On 17 April 2019, fearing imminent arrest on charges of corruption, Alan García shot himself in the head. Twice president of Peru (1985–90; 2006–11), García had been the undisputed leader of APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) since the death of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the party's founder, in 1979. With García's suicide, one of APRA's famous slogans – ‘El APRA nunca muere’ (‘APRA never dies’), a reference to the party's capacity to overcome successive waves of political repression – finally rang hollow. In the 2020 congressional elections, the party received less than 3 per cent of the vote and in the 2021 presidential elections it did not field a candidate. This rather ignominious end to APRA, 90 years after it contested its first elections in 1931, marks a turning point for Peruvian history and offers a new vantage point from which to consider the history of the party. Martín Bergel's La desmesura revolucionaria, a compilation of essays published between 2006 and 2018, provides an excellent example of how this might be done.

As Carlos Aguirre reminds us in the foreword to the volume, Bergel is one of several scholars who in recent years have started to rewrite the history of APRA, building on the strong foundations set by scholars such as Peter Klarén, Steve Stein, Imelda Vega Centeno and Piedad Pareja, among others, in the 1970s and 1980s. Avoiding both the hagiographic and the demonising accounts that have tended to dominate accounts of APRA's history, these scholars have moved scholarship into new areas, exploring APRA at the local and regional level (for example the work of Jaymie Heilman, Jaime Urrutia, Lewis Taylor and David Nugent) and the transnational dimensions of APRA's early history (Leandro Sessa and Geneviève Dorais), building on the pioneering work of the sadly recently deceased Ricardo Melgar Bao. Some historians have provided new biographical accounts on Haya de la Torre (Iñigo García Bryce) and Magda Portal, a feminist poet and one of the founders of the party (Ivonne Wallace and Kathleen Weaver). Bergel contributes to all these new areas of study.

To work on the history of APRA is no easy task. There is no central party archive (or none that is available to researchers) and the Peruvian national archive's relevant twentieth-century holdings remain largely uncatalogued. Key sources, such as the party newspaper La Tribuna, are not digitised. Most of the ‘historic’ leaders are dead. The few that remain, or their relatives, hoard documents and are usually reluctant to share them with, or even talk to, researchers. To draw together the vast documentation on which these essays are based, Bergel has had to work as both archivist and historian, using his evident skills to construct his very own APRA archive. This is a very rich archive, with numerous sources unearthed in Peru, including interviews, and extends to a broader international source base (with ample and new material from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and beyond). It gives new insight into the importance of the transnational sphere to the history of the party and helps to explain how, and why, it had more success than other pan-Latin American political movements.

The volume is divided into three sections that group essays thematically: ‘APRA in Transnational Spaces’, ‘APRA through its Founding Figures’ and ‘APRA and Print Culture’. In each of these sections, Bergel develops compelling and original arguments about APRA. He underscores, for example, the importance of exile and of various APRA diasporic communities and their ‘nomadic cultures’ in the establishment of a sense of collective identity among party members and a particular type of ‘action-led’ militant. He attempts to ‘decentre’ Haya de la Torre by shifting attention not only to other key leaders such as Manuel Seoane, Luis Heysen, Eudocio Ravines and Luis Alberto Sánchez, but also to local and regional intellectuals in the construction of the party. Again, Bergel stresses the importance of travel and of experience gained abroad, particularly in Argentina, to these party members’ political development and hemispheric influence. In the final section, Bergel foregrounds the importance of print culture, and the various strategies that the party developed in getting its message across to supporters, in our understanding of the early success of the party. This strategy, he shows, was as focused on the quantity of documents that the party could generate as much as on the quality of the message.

Although his approach is that of an intellectual historian, Bergel pays close attention to the materiality of the history he studies. A particularly interesting essay, ‘A Party Made of Letters’, focuses on the letters that Apristas exchanged with each other and with people outside the party, and draws attention not only to the content of the letters but also to the style employed (noting Haya de la Torre's abrasive tone) and the networks of circulation that the letters constructed. Another essay explores the key role of ‘canillitas’, or paper boys and girls, in the distribution of La Tribuna in Lima and Callao and discusses their incorporation as militants into the party. Yet another essay argues that the circulation of various forms of Aprista documents (newspapers, bulletins, manifestos, etc), was as important as, or perhaps even more important than, the texts carried by those documents in constituting the APRA as a political community and party – particularly in periods when the party was forced underground.

Inevitably, in a compilation of essays written over a period of time and that draw on a common, if expanding, source base, one finds repetitions: Bergel ‘recycles’ arguments and even source material in several of the chapters. Some readers may find this annoying, but I found it fascinating: it allows us to see the historian at work, developing ideas and interpreting sources anew. In short, this is a very important contribution to ongoing attempts to expand our understanding of APRA. Like much of the current scholarship it focuses on the early history of the party, from the 1920s to the 1940s. Hopefully it will inspire more research into the later history of APRA, which remains poorly understood and is still very much subject to hagiographic and demonising approaches.