast
territory of almost 1 million square kilometers--a dominion that extended from
northwest Argentina to southern Colombia. The Incan capital, at
Qosqo, was undoubtedly the richest city in all of
the Americas, with temples literally sheathed in heavy gold plate. Although
Qosqo's architecture remains only in fragments and
foundations, the architectural accomplishment of the Inca's has survived intact
at the astounding ceremonial centre of
Machu
Picchu.
In 1532, at the height of its power, the Inca empire
was driven by a war of succession. In one of the great tragedies of history, it
was at precisely this moment that Francisco Pizarro and his band of Spanish
conquis- tadors arrived
on the scene. Showing an uncanny ability to turn circumstances to his own
advantage, Pizarro used deception and guile to gain a personal meeting with
Atahualpa, the Inca ruler, whom he coolly
assassinated. In the face of fierce resistance, Pizarro and his men seized
Cuzco and sacked
the city. Although the Incas continued to fight for the next several years,
their empire had ended and Spanish rule had begun.
AS THE CRADLE of
South America's most advanced
native American civilizations, Peru has a rich and
unique heritage among the nations of the southern continent. It encompasses a
past that reaches back over 10,000 years in one of the most harsh and
inhospitable, if spectacular, environments in the world--the high Andes of South
America. The culmination of Andean civilization was the construction by the
Incas, in little more than one hundred years, of an empire that spanned a third
of the South American continent and achieved a level of general material
wellbeing and cultural sophistication that rivaled and surpassed many of the
great empires in world history.
Paradoxically, Peruvian history is also unique in another, less glorious, way. The Andean peoples engaged the invading Spaniards in 1532 in one of the first clashes between Western and non-Western civilizations in history. The ensuing Spanish conquest and colonialism rent the rich fabric of Andean society and created the enormous gulf between victors and vanquished that has characterized Peru down through the centuries. Indeed, Peru's postconquest, colonial past established a historic division--a unique Andean "dualism"--that formed the hallmark of its subsequent underdevelopment. Peru, like its geography, became divided economically, socially, and politically between a semifeudal, largely native American highland interior and a more modernized, capitalistic, urbanized, and mestizo coast. At the apex of its social structure, a small, wealthy, educated elite came to dominate the vast majority of Peruvians who, by contrast, subsisted in poverty, isolation, ignorance, and disease. The persistence of this dualism and the inability of the Peruvian state in more recent times to overcome it have prevented not only the development but also the effective integration and consolidation of the Peruvian nation to this day.
Another unique feature of Peru is the role that outsiders have played in its history. Peru's formal independence from Spain in 1824 (proclaimed on July 28, 1821) was largely the work of "outsiders," such as the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar Palacios and the Argentine José de San Martín. In 1879 Chile invaded Peru, precipitating the War of the Pacific (1879-83), and destroyed or carried off much of its wealth, as well as annexing a portion of its territory. Foreigners have also exploited Peru's natural resources, from silver in the colonial period to guano and nitrates in the nineteenth century and copper, oil, and various industrial metals in the twentieth century. This exploitation, among other things, led advocates of the dependency theory to argue that Peru's export-dependent economy was created and manipulated by foreign interests in a nefarious alliance with a domestic oligarchy.
Although foreigners have played controversial roles throughout Peruvian history, internal demographic changes since the middle of the twentieth century have shaped contemporary Peru in other fundamental ways. For example, the total population grew almost threefold from over 7 million in 1950 to nearly 20 million in 1985, despite slowing down in the 1970s. This reflected a sharp jump after World War II in fertility rates that led to an average annual increase in the population of 2.5 percent. At the same time, a great wave of out-migration swept the Sierra. Over the next quarter century, Peru moved from a rural to an essentially urban society. In 1980 over 60 percent of its work force was located in towns and cities, principally the capital, Lima (one-third of the total population), and the coast (threefifths ). This monumental population shift resulted in a dramatic increase in the informal economy, as Peru's formal economy was unable to expand fast enough to accommodate the newcomers. In 1985 half of Lima's nearly 7 million inhabitants lived in informal housing, and at least half of the country's population was employed or underemployed in the informal sector.
These demographic changes during the previous quarter century led anthropologist José Matos Mar to describe the 1980s as a great desborde popular (overflowing of the masses). Once the proud bastion of the dominant creole (American born) classes, Lima became increasingly Andeanized in ways that have made it virtually unrecognizable to a previous generation of inhabitants. In some ways, this trend of Andeanization suggests that the old dualism may now be beginning to erode, at least in an ethnic sense. Urbanization and desborde popular also tended to overwhelm the capacity of the state, already weak by historical standards, to deliver even the basic minimum of governmental services to the vast majority of the population.
As these demographic changes unfolded, Peru experienced an increasing "hegemonic" crisis--the dispersion of power away from the traditional triumvirate of oligarchy, church, and armed forces. This occurred when the longstanding power of the oligarchy came to an abrupt end in the 1968 military "revolution." The ensuing agrarian reform of 1969 destroyed the economic base of both the export elite and the gamonales (sing. gamonal; rural bosses) in the Sierra. Then, after more than a decade, the military, in growing public disfavor, returned to the barracks, opening the way, once again, to the democratic process.
With the resumption of elections in 1980, a process that was reaffirmed in 1985 (and again in 1990), "redemocratization" confronted a number of problems. The end of military rule left in its wake an enormous political vacuum that the political parties- -absent for twelve years and historically weak--and a proliferating number of new groups were hard-pressed to fill. Even under the best of circumstances, given Peru's highly fragmented and heterogeneous society, as well as its long history of authoritarian and oligarchical rule, effective democratic government would have been difficult to accomplish. Even more serious, redemocratization faced an increasingly grave threat from a deepening economic crisis that began in the mid-1960s. Various economic factors caused the country's main engine for sustained economic growth to stall. As a result of the ensuing economic stagnation and decline, real wages by 1985 approached mid-1960 levels.
Finally, redemocratization was also threatened from another quarter--the emergence, also in 1980, of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso--SL) guerilla movement, Latin America's most violent and radical ongoing insurgency. By 1985 its so-called "people's war" had claimed about 6,000 victims, most of them innocent civilians killed by the guerrillas or the army. Resorting to extraordinarily violent means, the Shining Path succeeded in challenging the authority of the state, particularly in the more remote areas of the interior, where the presence of the state had always been tenuous--the more so now because of the absence of the gamonal class. Violence, however, was a thread that ran throughout Andean history, from Inca expansion, the Spanish conquest and colonialism, and countless native American insurrections and their suppression to the struggle for independence in the 1820s, the War of the Pacific, and the longterm nature of underdevelopment itself.
