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)

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.