Critique of Frederick M. Nunn’s “Professional Militarism in Twentieth-Century Peru: Historical and Theoretical Background to the Golpe de Estado of 1968”^*

Frederick Nunn’s “Professional Militarism in Twentieth-Century Peru: Historical and Theoretical Background to the Golpe de Estado of 1968,” which appeared in the August 1979 issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review, represents a search for the long-term origins of the Peruvian military ideology which governed Peru’s policymaking after the 1968 coup. Nunn argues that the essence of Peruvian military ideology derived from several decades of indoctrination of officers by French military missions between 1896 and 1940. Peruvian officers exposed to this training came to be convinced that they had a social and modernizing role to play in their government and that they were capable of civilizing Peru. Many of the post-1968 regime’s seemingly contradictory policies, Nunn argues, can be explained as a function of this ideology, the historical roots of which have been overlooked by most analysts of the regime. The following is a short description of the government’s major policies, a brief summary of other major writings about the regime, and a critique of Nunn’s main arguments.

On October 3, 1968, a handful of officers deposed Peru’s discredited but constitutionally elected president, Fernando Belaúnde, and hastily organized a military government with generals at every cabinet post. During the next few years the Peruvian government embarked upon a series of remakable reforms including the expropriation of the vast sugar complexes of northern Peru, a workers’ profit sharing program borrowed loosely from Yugoslavia, a code of regulations strictly governing the behavior of foreign investors, plans to mobilize the masses for some sort of institutional participation, and an international foreign policy which aspired to make Peru a leader among Third World countries. By 1975, however, a faltering economy and growing unrest among the masses were reflected in the tangible dimunition of reformist zeal, the installation of a new president, and the weakening of many reforms. For the next four years, the government struggled to withdraw from power with some dignity intact. Elections were to be held in 1980.

Among intellectuals, one of the major tasks during the regime’s initial phase of leftist exuberance was to explain the origins of the reformist impulse of the government, certainly the first of its kind in Latin America. In this endeavor, two scholars, Luigi Einaudi and Victor Villanueva, contributed more than others to color our perceptions. Both had studied the Peruvian military before 1968 and both had in fact predicted future reformist tendencies among the officer corps. They were, incidentally, close friends and each was influenced by the other.

Einaudi wrote a doctoral dissertation on the Peruvian military in 1964 and continued to write about Peru after 1968 as an analyst for the Rand Corporation. As he saw it, senior officers at CAEM during the mid-sixties, reasonably well trained in social analysis and worried about guerrilla insurgents in the countryside, developed a doctrine which justified an expanded, reformist political role for the Peruvian military. Officers developed the conviction that a revolution from below could best be prevented by initiating preemptive reforms from above. Should a civilian regime fail to produce these reforms, the military institution had in the previous decades developed the capacity to succeed. The early policies of the Velasco government, therefore, represented an attempt to implement this doctrine.¹

Villanueva, on the other hand, explored the origins of Peruvian reformism not as an end in itself, but rather to predict what he considered to be the inevitable failure of the attempt. He argued that the officers who came to power after 1968 brought with them a mentality which had been evolving since the days of independence. Among the major characteristics of this mentality are an aversion to civilians, a rejection of political parties and partisan politics, a strong need for autonomy and power, and an exaggerated sense of self-confidence. These traits were formed and reinforced throughout Peruvian history by a series of humiliating frustrations suffered by the armed forces. The loss of two wars, partial defeat in civil war, subversion of the armed forces by the APRA party, and a loss of a sense of mission after Peru came under the U.S. defense umbrella following World War II all contributed to military disdain for civilian politicians. Bloated military budgets and improved professional training during the 1950s at CAEM and elsewhere convinced the officers, who already harbored anti-civilian sentiments, that they and they alone were capable of leading the country to economic and social progress. Villanueva attributed the specific mixture of reformist policies during the first years of the regime to relatively recent factors, agreeing with Einaudi that CAEM, the guerrilla insurgency of 1965, and the influence of the United States were among the most important causes of the reformist, modernizing orientation of the regime. But he remained skeptical, the agrarian reform notwithstanding, that the reformist impulse could long survive the age-old conservative, negative mentality of the officers.²

Both Einaudi and Villanueva undertook their major work on the government before 1973 when most observers were anxious to uncover the origins of the “Nasserist” left-wing colonels. Thus, although both identified conservative themes within the government and cautioned against a premature labeling of the regime as “leftist,” their admonitions went largely unheeded, and intellectual conventional wisdom soon had it that the regime was indeed leftist and had its origins in recent CAEM doctrine. Furthermore, the mind-set among Peruvian observers had become conditioned to a search for the intellectual origins of the Peruvian regime. When the regime veered to the right in the mid-seventies, scholars began searching once again for a military doctrine developed somewhere, sometime, within the institution, which would explain the regime, internal contradictions and all.

It is within this context that Professor Frederick Nunn’s article must be judged. In the first of two fundamental propositions, Nunn argues that many of the regime’s most salient characteristics—modernization, authoritarianism, anti-civilianism, reformism, and mass mobilization by the armed forces—have their roots not only in CAEM and the recent past, but also in a reasonably consistent doctrine first introduced in Peru by French training officers between 1896 and 1940 and later developed by their pupils. As evidence for this assertion he quotes from Peruvian military journals dating back as far as 1904. In that year, for example, a Peruvian officer under French tutelage criticized the treatment of Indians by landowners, indirectly challenging the land tenure system. In 1936 another officer asserted that the general staff could coordinate economic development and social mobilization. Throughout the French period, officers argued that the army was uniquely equipped to play a “civilizing” role by promoting such development projects as road building and airport construction, and by instilling respect for authority, social discipline, and moral standards in conscripts. All in all, Nunn offers impressive evidence that the modernizing, elitist character of the post-1968 regime had a long intellectual gestation period which should be linked to French military thought at the turn of the century.

Although several of these issues are covered by both Einaudi and Villanueva (using different sources), Nunn’s major contribution in this essay lies in his development of the French connection and identification of the deep historical roots of the modernizing impetus so prominent in the Velasco government. Both themes were minimized by Einaudi and Villanueva.

Nunn’s second proposition, however, should be viewed with caution. He argues that the abundant evidence concerning French-Peruvian thought within the military supports the thesis that the Peruvian military regime after 1968 should not be seen as leftist in orientation at all, but rather as the culmination of a consistently articulated doctrine, essentially conservative to the core. The regime, he claims, never had structural reform in mind despite the propaganda, favoring instead the creation of an even more hierarchical and authoritarian society.

This line of reasoning, however, flies in the face of a great deal of evidence that at least some officers seriously contemplated structural reform between 1968 and 1972. After intense debate, SINAMOS was created as a mechanism to handle participation from below and was staffed by at least one Marxist guerrilla, one Trotskyist, and a left-leaning Aprista. That it failed is not sufficient evidence that the intentions were mere window dressing. Agrarian colonization plans, with roots deep in Nunn’s military intellectual history, also failed. By 1971 certain officers were openly discussing Peru’s “dependent” status, a phrase that could not have been bandied about the general staff headquarters until at least 1966, when it acquired some currency among leftists throughout Latin America. All the evidence indicates that the profit sharing law for workers in the industrial, fishing, and commercial sectors was borrowed from Yugoslavia in 1970. Where are the roots of this law in French military thought?

The basic weakness in this essay is Nunn’s assumption, shared by many analysts of the Peruvian experiment, that the regime must be explained as the product of some coherent set of principles shared by a great majority of the senior officer staff. Political scientists have long known that the policies of governments are often best explained as the outgrowths of factional and bureaucratic infighting over control of policy. This is particularly true in situations where a great variety of ideological opinion exists within a regime. The contradictions inherent in President Carter’s foreign policy immediately come to mind.

In Peru as early as the 1940s, leftist Aprista sympathizers within the officer corps were plotting to overthrow the government to bring Haya de la Torre to power. Víctor Villanueva himself, for example, was a member of CROE, a secret military sect. Twice in 1948 he organized APRA-military rebellions designed to overthrow President Eustamante. Again in 1961-1962 serious factionalism beset the senior officer corps over ideological issues related to the APRA party. Historical evidence suggests that throughout the twentieth century the military, in fact, was a microcosm of the divisions that existed within the civilian body politic. Could it be that the colonels who overthrew President Belaúnde had at least some structural reformists among their numbers? Is it possible that between 1968 and 1972 they acquired leverage over the policy-making apparatus only to lose it thereafter to a more conservative faction? I am suggesting, in short, that a more fruitful explanation of the contradictions of the regime lies in an exploration of the history of factions within the Peruvian military and the linkages between these and the civilian groups to which they were tied.

Author notes