Modern Peru: A New History, Paulo Drinot and Alberto Vergara (eds), 2025, Duke University Press
If ever one personality can be said to embody the failure of Peru to overcome chronic instability, it is that of its former president Dina Boluarte, impeached in October amid a crime wave, growing insecurity and allegations of corruption.
Boluarte, Peru’s first woman president, took office in 2022 after her predecessor, Pedro Castillo, had himself been impeached, and she had been beset for most of her tenure by rock-bottom single-digit approval ratings.
The man who succeeded her, 38-year-old conservative José Jerí, became the country’s eighth president in 10 years and has prompted some commentators to speculate he represents a new rightward wave in Latin American politics.
Don’t hold your breath. Boluarte’s fate perfectly reflects the underlying theme of Paulo Drinot and Alberto Vergara’s new history of Peru, written in the run-up to the country’s bicentenary of independence in 2021.
The book provides an up-to-date overview of Peruvian history since the late colonial period and, as the chapters show, its perennial inability to flourish fully during the past 200 years.
The editors invoke the myth of Sisyphus to introduce this collection of historical essays about the national project of a land they describe as “a puzzle of infinite dimensions that appears impossible to solve”.
“The country seems condemned to carry the rock of each national project to the top of a mountain only to let it roll back down, and then to pick it up once more,” they reflect.
“Like Sisyphus, Peru seems cursed by freedom, with independence seemingly unleashing an endless repetition of national projects condemned to failure.”
The chapters span the republican project of the early independence era, the guano state and pax castillista of the mid-nineteenth century, civilismo from the mid-19th to the 20th century, indigenismo in the 1920s, aprismo in the 1930s, the acciopopulismo of the 1960s, Velasco’s military reformism into the 1970s, and thence neoliberalism in the 1990s and thereafter.
It is a story with no clear end. As the chapters demonstrate, each episode reflects a back-and-forth between political, economic and social options—experiments in democracy and dictatorship; free trade and protectionism; centralisation and decentralisation.
Charles Walker covers the long transition from colony to republic between 1780 and 1840; Natalia Sobrevilla Perea explores the unequal prosperity of the guano era from 1840–80; José Luis Rénique examines the transition to the 20th century of economic recovery that enabled a viable political system; Paulo Drinot focuses on the beginning of mass politics as Peru urbanised against the backdrop of epic global changes; Eduardo Dargent examines the period 1968 to 1994 of turbulence and violence; and Alberto Vergara analyses the tension between the imperative of governing over that of representation up to 2021.
These authors provide an accessible history written for an audience beyond academia that will be of value to readers new to Peru who are seeking an introduction to its political, social and economic development.
In her final chapter, Cynthia McClintock addresses the exceptional scale of the challenges to inclusion, democracy, and development that have been faced by Peru’s almost sui generis nation-building project, and the major contemporary setbacks that have tripped it up—not least the Covid-19 pandemic.
The country continues to face enormous challenges, but her message is ultimately one of refreshing optimism.
She points to the resilience of, and progress made by the Peruvian people overt time that offers another understanding of the myth of Sisyphus.
McClintock writes: “Indeed … Sisyphus pushed the rock farther up the hill than ever before and gained greater understanding of the challenges before him than he had ever had previously.”
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Categories: Peru