Living to Tell the Tale: Peruvian Agrarian Reform as Told by its Protagonists. A Review of Enrique Mayer's <em>Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform</em> (Durham: Duke UP, 2009)

Authors

  • Miguel La Serna University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill

Keywords:

agrarian reform, peruvian agrarian reform

Abstract

On October 3, 1968 the Peruvian military led a bloodless coup against civilian president Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Unlike other military regimes that seized power throughout Latin American in the 1960s and 1970s, General Juan Velasco Alvarado’s Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA) was ideologically left of center, vowing to fight for the popular classes. True to its word, the GRFA implemented one of the most extensive agrarian reforms in Latin American history. This reform is the subject of Enrique Mayer’s Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform. But rather than focus on the reform process itself, Mayer lets the people who experienced it firsthand tell the story in their own words. The result is a rich and powerful account that is anything but ugly.

Author Biography

Miguel La Serna, University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill

Miguel La Serna es un becario post-doctoral en la Universidad de North Carolina, Chapel Hill, donde empezará a trabajar como Profesor Asistente de historia en julio de 2010. Actualmente trabaja en un libro, The Corner of the Living: Culture, Power, and Violence in Ayacucho, Peru (1940-1983), donde examina las luchas indígenas campesinas antes de la insurgencia guerrillera de Sendero Luminoso.

Published

2010-04-01

How to Cite

La Serna, M. (2010). Living to Tell the Tale: Peruvian Agrarian Reform as Told by its Protagonists. A Review of Enrique Mayer’s <em>Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform</em> (Durham: Duke UP, 2009). A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 7(3), 543–546. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/564

Issue

Section

Reviews: Racism in the Andean Region and Mesoamerica