David Nugent's thrillingly smart The Encrypted State focuses on the underside of political order: the disorder and delusion inherent in projects of rule. The setting is the majority-rural Amazonas region in Peru in the mid-twentieth century, where Manuel Odría's dictatorial government failed in its campaign to harass and persecute the clandestine Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) party. Unable to get their way, government representatives figured that APRA had developed an underground apparatus endowed with powers that their own regime lacked, able to thwart official will with malicious ease. As authorities trusted fewer and fewer people, including the police, and resorted to communicating with each other in coded messages, we see shades of the terrifying lows that the Cold War would reach, with its repressive toll throughout Latin America. But Nugent's story does not move forward in time, say, toward the farcical APRA-Odría alliance of the early 1960s and its reverberations...
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