Author Description

Alan Garcia took on a tough assignment when he became President of Peru in July 1985. Longstanding structural problems--the legacy of a very unequal pattern of development, a yawning gap in living standards, a weak import-dependent industrial base, an inefficient and ill-funded state--combined with newer problems like the effects of the debt crisis and the upsurge of guerrilla violence to provide a particularly difficult inheritance. Initially Garcia was surprisingly successful in trying to tackle some of these problems. Then his government's strategy went awry. As he left office in 1990, Peru's social, economic and political ills looked worse than ever. On the right his critics blamed him for not liberalizing the economy and for his aggressive attitude toward the international financial community. On the left he was attacked for not going far enough, fast enough, in the opposite direction. In this book, the first balanced assessment of the Garcia years, John Crabtree rises above these polemical claims and counter-claims, and charts the rise and fall of Peru's First ever APRA government, analyzing the causes of its undoing. His study stresses the political as well as the economic constraints, and gives due emphasis to the extraordinary impact of the country's Maoist fundamentalists, Sendero Luminoso, in undermining the authority of government.