Published on and written by Cyril Jarnias
Behind the seemingly simple phrase History of the country in Peru lies one of the most dense and contrasting narratives of the American continent. From a territory occupied by hunter-gatherers to a sprawling Andean empire, from an ultra-wealthy viceroyalty to a republic shaken by coups d’état, foreign wars, and internal conflicts, Peru alone concentrates most of the great Latin American dramas: conquest, exploitation, indigenous revolts, radical agrarian reforms, Maoist guerrillas, state violence, crisis of political representation.
To tell the history of the country in Peru is therefore to hold together several threads: the long duration of pre-Hispanic societies, the colonial rupture, the difficult construction of the independent state, the lasting impact of social and racial exclusion, up to the very current fractures between Lima and the Andean regions.
From the First Andean Societies to the Inca Empire
Long before the arrival of the Spanish, the current Peruvian territory saw the birth of some of the oldest civilizations in the Americas. Excavations show human presence dating back more than 10,000 years BCE, with very ancient occupation sites in the caves of Guitarrero, Toquepala, or in coastal valleys like Chilca and Paracas.
Hunter-gatherer groups settled around 7000 BC, beginning to cultivate plants like gourds and cotton to make fishing tools. On the north coast, in the Supe region, the Caral civilization, considered the oldest in South America, developed urban centers and monumental earthen structures as early as the third millennium BC.
A network of cultures would then succeed and overlap: Cupisnique, Chavín, Paracas, Nazca, Moche, Wari, Chimú, Chachapoya… All perfected agricultural techniques, metal and textile work, and developed sophisticated political systems. Pre-Hispanic Peru is not a primitive “before,” but a mosaic of highly organized societies.
The Rise of Tawantinsuyu
Upon this foundation, the Inca Empire, or Tawantinsuyu – “the kingdom of the four parts” in Quechua – was built in the 15th century. From Cuzco, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui and his son Tupac Inca Yupanqui launched a lightning-fast expansion: from southern Colombia to the central valley of Chile, from the Pacific shores to the Amazonian foothills. Cohesion relied on a hierarchical administrative apparatus, an impressive road network (the Qhapaq Ñan), a state religion centered on the sun god Inti, and an economy organized around terrace agriculture and redistribution.
Upon the death of Huayna Capac around 1527-1528, a war of succession pitted his sons Huáscar (controlling Cuzco and the south) against Atahualpa (dominating the north from Quito with the imperial army). Atahualpa’s victory left the Inca Empire weakened and vulnerable, just as European diseases like smallpox were already devastating the population.
This context of fragility would weigh heavily when the country in Peru encountered the Spanish.
Spanish Conquest and Birth of the Viceroyalty of Peru
When Francisco Pizarro arrived on the northern coast of the future Peru in the early 1530s, he did not land in an isolated world. The coastline was integrated into the Inca system, ports like Tumbes were prosperous, and several peoples – Huancas, Chankas, Cañaris, Chachapoyas – poorly tolerated the domination of Cuzco. Very quickly, these internal rivalries played in favor of the newcomers.
The Capture of Atahualpa at Cajamarca
The decisive episode took place in November 1532 at Cajamarca. Pizarro had only a handful of men – about 168 soldiers, including some sixty horsemen – but he knew the key lay in the person of the Sapa Inca. He then set an ambush during a solemn meeting organized in the town square. Atahualpa presented himself unarmed, surrounded by thousands of attendants who had come to acclaim him.
During the encounter at Cajamarca in 1532, after Atahualpa rejected the religious book presented by the friar Vicente de Valverde, Pizarro’s Spaniards launched a surprise attack. The ensuing massacre claimed several thousand Indian victims and allowed for the capture of the Inca emperor. This seizure of the sovereign marked a decisive turning point, giving Pizarro symbolic and political power over the empire.
The Inca attempted to buy his freedom by promising to fill one room with gold and two with silver. Considerable quantities of precious metals flowed in from across the empire, stripped from temples and palaces. But once the treasure was melted and distributed, Atahualpa was executed by strangulation, despite opposition from some Spaniards. The message sent to the Andean elites was brutal: the old order was broken.
From Inca Resistance to the Neo-State of Vilcabamba
The fall of Cuzco in November 1533 and the founding of Lima in January 1535 consecrated Spanish control over the country’s center. But the conquest was far from instantaneous. A young prince, Manco Inca Yupanqui, first used as a puppet ruler, rebelled after repeated humiliations, laid siege to Cuzco, achieved several successes, and eventually retreated to the high valleys of Vilcabamba. There, an independent “neo-Inca state” was maintained for several decades.
It was only in 1572 that Viceroy Francisco de Toledo militarily ended this enclave, captured the last Inca, Túpac Amaru (not to be confused with the 18th-century rebel leader), and executed him in Cuzco. The conquest was complete; the era of the viceroyalty then began.
Viceroy Francisco de Toledo
The Establishment of the Viceroyalty
Officially created in 1542, the Viceroyalty of Peru, with Lima as its capital, became the cornerstone of the Spanish Empire in South America. For two centuries, it administered almost the entire South American continent under Spanish control, before other viceroyalties were carved out of this vast entity (New Granada to the north, Río de la Plata to the south).
The number of viceroys, Francisco de Toledo and José Fernando de Abascal, whose actions were decisive for the administration and mining of the viceroyalty.
For the wealth of the country in colonial Peru rested above all on silver. The immense deposit of Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) and the mercury mine of Huancavelica fueled an economic circuit centered on the export of metal to Europe. To run these operations, Toledo adapted the ancient Inca labor draft – the mit’a – into a system of forced labor for indigenous communities. The effects were devastating: combined with disease, hunger, and mistreatment, they contributed to a spectacular demographic collapse. Where the Incas had counted millions of subjects, 16th-century censuses found only a fraction.
The arrival of African slaves, the emergence of mixed-race populations, the partial recognition of some indigenous elites as local nobility, composed a hierarchical, deeply unequal, and racialized society. Thus, the country in Peru fully entered the Atlantic world, but at the cost of a human and cultural hemorrhage.
Indigenous Rebellions, Bourbon Reforms, and War of Independence
In the 18th century, the viceroyalty was no longer what it had been. The gradual exhaustion of the mines, competition from other colonial centers, and the so-called “Bourbon” reforms, imposed from Madrid to rationalize and increase revenues, upset the balance.
Reforms and Tax Pressure
The Bourbon monarchs reorganized the territories (creation of New Granada and Río de la Plata), strengthened fiscal control, and opened some ports to direct trade with Spain, bypassing Lima. This recentralization angered both Creole elites and indigenous communities, subjected to increased tax pressure and growing abuses by officials.
In the Andean highlands, several uprisings broke out, some reaching considerable scale.
The Great Insurrection of Túpac Amaru II
In 1780, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, cacique of Surimana, Pampamarca and Tungasuca, proclaimed himself Túpac Amaru II, claiming descent from the Inca lineage. He launched a revolt in the Cuzco region to abolish forced labor, the abuses of the corregidores, and, in his most radical proclamations, slavery. The movement mobilized tens of thousands of indigenous and mestizo peasants, deeply alarmed the authorities, and took on an anti-colonial tone.
The repression of the rebellion led by Túpac Amaru II was extremely violent. Its leader was executed in an atrocious manner in 1781, although fighting continued until 1783. This historical event is significant in several respects: the viceregal authorities used the term “insurgents” for the first time to describe the rebels. The episode became a powerful symbol of indigenous resistance in collective memory. At the same time, it served as a warning for the Criollas (Creole) elites, who were frightened by the prospect of a “race war.”
From Empire Crisis to Independence
When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and overthrew the monarchy, the imperial structure wavered. In many regions of Hispanic America, local juntas formed in the name of the absent king, then gradually slid toward independence projects. The country in Peru, a royalist stronghold, resisted the revolutionary contagion longer. Viceroy Abascal even used the viceroyalty as a base to crush patriot movements in Upper Peru (Bolivia) and Chile.
After the first revolts of 1810, the Viceroyalty of Peru experienced a series of local uprisings, often supported by independence armies from the south, heralding the end of Spanish domination.
Insurrections erupted in the cities of Tacna, Huánuco, and Cuzco between 1811 and 1815, showing the widening of dissent within the viceroyalty.
These uprisings were often coordinated or supported by independence armies from the neighboring United Provinces of the Río de la Plata to the south.
The royal authorities managed to repress these revolts, sometimes with the help of caciques (local chiefs) who remained loyal to the Spanish Crown.
Despite the repression, the pressure for independence did not wane. The noose tightened around the colonial power, heralding its future collapse.
Two major liberation currents would finally converge on Peruvian territory: from the south, that of the Argentine general José de San Martín, coming via Chile; from the north, that of Simón Bolívar, after his victories in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
San Martín, Bolívar, and the End of the Viceroyalty
San Martín, after crossing the Andes and defeating the royalists in Chile, organized an expedition from Valparaíso and landed in Pisco Bay in 1820. He slowly advanced towards the capital, seeking to avoid a frontal confrontation and betting on the erosion of the royalist camp. Abandoned by the army of Viceroy de la Serna, Lima was finally occupied by the patriots in 1821. On July 28, San Martín proclaimed Peru’s independence in the Plaza Mayor and assumed the title of “Protector.”
In 1822, the liberators José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar met in Guayaquil. San Martín, aware of the limits of his forces against the royalists entrenched in Cuzco in the Andes, and in political disagreement with Bolívar (he advocated for a constitutional monarchy, while Bolívar defended a republican model), decided to withdraw. He ceded leadership of the war of independence to Bolívar and left South America for good.
Bolívar arrived in Lima at the end of 1823, reorganized the army, and his troops won the victory of Junín in August 1824, and especially that of Ayacucho in December of the same year. Under the command of Antonio José de Sucre, the patriot army crushed the viceregal forces; Viceroy de la Serna was captured and accepted capitulation. A few pockets of resistance remained until 1826, but the viceroyalty was over. The country in Peru entered the republican era.
The Difficult 19th Century: Caudillos, Guano, and the War of the Pacific
Independence did not mean the immediate advent of a stable state. The first decades of republican life were dominated by struggles between military caudillos, wars with neighboring countries, and the difficulty of inventing a political model in a deeply unequal society.
Caudillos and First Constitutions
Simón Bolívar left Peru in 1826, leaving behind a divided country. A liberal constitution was adopted in 1828, but forceful takeovers followed one another: Agustín Gamarra, Felipe Salaverry, Andrés de Santa Cruz, among others, seized power by force. The ephemeral Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation, attempted by Santa Cruz in the 1830s, was destroyed by a coalition led by Chile at the Battle of Yungay in 1839.
In the mid-19th century, the presidency of Ramón Castilla brought a period of stabilization and modernization, financed by guano revenues. This windfall allowed for funding the military, public education, and infrastructure, as well as abolishing the slave trade, visible slavery, and the indigenous tribute. However, this prosperity rested on increased dependence on foreign markets and capital.
Indebtedness and Regional Rivalries
Subsequent governments, particularly that of Manuel Pardo, heavily relied on borrowing to finance infrastructure projects, especially railways. Debts exploded. At the same time, borders inherited from the colonial era remained vague, and the guano- and nitrate-rich desert areas in the south attracted the covetousness of several countries.
It was in this context that, in 1879, the War of the Pacific erupted, pitting Chile against a defensive alliance between Peru and Bolivia.
The War of the Pacific: A National Trauma
The immediate origin of the conflict lies in a dispute between Chile and Bolivia over taxes on saltpeter in the Antofagasta region. But in the background, it was about control of the gigantic nitrate and guano deposits of the Atacama, key resources for public finances and European industry.
When Bolivia unilaterally attempted to increase the taxation of a Chilean company in 1878, Santiago considered this a violation of treaties and occupied the port of Antofagasta in February 1879. Bound by a secret treaty to Bolivia, Peru first sought to mediate, but ended up dragged into the war after Chile’s declaration in April 1879.
Historical Context of the Outbreak of the War of the Pacific
Chilean naval superiority was gradually confirmed – despite exploits like those of the Peruvian monitor Huáscar – and allowed for a troop landing in southern Peru. After a series of land battles, the Chilean army marched on Lima. The fighting at San Juan, Chorrillos, and Miraflores in January 1881 was particularly deadly. The capital was occupied, looted; the National Library was devastated.
A Peruvian resistance reorganized in the Sierra, around General Andrés Avelino Cáceres, who waged a fierce guerrilla war. But after the defeat at Huamachuco in 1883, the country, bled dry and divided among several rival governments, was forced to negotiate. The Treaty of Ancón in 1883 permanently ceded the province of Tarapacá to Chile, and placed Tacna and Arica under Chilean administration pending a plebiscite that would never take place as planned. Bolivia, for its part, lost all access to the sea.
The impact on Peru was immense: human losses, financial ruin, symbolic trauma. To manage its debt, the country conceded in 1889 to the Peruvian Corporation, a London-based company, control of its railways and part of guano exploitation. The War of the Pacific became a major reference point in national memory, often reinterpreted through a prism of internal betrayals, racism towards Andean populations accused of “weakness,” and resentment towards Chile.
From the Oligarchic Republic to Military Reforms
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were marked by the consolidation of a so-called “oligarchic” order. A Civilist party, representing large landowners and merchants, governed in close alliance with foreign interests. While the economy diversified (copper, cotton, sugar, wool), the agrarian structure remained dominated by haciendas; most indigenous peasants still lived in conditions close to serfdom.
Aprismo and the First Mass Contestations
Between the two World Wars, social tensions intensified. The 1920 constitution recognized indigenous communities and, theoretically, protected their lands (Article 58), but these guarantees were not enforced. It was in this context that the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) was born, founded by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in exile in Mexico in 1924. Its program mixed anti-imperialism, defense of indigenous peoples, economic planning, and nationalization of foreign companies.
During the 1930s-1950s, the elites and the military perceived APRA as an existential threat. This period was marked by coups d’état (Sánchez Cerro, Odría), Aprista uprisings, bloody repressions, and party bans. The army thus developed a lasting hostility towards Aprismo, which would deeply influence all of Peruvian political life.
Belaúnde, Coup d’État, and the “Military Decade”
In the early 1960s, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, an architect and centrist, was elected on a platform of moderate agrarian reform and development of the Andean regions. But parliamentary resistance and established interests blocked the reforms. The country was shaken by land occupations, especially around Cuzco, where peasants organized in the Peruvian Peasant Confederation (CCP) demanded redistribution of large estates.
On October 3, 1968, a group of officers led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado overthrew President Fernando Belaúnde Terry. This coup d’état established a military government claiming “revolutionary nationalism,” marking the beginning of a historical period known as the *military decade* (1968‑1980).
Velasco’s Agrarian Reform: Rupture in the Andean Countryside
At the heart of Velasco’s project was a radical agrarian reform, officially launched on June 24, 1969. The stated objective was twofold: to break the power of the large landowners (latifundistas) and to transform peasants, until then subjected to quasi-feudal relations, into “free citizens.”
Before the reform, the country’s agrarian structure was one of the most unequal on the continent: 1% of landowners held more than 60% of arable land. In the haciendas, indigenous peones often worked without wages or for derisory pay, subject to the arbitrariness of the gamonales, local grandees who de facto combined economic, judicial, and political authority.
Expropriations and Cooperatives
The law of 1969 expropriated almost all large estates without regional exceptions, unlike Belaúnde’s attempted reform a few years earlier. Between 1969 and 1979, more than 9 million hectares were redistributed, affecting nearly 370,000 families, far more than the previous reform.
Agrarian reform in Peru did not distribute land in small individual plots. It regrouped it into large production cooperatives: CAPs (Agrarian Production Cooperatives) on the coast and in some Andean valleys, and SAISs (Social Interest Agrarian Societies) in livestock regions. The goal was to maintain the economies of scale of the former large estates while placing them under workers’ control. Former owners were compensated via long-term government bonds.
Tensions, Land Occupations, and Legacies
While the reform effectively dismantled the class of large landowners in the Sierra – to the point that an anthropologist would later speak of a “total elimination of the landowning class” in the Andean countryside – its implementation sparked many tensions. In some emblematic cooperatives like Túpac Amaru II in the Cuzco region, technocratic management, insensitive to community logic and not speaking Quechua, clashed with the communities. Land occupations by peasants, sometimes supported by organizations like the CCP, erupted as early as the early 1970s to demand a more direct distribution.
After General Velasco’s overthrow in 1975, General Morales Bermúdez initiated a liberal turn in response to the economic crisis. Expropriations slowed, priority was given to macroeconomic management and re-indebtedness to the IMF. The democratic transition began with the election of a Constituent Assembly in 1978, dominated by APRA, leading to the adoption of a new constitution in 1979.
In the 1980s, the civilian governments that succeeded the junta – notably that of Belaúnde, returned to power – allowed the large cooperatives to gradually dissolve. Much land was then divided among communities and individual small producers. At the same time, vast state-sponsored agricultural colonization projects in the Amazon led to deforestation, mass migration, and expansion of coca cultivation.
This profoundly transformed rural landscape served as the backdrop for one of the darkest chapters in the contemporary history of the country in Peru: the internal war of the 1980s‑2000s.
The Internal Armed Conflict: Shining Path, MRTA, and Counterinsurgency
Between 1980 and 2000, Peru was ravaged by an internal armed conflict of an intensity rarely reached on the continent since the wars of independence. Two guerrilla groups – Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) – rose up against the state, each with its own logic. The response of the armed forces and intelligence services, marked by massive human rights violations, caused almost as many victims as the insurgency itself.
The Birth of Shining Path
Shining Path has its roots in the 1960s–1970s. Its founder, Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor at the University of Huamanga (Ayacucho), was deeply influenced by Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Convinced that the agrarian reforms carried out by the military did not fundamentally transform society, he advocated for “prolonged people’s war” and the construction of a new proletarian democracy, a step toward world communism.
Refusing any participation in the electoral process of 1980 – the year of the return to democracy after the military decade – the group marked the beginning of its armed struggle by burning ballot boxes in a village in Ayacucho on May 17, 1980. At the time, it had only a few hundred militants but would quickly expand its influence in the poorest Andean countryside, taking advantage of the state’s and parties’ discredit.
The approximate proportion, about half, of female combatants within the described movement.
MRTA: Another Armed Left
Faced with this dogmatic Maoism, the MRTA, founded in 1982 from remnants of other revolutionary groups, claimed a Marxism-Leninism inspired by Castroist Latin American guerrillas. Its members wore uniforms, claimed to be defenders of democracy, and sometimes distinguished themselves from Shining Path by choosing more symbolic targets and trying to spare public opinion.
But their relative weight remained low: according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), created in 2001 to shed light on the conflict, the MRTA was responsible for only about 1.5% of the victims. The most mediatized episode would remain the hostage-taking at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima in 1996, which ended in 1997 with the army’s spectacular assault (Operation Chavín de Huántar) and the death of the last guerrillas.
The Spiral of Violence
The successive civilian governments – that of Belaúnde (1980‑1985), then Alan García (1985‑1990), and especially Alberto Fujimori (1990‑2000) – were quickly overwhelmed. In the regions of Ayacucho, Apurímac, Huancavelica, Junín, Huánuco, a state of emergency was declared, entrusting the armed forces with the conduct of operations in areas where a predominantly Quechua-speaking population lived. Impunity became the norm: forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture multiplied. Units like the Sinchis, a police battalion trained by the United States, gained a sinister reputation.
Peasants, caught between Shining Path and state repression, formed self-defense committees called *rondas campesinas*. Supported by the state from the mid-1980s, they contributed decisively to weakening Shining Path’s grip in the countryside but were also responsible for serious abuses.
The human toll is overwhelming. The CVR, in its final 2003 report, estimates nearly 69,280 dead and missing between 1980 and 2000. About 45% of these victims are attributed to Shining Path, one third to the armed forces and police, the rest to other groups. A crucial fact: nearly three-quarters are indigenous people whose mother tongue is Quechua. In other words, it is the historically marginalized populations who paid the heaviest price for a conflict triggered and directed from urban centers.
Fujimori, Military Victory, and Authoritarianism
Elected in 1990 on an anti-political discourse, Alberto Fujimori took advantage of the discredit of traditional parties and the economic crisis – hyperinflation, colossal debt, break with the IMF under Alan García – to impose a neoliberal shock therapy program. In April 1992, he carried out an autogolpe (self-coup): he dissolved Congress, suspended the constitution, governed by decree with the support of the military and intelligence services led by Vladimiro Montesinos.
The rapid decline of the Shining Path guerrilla in the 1990s is attributed to a combination of factors: the capture of its leader Abimael Guzmán by the GEIN in 1992, the arrest or elimination of other leaders, laws encouraging the surrender of combatants, and the action of rural militias (rondas) that isolated the movement.
But this “victory” had a very heavy democratic and human cost: massacres of Barrios Altos, La Cantuta, Santa by the paramilitary group Colina, forced sterilizations of hundreds of thousands of indigenous women as part of a population control program, tight control of the media, massive corruption. When videos showing Montesinos bribing parliamentarians were made public in 2000, the regime collapsed. Fujimori fled to Japan, from where he attempted a political return before being extradited, tried, and convicted for crimes against humanity and corruption.
The democratic transition that followed, marked by the presidencies of Alejandro Toledo, Alan García (returned to power from 2006 to 2011), Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, attempted to close the chapter of the armed conflict, without ever truly healing the structural wounds that made it possible.
Contemporary Political Crises and Persistent Fractures
The beginning of the 21st century did not spare the country in Peru. While economic growth was often robust – driven by mining exports and a relatively orthodox macroeconomic framework – the political scene remained unstable and undermined by corruption. Between 2016 and 2025, no fewer than eight presidents succeeded each other, often brought down by scandals or clashes with a fragmented Congress.
Post-Fujimori: Memory of the Conflict and New Scandals
Under the presidency of Alejandro Toledo (the first democratically elected Quechua head of state), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created and submitted its report, but its conclusions – notably attributing a significant share of crimes to state forces – sparked strong resistance from the army, political parties, and sectors of the Church. Reparations advanced slowly; the Andean territories traumatized by the war remained poor and marginalized.
The Lava Jato scandal, originating in Brazil, revealed a generalized system of bribes paid by the company Odebrecht to leaders across the region. Several former Peruvian presidents found themselves implicated; Alan García committed suicide in 2019 to avoid arrest. This succession of affairs further corroded citizens’ trust in the political class.
The Lava Jato Scandal and Odebrecht
A Country Cut in Two: Lima and the “Deep Country”
The 2021 elections highlighted the gap that had widened between Lima and the rest of the country, particularly the Andean and Amazonian regions. A rural schoolteacher, Pedro Castillo, from the radical left, came first in the first round and then narrowly won the second round against Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the former president. The electoral map was telling: Castillo obtained over 80% of the vote in departments like Cuzco, Puno, Ayacucho, Apurímac, Huancavelica – areas marked by poverty, the memory of the violence of the 1980s‑1990s, and linguistic and cultural marginalization. Keiko Fujimori dominated widely in Lima and the capital’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
The contestation of the results by the Fujimori camp, seeking to invalidate rural votes without proof of fraud, fueled a feeling of injustice and social contempt among those who designate themselves as the “deep country.” Barely in office, Castillo faced a hostile Congress that repeatedly brandished the threat of impeachment for “moral incapacity.”
Post-Election Political Analysis in Peru
On December 7, 2022, in a desperate attempt to escape another removal procedure, Castillo announced on television the dissolution of Parliament and the establishment of an emergency government. The army turned against him, accusing him of a coup d’état; he was arrested, and his vice-president, Dina Boluarte, was sworn in.
Protests, Repression, and Institutional Deadlock
Boluarte’s assumption of power triggered a powerful protest movement, especially in the southern Andes. Protesters demanded her resignation, the dissolution of Congress, and the convening of a Constituent Assembly. In several cities – Ayacucho, Juliaca, Cuzco, Puno – clashes with security forces left dozens dead. Human rights organizations spoke of massacres; justice struggled to advance, and impunity was almost total.
Despite record unpopularity (4% favorability) and strong electoral rejection (nearly 40% of citizens considered a blank or null vote), President Boluarte remained in power thanks to an alliance with a conservative and Fujimorist parliamentary majority. The official discourse used delegitimization methods, denouncing foreign interference, accusing protesters of terrorism (the practice of *terruqueo* inherited from the 1990s), and attributing deaths to alleged plots.
In parallel, insecurity exploded, fueled by the rise of organized crime, extortion, and illegal mining. Faced with public opinion scandalized by highly mediatized crimes, Congress finally voted in October 2025 to impeach Boluarte for “permanent moral incapacity”, after a series of aborted attempts. José Jerí was designated interim president, adding one more name to the long list of ephemeral heads of state.
Continuities and Lines of Fracture in the History of the Country in Peru
Through this rapid – but already dense – overview of the history of the country in Peru, several constants appear. They allow us to connect episodes that seem very distant, from Chimú child sacrifices to forced sterilizations, from the battles of independence to protests against contemporary repression.
Weight of Social and Racial Exclusion
The marginalization of rural and indigenous populations runs throughout history: colonial expropriations, forced labor in the mines, serfdom on the haciendas, exclusion from citizenship (illiterates, predominantly indigenous, could not vote before 1979), terrible disproportion of victims of the internal armed conflict. Quechua speakers represent about 75% of the dead and disappeared from the war of the 1980s‑2000s; Andean regions still, today, concentrate poverty, weak public services, and the most brutal repression during protests.
This continuity partly explains the receptiveness of some sectors to the radical discourse of Shining Path in the 1980s, the strength of the vote for candidates presenting themselves as “provincial” or “peasant” in the 21st century, and the depth of distrust towards Lima, perceived as a distant, elitist, often hostile center.
Centralism and Fragmentation
Lima, founded by Pizarro as a bridgehead of colonial power, remains, to this day, the over-sized heart of the political, economic, and media apparatus. From the extreme centralization of the viceroyalty to the concentration of modern institutions, a constant emerges: major decisions are often made without real consultation of the regions. When they protest – whether against a mining project, a law on the Amazon, or a structural adjustment policy – the institutional reflex often favors repression over dialogue.
The attempt at decentralization and strengthening of regional governments since the 2000s has progressed but remains incomplete. It is sometimes accompanied by new local corruption networks, without fundamentally challenging the underlying centralism.
Political Violence and Institutional Instability
Since independence, the country in Peru has experienced chronic instability: between 1821 and 1845, there was almost one change of government per year, and several constitutions succeeded each other. This propensity for coups d’état and forceful solutions never completely disappeared. The “military decade,” Fujimori’s autogolpe, the multiple recent presidential impeachments testify to a political culture where constitutional legality remains fragile.
The historical resort to extrajudicial violence, from executions under the viceroys to the repression of insurrections and anti-terrorist massacres, has left deep scars and lasting distrust of institutions.
A Contested Memory
The great figures – Atahualpa, Túpac Amaru II, San Martín, Bolívar, Velasco, Guzmán, Fujimori – are the object of competing interpretations, depending on social groups and moments. Velasco is seen by some as the only one who broke the power of the gamonales and returned land to communities, by others as responsible for a decade of agricultural stagnation and authoritarian excesses. Fujimori, convicted of crimes against humanity, remains, for part of the population, the one who “defeated terrorism” and stabilized the economy.
The internal armed conflict in Peru continues to influence public policies: the Truth Commission’s recommendations are only partially implemented, reparations for agrarian reform and unpaid debts are debated, and responsibilities in cases of forced sterilizations are contested in court. Furthermore, the accusation of “terrorism” is regularly used to discredit social movements during crises.
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The history of the country in Peru is not a linear narrative of progress, nor a simple succession of disasters. It is a trajectory made of ruptures and reappropriations, where rural communities, indigenous peoples, women, long made invisible, have nonetheless played a central role: in the construction of Andean civilizations, in anti-colonial revolts, in agrarian struggles, in self-defense committees against Shining Path, in recent mobilizations to demand fairer representation.
To understand this history, from the temples of Caral to the protests in Juliaca, passing through the halls of the National Library destroyed in 1881 or the GEIN offices where Guzmán was captured, is to grasp what is at stake in Peru today: the difficulty of building a truly inclusive social contract, in a country where fractures of race, class, and territory remain gaping but where, in every generation, actors seek to overcome them – sometimes through reform, sometimes through revolt, sometimes, alas, through war.
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Cyril Jarnias is an independent expert in international wealth management with over 20 years of experience. As an expatriate himself, he is dedicated to helping individuals and business leaders build, protect, and pass on their wealth with complete peace of mind.
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