South American History, Latin America & the Caribbean - Politics & Government

Peru under Garcia: An Opportunity Lost

Name: Peru under Garcia: An Opportunity Lost
Author: John Crabtree
ISBN: 9780822911685

by John Crabtree

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Overview

Alan Garcia took on a tough assignment when he became President of Peru in July 1985. Longstanding structural problems--the legacy of a very unequal pattern of development, a yawning gap in living standards, a weak import-dependent industrial base, an inefficient and ill-funded state--combined with newer problems like the effects of the debt crisis and the upsurge of guerrilla violence to provide a particularly difficult inheritance. Initially Garcia was surprisingly successful in trying to tackle some of these problems. Then his government's strategy went awry. As he left office in 1990, Peru's social, economic and political ills looked worse than ever. On the right his critics blamed him for not liberalizing the economy and for his aggressive attitude toward the international financial community. On the left he was attacked for not going far enough, fast enough, in the opposite direction. In this book, the first balanced assessment of the Garcia years, John Crabtree rises above these polemical claims and counter-claims, and charts the rise and fall of Peru's First ever APRA government, analyzing the causes of its undoing. His study stresses the political as well as the economic constraints, and gives due emphasis to the extraordinary impact of the country's Maoist fundamentalists, Sendero Luminoso, in undermining the authority of government.

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Editorials

Library Journal

The Garcia presidency of Peru, 1985-90, may prove to be the defining moment in that economically, politically, and racially divided country. The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), first elected to the presidency in the early 1930s and then prevented from taking power, finally had its chance to rule--and failed. With it failed Peru's first and only genuine political party, opening the door to the Perot-like Fujimori, now a caudillo ruling without a Congress, and, perhaps, ultimately to the Shining Path. Crabtree's book, the first in English on the debacle, which builds on the excellent work of Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Beltram's Peru, 1890-1977 ( LJ 3/1/79), presents a balanced approach to a regime about which few Peruvians hold balanced views. At the same time, by incorporating the research and thoughts of 17 Peruvian, British, and North American experts into his own analysis, Crabtree manages to write a true insider study without a discernible bias--a tour de force in Latin American scholarship. Recommended for both academic and large public libraries.-- Nancy Padgett Lazar, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit

Booknews

An assessment of the failures and successes of the revolutionary party's (APRA) first president of Peru, Alan Garcia, 1985-90. Stresses the political and economic constraints as the right attacked his direction of reform and the left attacked his pace. Crabtree is Latin American editor for Oxford Analytica, and has also been a correspondent for the Guardian and the Economist. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)