The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru's Central Sierra

By Javier Puente

2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS)

A study of the intersection of rural populations, state formation, and the origins of political conflict in Peru.

On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed like a profitable and yet fairly unexploited country. Both foreign capitalists and local state makers envisioned how remote highland areas were essential to a sustainable national economy. Mobilizing Andean populations lay at the core of this endeavor. In his groundbreaking book, The Rural State, Javier Puente uncovers the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru’s rural communities formed the political nation-state that still exists today.

Puente documents how people living in the Peruvian central sierra in the twentieth century confronted emerging and consolidating powers of state and capital and engaged in an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomies. Over the years, policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru until violent unrest, perpetrated by the Shining Path and other revolutionary groups, unveiled the extent, limits, and fractures of a century-long process of rural state formation. Examining the conflicts between one rural community and the many iterations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru, The Rural State offers a fresh perspective on how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477326305

Book preview

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

The Rural State

Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra

JAVIER PUENTE

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2022

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Puente, Javier, author.

Title: The rural state : making comunidades, campesinos, and conflict in Peru’s central sierra / Javier Puente.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022002138 (print) | LCCN 2022002139 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2628-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2629-9 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2630-5 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous peoples—Peru—Sierra—Politics and government—20th century. | Land reform—Social aspects—Peru—Sierra—History—20th century. | Agriculture and state—Peru—History—20th century. | Sierra (Peru)—Politics and government—20th century. | Sierra (Peru)—Economic policy—History—20th century. | Peru—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC F3451.A5 P84 2022 (print) | LCC F3451.A5 (ebook) | DDC 985—dc23/eng/20220126

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002138

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002139

doi:10.7560/326282

For Gabriela and Javier, mamá y papá

Contents

Gracias

Introduction: Bringing Back the Central Sierra

1. Reimagining the Peruvian Andes

2. Making Indigenous Communities

3. Reconciling the State and Communities

4. Reforming without Revolution

5. Making Campesino Communities

6. Tilling an Agrarian Conflict

Conclusion: Eroding Rural Communities

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Gracias

I would like to claim that I always envisioned writing this book, but that was not quite the case. The Peruvian central sierra and San Juan de Ondores became a part of my path as I struggled to find a dissertation topic. After a delightful but unsuccessful trip to Ayacucho, while spending some time at the drawing board, I encountered the first traces of the unusual trajectories of the Ondores people, a campesino community located in the Bombón Plateau, next to the Chinchaycocha lake in the highlands of Junín. At Georgetown University, Erick Langer and John Tutino patiently listened to my recounting of the first archival findings and convinced me that I had found what I was looking for. The Department of History and the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University funded multiple trips to Peru and a research year spent in Lima, Huancayo, Junín, and Ondores. I briefly considered visiting San Juan de Ondores before running into a comunero from San Pedro de Pari who was seeking the titles of his comunidad at the Archivo General de la Nación. After he was treated disdainfully by the staff, I tried to assist him and point him in the right direction. In return, he provided the phone numbers of the current communal leaders of San Juan de Ondores. Most of the research that informs this book could not have been possible without a great deal of good luck. Contingency also drives history.

Throughout the course of my doctoral program, Georgetown University became home in ways I could not possibly convey. The halls of the Department of History offered shelter in winter, plenty of coffee, leftovers from faculty meetings, and—most important—the mentorship and guidance of Erick Langer and John Tutino. Erick and John nourished my early interests in rural peoples and their struggles with confronting structures of power. I could not have fulfilled any steps of the arduous processes of finishing a doctorate, finding fellowships, and landing jobs without their enthusiastic support. John McNeill became a source of wisdom of all sorts in the latter part of my doctoral training, making me one of his people. His ongoing mentorship has pushed me in different and very intellectually rewarding directions. All of them read the full draft of my dissertation and made seemingly endless corrections and suggestions. This book is the result of years of their generous guidance.

While at Georgetown, I found the friendship and comradeship of a wonderful group of people. Clara Peña supported a great deal of this part of the adventure, helped me launch a life abroad, and endured some of the most challenging parts of this project, including many moves throughout Lima, Bogotá, and Washington, DC. Patrick Dixon and Lawrence McMahon helped me emotionally endure the challenge of pursuing a doctoral degree in a very foreign environment while reading more versions of the seeds of this book than they probably wanted to. I am very proud of having been part of the community of Latin American doctoral students, a generation of wonderful scholars set to achieve great things. Larisa Veloz, Okezi Otovo, Jonathan Graham, Nate Packard, Daniel Cano, April Yoder, and Fernando Pérez-Montesinos care about this book and me much more than I can possibly express. They also brought me to the Tombs for lagers and ales when times became hard. A pre-postdoctoral fellowship took me to the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Lehigh University, in the core of the postindustrial United States. There, I benefited from the comradeship of Matthew Bush, Bill Bulman, Bárbara Zepeda, John Savage, José Cornelio, and Miguel Pillado, with whom I shared many thoughts, tacos, beers, and curry soups.

The Instituto de Historia at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile allowed me to go back to Latin America after years of training in the United States, and I will forever be grateful. In San Joaquín, I found a community of mentors and friends. Fernando Purcell, Alfredo Riquelme, Olaya Sanfuentes, Claudio Rolle, and Rafael Gaune became endless sources of academic, professional, and personal advice. Brandi Townsend, a colleague and friend since our DC times, helped me build another community of friends and young scholars who became essential for my life and work. Matías Hermosilla, Denisa Jashari, Joshua Savala, Marianne González Le Saux, Joseph Feldman, Alfonso Salgado, Alyssa Bowen, and Samuel Finesurrey—the Taller team—read the entire manuscript, made valuable contributions, and helped me rework it along the way. Constanza Dalla Porta shared her own enthusiasm for campesino struggles in Chile, read too many versions of many passages of this book, tolerated my constant academic rants, and always cheered me up with her unlimited kindness.

Back in Peru, I have always counted on the unconditional support of Jesús Cosamalón, Margarita Suárez, Martín Monsalve, Joseph Dager, and the late Jeffrey Klaiber. Scholars all over the world also made me part of a community, sharing their intellectual depth. Special thanks go to Paulo Drinot, Emily Wakild, Adrián Lerner, Brenda Elsey, Joanne Rappaport, Catalina Garzón, Paul Gootenberg, Christof Mauch, Neil Safier, Hanni Jalil, José Carlos de la Puente, David Colmenares, Jonathan Graham, Cecilia Méndez, Gonzalo Romero, Mark Healey, Mark Carey, Brooke Larson, Claudio Robles, Vanderlei Vazelesk, Florencia Mallon, Charles Walker, Claudio Barrientos, Miguel La Serna, Emilio Kourí, Enrique Mayer, Sarah Hines, Nicole Pacino, Angie Picone, Rachel Nolan, Gilbert Joseph, Mark Rice, Alden Young, Raymond Craib, Aparna Vaidik, Karin Rosemblatt, and Alfredo Ávila. Kerry Webb, my editor at the University of Texas Press, believed in this project from the very beginning and pushed me to complete it with patience and kindness. Greg Cushman and another anonymous reviewer saw the potential of this book, and their insightful comments made it a much better work.

In an unexpected turn of events, I returned to the United States to continue my academic career. Smith College opened its doors, brought me into a world completely unknown to me, and has offered me an opportunity to be a better scholar and a more complete human being. In the Happy Valley, I have had the good fortune of sharing my life with a truly wonderful array of colleagues, students, and friends. I want to mention, very specially, the intellectual and personal support of Dana Leibsohn, Elizabeth Klarich, Roisin O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Pryor, Ginetta Candelario, Rob Dorit, Floyd Cheung, Kiran Asher, Manuela Picq, Michelle Joffroy, and María Helena Rueda. They all offered words of comfort and encouragement when I needed them the most. Dana, in particular, has become an exemplary model of collegiality, mentorship, and friendship. Here, I also found an unexpected community of friends and colleagues who have become my own comunidad, including Verónica Dávila Ellis, Rachel Newman, Mariyana Zapryanova, Jorge Vásquez, Colin Hoag, Samuel Ng, Ilona Sotnikova, Sarah Mazza, and Susanna Ferguson. Amelia Mitter-Burke joined my New England life toward the completion of this project and became a beacon of light amid the darkness of COVID-19. Her pace, her love for classrooms, her passion for teaching, and her students are a source of inspiration.

This work could not have been possible without the trust and support of the Comunidad Campesina de San Juan de Ondores. Obed Laureano and Humberto Palomino, past presidentes comunales, believed in the importance of history and helped me to present the project before the rest of the comuneros and campesinos. Access to the community of San Juan de Ondores was granted by the popular vote of the asamblea comunal, a seminal moment that taught me much about the link between the historical discipline and rural politics. The late Dan Hazen believed the historical records of San Juan de Ondores needed to be preserved and funded a project for digitizing their actas comunales through the now extinguished Program of Latin American Libraries and Archives (PLALA) at Harvard University. Yoshy Luengo made the map included in this book and has always helped me with my cartographic quests. Joaquín Gutiérrez elaborated the bibliography and revised many smaller details of the final manuscript. Nino Bariola helped me revise the glossary of Spanish terms, providing his always incisive comments. Lisa Munro and Sarah Hudgens made the original text legible to other readers, and I cannot be thankful enough.

Students at Georgetown University, Lehigh University, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and Smith College deserve a special mention. In all of these classrooms, I have had the pleasure and privilege of exchanging and cocreating knowledge as well as testing many of the preliminary ideas that informed this work. They made this work better and also made me a better person.

My parents—Gabriela and Javier—never thought a low-income, first-generation college student should become a history major, headed for a career that seemed reserved for the privileged few. However doubtful and hesitant, they respected, endured, and supported every single one of my decisions. I hope they will see this book, dedicated to them, as a reflection of years of challenges and loving perseverance.

Peru, the central sierra, the Chinchaycocha lake, and San Juan de Ondores. Map by Yoshy Luengo Oyarzún.

San Juan de Ondores and Atocsayco [sic], also known as the Harrison Map. Commissioned to William H. Harrison by the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, 1905. Archivo Comunal de San Juan de Ondores.

The urban sector of San Juan de Ondores. Photograph by the author, 2012.

Boundary between the Atocsaico hacienda and the San Juan de Ondores Community, 1955. Archivo General de la Nación.

Internal statute of the comunidad indígena San Juan de Ondores. Archivo de Comunidades Indígenas y Campesinos, Dirección Regional Agraria de Junín, 1954.

Last page of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces’ Council of Ministers’ minutes declaring the promulgation of the 1969 agrarian reform law. Colecciones Especiales, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1969.

Communal minutes of San Juan de Ondores declaring the possession of the Atocsaico estate. Archivo Comunal de San Juan de Ondores, 1979.

Atocsaico es de Ondores, La Voz Campesina, October 1979 (detail).

Abandoned structures of the old Hacienda Atocsaico. Photograph by the author, 2012.

Introduction

Bringing Back the Central Sierra

This book tells the story of a rural community in the core of the Peruvian Andes. People living in the countryside during the twentieth century faced many challenges, particularly the acceleration of another globalized industrial revolution. While industry and capital incorporated rural spaces into their socioeconomic metabolism, livelihood in the countryside became an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomy. As Karl Marx once explained, the absorption of areas not yet integrated into capitalist production entailed violent processes that led to primitive accumulations on the one hand, and deepening disenfranchisements on the other.¹

Examining the conflicts between a rural community, a hacienda, and the many manifestations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru—primarily reconstructed based on documents preserved by the people of San Juan de Ondores—this book offers a century-long view of how los Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos. In each transformation, forces and agents at stake included the agency of rural villagers, the contested mandates of the Peruvian state, the industrializing aim of capitalist institutions, and other modernizing forces. I argue that conflict became a central thread in the making of the twentieth-century Peruvian countryside. While this story also included episodes of negotiation, cooperation, collaboration, and contestation, conflict—not violence, but conflict broadly understood—shaped institutions, social relations, and economic formations. In the last decades of the past century, political violence engulfed the Peruvian countryside, causing the death of approximately 69,280 Peruvians. Most lived in impoverished areas of the Andean countryside, survived on an agrarian livelihood, and spoke a language other than Spanish.² More than 20 percent of the victims—over fifteen thousand people—lived in the central sierra, which became the second foremost battleground of the Internal Armed Conflict.³ Upon closing this book, I expect readers of The Rural State to further consider how political violence in the rural countryside emerged from grassroots understandings of and disputes over land, identity, autonomy, and sociopolitical belonging.

Throughout the twentieth century, the world became more urban and less rural. A dystopian urbanization has turned cities—and specific forms of cities—into symbols of wealth and progress. Rural villagers became the center of wage labor markets, in major cities after migratory movements or as the regional focuses of industrializing development. Every Latin American nation-state faced the pressing challenge of desbordes populares, the quintessential label coined by Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar to explain massive human migration from rural peripheries toward urban centers. The physical and human geography of cities has been amassed with the flesh, social tissue, and resources of the countryside. Every macro sociopolitical development related to the perils of urbanization correlates to rural dynamics that deserve careful scrutiny.

Since conquest and colonization, when war capitalism prevailed, the Andes became an integral part of what later became the third world and the global south. Incorporating this region into an accelerated world economy had an undeniable and unquestionable colonial component. In spite of major demographic constraints, the central Andean region transformed capitalism. The Potosí-Huancavelica complex signaled the emergence of a truly global circulation of commodities and capital. However, the early colonial reconstitution of Andean repúblicas de indios and the creation of regional networks of exchange and trade made the rural countryside important in decades and centuries to come. Nineteenth-century ideals of modernity reinvented the physical and human geography of the Andes. Nineteenth-century liberalism legally obliterated Andean populations, who were recovering after centuries of demographic collapse. A new world order emerged after the contraction of early-modern empires and the rise of British informal imperialism; paired with centralized industrialization and capitalist production, it brought the Andes—along with Africa, Asia, India, and other constitutive regions of the global south—into a worldwide scheme of circulation as lands of famine. Starvation, poverty, and desolation became essential characteristics of a pauperized global countryside. In turn, the fights of rural dwellers against colonial and imperial domination became struggles over the means of life and death, the right to subsist.

Means of Life and Death in an Andean Comunidad

People in rural areas become woven together into a community through social relations of production. Cultural articulations, the manifold and multilayered material interactions between peoples, resources, institutions, spaces, and environments, explain rural livelihood in the twentieth-century countryside. In the Peruvian Andes, as Enrique Mayer asserts, communities constitute the home base of Andean peasant social and economic organization centered on household economies and widespread networks of socioeconomic and political connections.⁴ Communal rationalities of settlement and mobilization are deeply embedded within the specificities of their environments, particularly in the vertical context of the Andes.⁵ Lowland communities and valley settlers mastered agrarian cycles of harvest and sowing seasons, producing enough for subsisting and a minimum of surplus for exchange. Peoples who migrated to upland grounds faced greater environmental constraints as elevation decreased oxygen concentration and hypoxia—commonly known as soroche—required both biological and societal adaptations. Aided by animal power, particularly sheep, these communities became masters of pastoralism and engaged grazing economic markets with greater surplus access and autonomy.⁶ Ethnic bonds and linguistic differences provided almost limitless distinctions within both lowland and upland communities. State powers, past and present, viewed the highly heterogeneous social tissue of rural communities through a homogenizing social lens.

In these chapters, I recast the relationship between the Peruvian state and rural community to dissect how rural populations and state powers shaped each other throughout the last century. In offering a lococentric, regionally focused, community-based study of nation, state, and communal formation in Peru throughout the twentieth century, I also examine the problems that developed among centralizing state powers, logics of capital, and rural human groups. While implicit in many chapters, capitalism lies at the core of this rural appraisal of twentieth-century Peruvian history and the enduring histories of campesino struggles in the rest of the world. Rural communities as a socio-spatial ideal became a pivotal hub for framing the lives of thousands, even millions, of rural villagers in an age of an expanding governance of capital. When rural people were incorporated into schemes of capitalist production, they mixed economic practices—primarily indebted, and wage labor with subsistence agrarian economies—which remained profitable for the few and alienating for the many.⁷

San Juan de Ondores is one of the thousands of rural villages that constitute the social tissue of the Peruvian countryside. Subjected to centuries of social engineering projects, twentieth-century rural villages became Indigenous and campesino communities, adapting to evolving rural governmentalities of the state. Ondores lies in the upper central region of Peru, at more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level in the center of the Bombón Plateau. The central Andean region of the country is typically referred to as the central sierra, a pivotal geopolitical region of Peru. Within this area, Ondores and its surrounding lands cover much of the western margin of the Chinchaycocha lake, one of the largest bodies of water in Peru. The same melting glaciers that end in the Mantaro River feed the Chinchaycocha lake. Deglaciation water is geothermally heated, providing the lake with a surface temperature of fifty-seven degrees. This unusual environment produces a high level of moisture, encapsulated by the surrounding orography—wide and deep ravines along with medium-size hills. Crossing west over the hills—referred to by locals as La Cima—another vast plateau of natural pastures connects this region with the highlands of Lima and the mining towns of Morococha and La Oroya. This plateau contains approximately forty smaller bodies of water, from small lagoons to hot springs, which nurture rich natural pastures. These pastures, the environment, the altitude, and the ecological processes of rural settlement form a crucial part of the enduring story of the struggles of San Juan de Ondores over the means of life and death.

San Juan de Ondores reached notoriety in the mainstream media when a prominent Lima journal, Caretas, published in 2003 an article about the historical struggle of villagers over a neighboring estate called Atocsaico.⁸ According to the article, San Juan de Ondores had been involved in a sustained trial with the Sociedad Agrícola de Interés Social (SAIS) Túpac Amaru over the possession and exploitation of more than twenty-two thousand hectares of land. The conflict ignited after the 1969 agrarian reform, when the Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada—a military junta led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado—established peasant cooperatives and agrarian societies, which he claimed empowered the Peruvian campesinado without threatening the productivity of major rural estates. In narrating the historical nature of their trial, campesinos interviewed by Caretas framed the recent trial with the SAIS and the Peruvian state within a larger struggle over the recovery of lands—a struggle that dated to the colonial period. As in millions of rural stories of struggle elsewhere in the world, land as a means of life lay at the center of every battle—whether legal or physical—worth fighting and often dying for. Land, Eric Wolf reminds us, was far from being a commodity in nature but rather constituted the byproduct of a new cultural system . . . creating a new kind of economics.⁹

The twentieth-century history of rural and campesino politics has centered on questions of insurgency, rebellion, and revolution. The global countryside became a central battleground for the two dominant sociopolitical and economic architectures of the last century. Capitalism and communism have wielded their muscles over rural villages since the dawn of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, respectively, as definitional moments of global rural history.¹⁰ Consequently, almost every question related to the agrarian structures of power of production placed violence—whether insurrectionary or counterrevolutionary—as the deus ex machina of campesino histories around the globe. Capitalism placed the control of the means of life and death in the hands of a few—hacendados, corporations, or states—fostering enduring inequalities. Communism eventually provided the semantics of contestation and rebellion, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, explaining the opprobrium and delivering answers and recipes for mobilization and revolution. Still, unjust material and social conditions for campesinos did not feed permanent revolution. Rural injustices also built up much needed moral codes and sanctioned legitimacies, soothing discourses that spurred campesino obedience while projecting fictions of assistance, cooperation, and empowerment.¹¹ Rural villagers became campesinos upon being the subject of these fictions, experiencing the perils of power while learning to endure, resist, and mobilize when necessary and possible.¹²

In the Peruvian case, recent rural histories have almost all dissected the dynamics of the Internal Armed Conflict (1980–2000) and the post-conflict aftermath, as the Informe final of the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did in 2003. Nevertheless, the larger historical narrative of San Juan de Ondores, as recounted by its own members, transcends a conflict-centered understanding of communal trajectories. The campesinos of Ondores viewed the latter political violence as part of a historical struggle that started in colonial times. They saw how the community originated as a pueblo de indios in the eighteenth century and continued into a socially obscure era of indebted servitude as hacienda peons in the nineteenth century, then reemerged in the early twentieth century constrained by centralizing dynamics of state formation and capital accumulation. In becoming indios, peons, Indigenous people, and campesinos, rural villagers from Ondores have built a powerful memory of experiencing power, enduring injustice, advancing autonomy, and regaining their right to subsist—asserting how they live and die on their own terms.

Tracing the history of San Juan de Ondores, in this book I bring global dynamics into local domains and local narratives into global discussions. Far from having a purely intellectual aim, rural villagers from Ondores demanded global understanding decades ago. In 1980, a group of Ondores campesinos participated in the Fourth Russell Tribunal for Indigenous Peoples, held in Rotterdam. Along with thirteen other Indigenous groups from all over the world, the campesinos presented their grievance at the usurpation of Atocsaico, the long-treasured rural estate that had become a core component of SAIS Túpac Amaru and a symbol of a militarily enforced agrarian reform. In presenting their grievance, this symbolic group of Peruvian campesinos intended to represent rural communities throughout the hemisphere and the world, millions of villagers who suffered economic disenfranchisement, political repression, and alienation. As the Peruvian Andes entered one of the darkest periods of its history, the presence of Ondores before the Russell Tribunal becomes even more symbolic. The Internal Armed Conflict, which began in 1980 as a conflict between the Maoist party Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian state, escalated into a civil strife that placed the campesinado at the center of the conflagration—as both victims and perpetrators. In the century of history rebuilt in this book, the villagers of San Juan de Ondores pursued control of the means of life and death, experiencing the power of state and capital, resisting and adapting according to their logics, and revolting and mobilizing when conditions proved favorable. Facing social obliteration, a group of rural villagers resorted to legal means to recover lands, regain their autonomy, advance their political claims, and reaffirm the rights of a global countryside to remain alive.

Toward a Modular History

Every local history is extraordinary, and San Juan de Ondores’s is not an exception. However, local history also risks becoming modular, integrated into larger historiographical conversations due to methodology, scope, and relevance.¹³ Besides reconstructing a local history, a study of Ondores furthers our understanding of rural politics, economics, and societal formations. The documents community members presented before the Russell Tribunal indicated the existence of a campesino legal culture that engaged the official sphere of the state, circulating through courts and tribunal networks in different Peruvian provinces.¹⁴ As many studies remind us, legalistic vocabularies—the lingua franca of the state—often obscure court documents, hiding more than they reveal. Exclusive focus on the legal struggle of Ondores, by the same token, limits the historicity of the campesinado to a sphere dominated by the state, ignoring the many sources of rural conflict and their correlates. When studying Huasicancha, Gavin Smith showed how placing legal questions about land property within their cultural and ecological environments framed those questions.¹⁵

In vividly reconstructing the story of Huasicanchinos and their successful land recovery in 1972, Smith also showed that the period of agrarian reform represented both the departure and arrival of rural and campesino politics in Peru. Much of the contemporary political history of rural issues portrays the years of agrarian reform (1969–1975) as a primordial political principle, from where all evils that ravaged the countryside in the following decades first emerged.¹⁶ This view has dominated the literature that examines the military government’s policies in the decade following what Abraham Lowenthal and Cynthia McClintock label the Peruvian experiment.¹⁷ Such demiurgic nature attached to the 1969 agrarian reform, cast as an extraordinary and radical political restructuring of the countryside, enabled scholars to quantitatively and qualitatively measure the policies and outcomes of the regime. In combination with ethnographic and anthropological work, traditional literature provides critical social measurement, examining the nature of political attitudinal change among campesinos as the human focus of agrarian policies.¹⁸ Comprehensive understandings of twentieth-century rural history require a zoomed-in, intimate dissection of how national politics and international processes became grounded in major rural continuities over the course of the century.

Century-long historical analyses have been as ambitious as rare. Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram’s study of the policies and internal effects that shaped the Peruvian economy from 1890 to 1977 identified three major cycles, each fueled by both international market forces and domestic responses.¹⁹ The first cycle lasted until the 1879 debacle of the War of the Pacific and had guano at the center of economic dynamics. A second cycle (1879–1930) was characterized by repeated collapses of the international economy, ending with the Great Depression.²⁰ Finally, a third cycle emerged in the post-Depression period and ended with the meltdown of the military economic policies in 1977. Thorp and Bertram show how national economic leadership failed to retain control of expanding economies and foster domestic manufacturing, preventing the launch of national industrialization. Every cycle began as a national, state-led, commodities-based boom and ended as a foreign-controlled disaster. Understanding these larger cycles of economic booms and busts should inform every discussion of rural economies. Villagers became campesinos within a larger framework of open economic policies and entangled growth.

Andean regions and rural villagers helped make almost every commodity that fueled short-lived booms and dynamized the Peruvian economy. The case of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation exemplifies the entangled economic growth described by Thorp and Bertram. A number of studies have analyzed Cerro de Pasco’s history, highlighting the social impacts of corporate operations.²¹ In fact, this particular case of corporate capitalism in Andean Peru spanned the three periods proposed by Thorp and Bertram. Rural villagers and the human geography of the Peruvian Andes made up the socioeconomic networks that linked mining areas and neighboring towns, accelerating the dynamics of capitalism. San Juan de Ondores, along with hundreds of other villages, helped establish the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and twentieth-century capitalism. Early on, the villagers formed part of a coerced labor pool of miners, which seemingly transformed them into a new proletariat. Later, they labored as arrendatarios and salaried shepherds once the corporation diversified its production, participating in agrarian capitalism through livestock raising and wool exportation by the mid-twentieth century.²² Rural histories unfolded within larger economic narratives of capitalist development, which included the stories of people who created networks that structured the cycles described by Thorp and Bertram, linking the countryside with national and international webs of exchange, merging the local and the global.

The Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation was one among many agents that framed the lives of villagers and structured the history of the countryside. Enduring campesino struggles over the means of life preceded the arrival of corporate capitalism. Other economic actors included private haciendas, business associations, and conglomerates such as the Junta de Industria Lanar and the Sociedad Ganadera Junín, and state ministries and offices such as the Ministerio de Fomento. Campesino mobilizations also involved critical degrees of politicization as local struggles became regional and national. Representing campesino interests became a pivotal goal for political parties of diverse affiliations, campesino confederations, state bureaucracies and local representatives