Aiming to historicise the violence of Peru's 1980s and 1990s, Fiona Wilson's solid study provides fresh insights on nineteenth-century political participation, the political history of teachers and twentieth-century radicalism. Focusing on the Andean town of Tarma, Wilson asserts that the roots of Peru's late twentieth-century violence are found in two interconnected historical processes: the erosion of local democracy through rampant centralisation and the consistent repression of popular political movements.
Wilson opens the book with a consideration of Tarma's Provincial Council, an elected body responsible for issues like education, public works and hygiene at the local level. Wilson shifts our understanding of political participation in the nineteenth century, showing that municipal elections indeed mattered and that Provincial Councils were energetic governing bodies. Although these councils excluded groups like indigenous peoples, women and military men, council members nonetheless had a diverse range of political views and affiliations. Following the War of the Pacific, Peru's centralising state steadily diminished the political authority and powers of the Provincial Councils. Wilson traces how these councils lost their fiscal authority and primary responsibilities, a process that weakened municipal politics and generated considerable local anger.
One of the key figures in Tarma's political scene was Adolfo Vienrich, the region's foremost intellectual and activist. The son of a German immigrant father and a wealthy Tarma mother, Vienrich studied science at San Marcos University and became enmeshed in Lima's burgeoning radical political scene. He was a founding member of the Unión Nacional, a political party dedicated to equality, political liberties and fighting against centralism. Upon his return to Tarma in 1895, Vienrich served two brief terms as mayor and struggled to develop a workers' movement, limit indigenous exploitation and overhaul educational practices. He also wrote extensively about indigenous folklore and cultural practices.
Through her consideration of Vienrich, Wilson reveals the difficulties of public service as a political radical. Vienrich's determination to protect Tarma from disease, for example, collided with his desire to safeguard individual freedoms, leading him into an uncomfortable embrace of authoritarian measures like home inspections and forced vaccinations. During his short political career, Vienrich also witnessed growing political centralisation and the consequent deterioration of local democracy. His political despair drove him to suicide in 1908.
Following Vienrich's suicide, two national indigenous rights movements gained prominence in Tarma: the Asociación Pro Derecho Indígena (Pro-Indigenous Rights Association) and the Comité Pro Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyu (Tahuantinsuyu Pro-Indigenous Rights Committee). Many Tarma workers adopted the indigenista ideas of the Asociación Pro Derecho Indígena, using paternalistic discourses of indigenous protection and uplift to better establish their own racial identities as mestizos. Members of the Tahuantinsuyu Committee, in contrast, struggled much more actively for indigenous citizenship rights, education and land claims, generating much anger and apprehension among Tarma's landed elites.
Following the demise of the Tahuantinsuyu Committee in 1927, many Tarma residents embraced the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA), believing that the populist political party could bring meaningful political change to Peru. But when APRA gained significant political power during the mid-1940s, many of Tarma's apristas grew disillusioned with the party. Far from transforming politics, APRA seemed only to further entrench patterns of centralisation, corruption and financial mismanagement. Wilson next provides the tantalising information that General Manuel Odría – the man who seized presidential power in a 1948 coup – was from Tarma and that he enjoyed a broad base of support there, but she leaves this component of Tarma's political history relatively unexplored.
Wilson closes her book with a consideration of Tarma's teachers between 1950 and 1980. She summarises the history of Peruvian teachers' unions and uses oral history interviews to consider teachers' responses to the emergence of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL). Teachers played a pivotal role in the early dissemination of SL ideology, and several of Wilson's interviewees reveal their initial attraction to the Maoist party. This final chapter brings extended attention to a theme Wilson weaves throughout the book: teachers' contradictory roles as representatives of the state and as politically engaged, activist critics of Peru's government. By tracing teachers' activism from the late nineteenth century through to 1980, Wilson offers much-needed historical perspectives on teachers' leadership role in SL. Wilson's consideration of teachers highlights tensions of race, class and gender. She examines differing attitudes toward male and female teachers, the disdain teachers encountered from wealthier and whiter citizens, and the ways that many teachers themselves exhibited these race and class prejudices. Any scholar interested in the history of Peru's educational system will find Wilson's book a valuable resource.
Citizenship and Political Violence in Peru draws on an especially rich collection of municipal archive documents, local newspapers and interviews conducted in the early 1970s and in 1994. This source base offers Wilson outstanding material to work with, but the book would nonetheless have been stronger had the author consulted departmental and national archives. The materials housed in those archives would have been particularly useful for her discussion of the Tahuantinsuyu Committee, as they would have rounded out an analysis based largely on newspaper articles highly critical of the movement. Such archival sources would likely also have provided material for much more extended reflection on Tarma residents' reactions to the Odría presidency. A similar point can be made for Wilson's oral history interviews. The interviews Wilson conducted in the 1970s with former apristas provide substantial historical detail. The interviews with teachers in 1994 likewise offer significant insights, but these interviews occurred at what Wilson rightly notes was a tense historical moment: the worst violence of the civil war had ended only two years earlier, and Peru remained under the authoritarian control of President Alberto Fujimori. That context no doubt shaped much of what teachers were willing – and unwilling – to say about SL; more explicit reflection on these memory issues would have been helpful. Nonetheless, Wilson has produced a thoughtful work that furthers our understanding of the historical origins of Peru's bloody civil war violence.
