Peru is a major South American country replete with contradictions and anomalies, past and present. The highly developed, heavily populated, and well organized Inca Empire, with its capital in the Peruvian Andean highlands city of Cuzco and with control of what is present -day Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, southern Colombia, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina, collapsed in weeks after the
... [Show full abstract] arrival of a small band of Spanish conquistadors. With the coastal city of Lima the Spanish Empire's administrative center for all of South America for more than two hundred years, until the Bourbon reforms of the 1760s, Peru was favored over the rest of the region by the concentration of the Crown's human and material resources. Perhaps due in part to Peru's privileged position within the Empire, independence came late, in the early 1820s, and reluctantly, achieved largely through military forces and leaders from the South American colonial periphery of Argentina and Venezuela. The same explanation might also apply to some degree to the late arrival in Peru of the first wave of democracy, limited as it was, that was gradually spreading through Latin America from the 1850s onward. Only in the mid-1890s, after a succession of military heads of state and a devastating loss in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) against Chile that contributed to further political instability as well as virtually complete economic collapse, was limited liberal democracy established in Peru. Though lasting only about two decades (1895-1919, with a brief coup in 1914), it represents to this day Peru's only extended experience with civilian elected rule. Augusto Leguía, the last of the elected presidents in this period, carried out a "self -coup" in 1919 to rule as a civilian dictator for the next eleven years. From the 1930s through the 1970s, 1
