[Peru, Land of Tradition]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

Land of Tradition
Spaniards used the household expression "vale un Peru"— “worth a PeruY—they thought only of the gold and silver which poured from,the colony. The gold and silver are still there, and so are other minerals scorned or unknown to the conquistadores but highly important to modern industry—oil, vanadium, copper, antimony, lead, and tungsten. Yet the ^rue wealth of Peru lies in the land itself, and in her people with their deeply ingrained love of the soil.
Peru’s coastline forms the western “bulge’ ’ of South America and, months before Pearl Harbor, she was aware of her strategic position in hemisphere defense. As early as April, 1941, she seized Axis ships, outlawed German news agencies, canceled the Lufthansa airline contracts and interned German seamen who had scuttled their ships off her coast. Later that year she banned Axis and Falangist propaganda, canceled immunity of German diplomatic pouches because they were carrying nonofficial correspondence, froze Axis funds, restricted Axis trade and the activity of Axis nationals, and agreed to sell all her strategic metals to Western Hemisphere nations.
Her formal break with the Axis came on January 24, 1942. Since then she has increasingly marshalled her resource s for Allied use. With United States cooperation, she is developing her Amazon territory, with its rubber and cinchona (quinine) possibilities, and she made a' five-year agreement to sell all rubber to the United States. Her long staple cotton, and her
ordinary cotton (much of which went to Japan before the war) are coming to this country and to Britain for special war uses. Price ceilings have been established and a post-war planning board created.
One of Peru’s wartime problems has been the presence of large numbers of Japanese (estimated at 16,000) on her coastal plain , and their active participation in local as well as in foreign commerce. Those in the port city of Callao have been moved inland to Talara, and others, mainly retail merchants, are under surveillance.
Peru’s geography is as complex as her inheritance. There are really three Perus—the Peru of dry coastal plains with modern cities and ports, vast sugar plantations and cotton * farms; the Peru of the Andes, the Sierra, with its mineral wealth and Indian traditions; and the Peru of the montana or eastern slopes of the mountains, with its still undeveloped
HISTORY OF PERU
Growth of Inca Empire
12th to
16th Century
1500
1550
1575
1600
1625
1650
1675
1700
1725
1750
1775
1800
1578 Callao sacked by Drake
1551
San Marcos University founded
1900
1917 Relations with Germany severed
1875
1879-1884 War of the Pacific
1850
1865 67 War with Spain
1925
1821 Independence Proclaimed
1824 Emancipation from
Spain Completed
1836-39 Peruvian-Bolivian
Confederation
1825
1522 Peru Discovered ^2] 33 Conquest by Pizarro 1535
Lima Founded 1544
First Viceroy arrives
possibilities and its forest products. Three cities are typical of the three Perus—Lima, colonial “City of the Kings’’; Cuzco, ancient Andean capital of the Incas; and Iquitos, frontier river port on the Amazon, boom town in the day of wild rubber.
Flying over Peru today, the traveler can see traces of the irrigation ditches for the gardens of Chan Chan, metropolis of the highly artistic subjects of the Chimu who lived in their adobe g houses near modern Trujillo on the coast from about 200 to 1000 A. D. Near Cuzco, the ruins of massive stone buildings highlight the importance of the pre-Inca culture. This civilization flourished before the first Inca started to found an empire in the twelfth century, an empire that spread until it stretched from Ecuador to northern Chile. The Incas, engineers and administrators, built 25-foot wide roads to carry news and supplies, and their runners were said to have covered the-distance between Quito, for instance, and the capital at Cuzco—1,200 miles—in five days. The roads which went out to the four winds from Cuzco are in disrepair, but some of the agricultural terraces, still fertilized with guano and fish and filled with soil laboriously brought up the
1929 Tacna-Arica Dispute settled 1932-34 Leticia Conflict" with Colombia ■ >1942 Break with Avis
mountains, are still cultivated, often with the ancient bowhandled plow. Inca' suspension bridges, aqueducts, and irrigation systems are in use today.
Technically, the Incas were only the members of the ruling family, head both of church and state, but the name, Inca, often is applied loosely to their subject peoples as well. The land was owned in common, and each year it was reallotted according to family needs. Work was divided according to age and sex and skills. Each year there were community shearings of the domesticated llamas and huge roundups of the4< wild vicunas. The llama wool was deposited in public magazines, and then distributed according to need.
Spaniards reached Peru in 1522 and brought back tales of Inca riches. Charles V gave the right of conquest to Francisco Pizarro, ex-swineherd who had been with Balboa at Panama.
He was short of funds, and had fewer than 200
men when he reached the Inca stronghold of Cajamarca in 1532 to find the Inca Empire in a state of civil war. The Inca Atahualpa, captured through a ruse, offered to ransom himself with one room filled with gold and two others with silver.
Trains of llamas and bearers came from all parts of the Empire of the Sun, laden with
The guano birds.
t
beautifully wrought ornaments, and the ransom was paid, but the uneasy conqueror had Atahualpa put to death anyway. Reinforcements arrived—the invaders never numbered more than 400 men—and, with these, taking advantage of the civil war, Pizarro overthrew one of the great, centralized empires of all times. The capital fell in 1534.
The conquest was bloody, and violence bred violence. Rivalry over the unexpected richness of the colony developed between Pizarro and his active partner in conquest, Diego de 1 Almagro. Pizarro himself was to die by the sword in Lima, the “City of the Kings’’ which he had founded in 1535. Almagro was killed "so were his son and several of Pizarro’s brothers who took part in the conquest.
The new city of Lima, more accessible from the sea than highland Cuzco, became the capital of the vast Viceroyalty of Peru, rival of the already rich colony in Mexico. For years all trade with Spain, which meant all legal trade from as far away as Buenos Aires, had to come through Lima. The Spaniards took Indian women as wives but, for the most part, the subject peoples of the fallen empire were driven to working the mines, their elaborate system of communal agriculture disrupted.
Descendants of the Incas tried to win back
The llama.
succeeded. For two years his force of 60,000 fought against the Viceroy, but in 1781 he was defeated, tortured and e
executed, and thousands of his followers put to death. Rebellion still continued in Alto-Peru (Bolivia), and in both
countries Indians and mestizos joined with colonists of European descent in the final successful Liberation movement.
Freedom came primarily, however, through outside forces. General Jose de San Martin, whose armies already had freed Argentina and Chile, declared the independence of Peru at Lima in 1821. Meanwhile Simon Bolivar, to the north, had liberated what are now Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador. The two men met in Ecuador in 1822, and San Martin turned his command and the new state over to Bolivar. Final independence, however, did not come to Peru until after the decisive highland battle of Ayacucho between the Venezuelan General Antonio Jose de Sucre and the Spaniards. It was accepted grudgingly by many Peruvians, who had fared well under colonial rule.
Peru’s first constitution, adopted in 1823, was followed two years later by one Bolivar had drawn up for Bolivia. In all, Peru has had fifteen constitutions. Bolivar, first Protector, also had Gran Colombia and Bolivia to govern, and during his Absences, local administrators seized power. Presidents rose and fell (there were eight in the one year of 1834'). Between 1836 and 1839 Peru and B,olivia were united in a federation by General Andres Santa Cruz:
Border wars have cost Peru both men and territory. During
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS IN PERU
the War of the Pacific, Chile fought Peru and Bolivia over the nitrate fields and guano beds along the coast. Although the war itself ended in 1884, final settlement between Peru and Chile did not come until 1929, when Tacna was granted to Peru and Arica to Chile. Boundaries in the Amazon region were difficult to establish, and Peru has contested territorial ^claims of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. The only other war was that of 1863-72 with Spain, whose navy shelled the port of Callao. Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador joined with Peru to defeat the former mother country.
An international Indianist movement, its aim the betterment of the common man in the continent, was started in 1924 by Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. Known as the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), it is officially outlawed as a party in Peru but generally is conceded still to have a large following. Some say it is communistic and atheistic; some that it is democratic.
Peru’s wartime president is Manuel Prado, son of the President Mariano Ignacio Prado who was credited with the defeat of Spain* in 1872. Elected in 1939, he was the first South American president to visit the United States while in office.
There is a saying in Peru that the people live off the land while the government lives off the mines. Taxes on
minerals still form an important source of state revenue, but 85 percent of Peru’s workers are in agriculture. High in the Andes are many communities where land is still held in common. For many years it was held without legal title, but the civil code of 1936 once more recognized the rights to common lands. However, many farmers are employed by large landowners, finding little time to work the tiny plots allotted to them for family use. .
Irrigation, fed by streams from the Andes, makes possible the commercial agriculture of the coast, where sugar, raised on vast plantations; cotton, on smaller farms; and recently, flax, are cash crops
of importance to Peru’s export trade. Peru ranks sixth in world cotton production, third in the hemisphere, and third in the world as to yield per acre. Sugar cane can be cut the year round.
The temperate highland valleys and the almost sub-arctic mountain terraces produce wheat, coca (for cocaine), corn, barley, oats, quinoa (a cold-weather grain), and potatoes— this last a native of Peru and a greater boon to man than all the gold of the Incas. Cattle, sheep, and llamas are raised, providing nearly all of Peru’s meat supply and some wool for the export market.
The war has highlighted the paradox of Peru, an agricultural nation, depending upon the outside world for food. It was easier to bring it in by sea to the populous coastal cities than down from the mountains. When shipping was dislocated by the war, Peru intensified her efforts to grow all her own food. Rice is being planted in increasing amounts, fishing augmented, tea plantations started, livestock improved, victory gardens encouraged, and better methods of agricultural cultivation urged.
Three hundred years ago Peru gave quinine to the world, and plantations of cinchona, from which it is obtained, are being planned in the montana. A tropical agriculture station has been established at Tingo Maria, a National Bank of Agriculture formed, and health centers opened to combat the tropical handicaps of malaria and yaws. Wild rubber, cinchona, and the insecticide-producing barbasco are being taken from the forest for war use.
4 DIET OF THE PERUVIAN MOUNTAIN INDIAN
Each symbol represents 10% of Peruvian consumption
The Tingo Maria Station is one of those which a writer in Agriculture in the Americas has described as deciding “the success or failure of the American republics to produce in sufficient ^quantities those crops that are mutually advantageous.’’
The experiment is being operated by colonists brought in from other parts of the country, and their pride in their task is shown by their eagerness to get books and practical instruction in the latest and best agricultural methods. The colonists work in cooperative communities, one being composed of farmers from the mountains and the other of former tenants and workmen drawn from haciendas in the coastal valleys near Lima.
An example of low cost housing at Lima.

Health and sanitation programs to make possible greateri development in the Amazon and along the northern coast were started in 1942 through the cooperation of the Peruvian and United States governments. Preliminary success was so great that in 1944 the two countries extended their agreement for another three years. Health services for rubber tappers, hospitals, health centers, dispensaries, malaria control stations, water and sewage systems and nursing schools are included.
For the development of Peru’s share of the Amazon valley, adequate transportation is essential. In. fact, transportation, as in other countries of the Andes, has always been a major problem in Peru. The building of her railroads, particularly the main Central and Southern lines, presented incredible engineering difficulties. The highest grades on the central are at almost 16,000 feet, and the station at the copper city of Cerro de Pasco is the highest in the world. Today trains carry oxygen tanks, but earlier travelers had to brave mountain sickness without its aid. Of Peru’s 2,345 miles of rail-
«AND EXPORTS
EXPORTS
I roads, many are privately owned by sugar and mining companies, and none reach into the east.
Peru’s 4,641 miles of commercial airlines, which connect with the vast west coast network, have helped in transporting men and supplies to the backlands and in making her Andean cities accessible. Until 1943 the airplane was the only alternative to a 7,000-mile water trip to get from Lima to Iquitos (via the Panama Canal and the Amazon River), or the 30- to 45-day trek overland by train, muleback, and canoe.
In September of that year a highway was completed from Lima, through Huanuco and Tingo Maria, to Pucallpa on the . Ucayali, an Amazon tributary. Six hundred and fifty miles beyond, by river steamer, is Iquitos and Amazon River traffic to the Atlantic. A triumph of engineering, the new road cuts the coast-to-Amazon trip to five days—two by motor and three by boat. Beyond Tingo Maria the last-known travelers had been the intrepid Amazon missionaries of 200 ygars ago. From the field notes of one of them, engineers learned of a deep pass not visible, from the air. Through this narrow
canyon the road now runs, at times 6,000 feet below the rim. Other roads into the Amazon basin are under construction, part of a program of expansion of Peru’s 18,641 miles of highways. Her section of the Pan American Highway is completed.
The Andes have dominated Peru’s economy and way of life, but of great influence also has been the cold Humboldt current from the south which cools her otherwise tropical coast and makes it so dry that except where irrigation is practiced, sand dunes march across the plains. A shift in the Humboldt brought the arid coast a seven-day downpour in 1925 which melted into meaningless mud the 1,500-year-old adobe ruins at Chan Chan.
Basic credit for Peru’s guano boom in the nineteenth century can go to the Humboldt, too. Just off her Chincha Islands it meets a warmer current from the north. Fish are stunned by the sudden change of temperature, and are easy prey for the waiting birds. Their droppings, preserved in the dry air, seemed inexhaustible, and for years were shipped to Europe < for fertilizer. Guano built Peru’s railroads, and when the accumulation dwindled, caused her greatest financial depression. Now rationed, guano is reserved by the government to implement the country’s growing agricultural program.
The first barrel of oil to be shipped from South America came from Peru, and oil, largely from along her northern coast, represented 34 percent of her export income in the peak year of 1934. Most of this went to France and Argentina, and
because of the loss of her European markets, production declined from the 18,000,000 barrels of 1937 to 13,000,000 in 1942. Copper, primarily from the rich United States-operated Cerro de Pasco mines, in 1938 furnished 31 percent of exports.
Peruvian industry has made considerable progress since 1929, particularly in refineries, copper smelters, and the first tire factory on the South American west coast. Local factories produce all the cheaper cotton textiles used in the country as well as substantial quantities of woolen and cotton cloth, leather goods, cement, chemicals, drugs, tobacco, “Panama” hats (a stock item of dress for Peruvian Indian women), and processed foods.
Although Peru sells more abroad than she buys, by almost 25 percent, this balance of trade is “favorable” in name only, Peruvians point out, since profits on the bulk of exports go to foreign companies—largely British and United States—who own mines, oil wells, and sugar and cotton plantations as well as railroads and utilities.
I Peru has an advanced code of labor legislation. Her social insurance law, passed in 1936 and put into effect in 1937, applies to all enterprises with more than five workers, including agriculture. There is no national federation of labor, but a number of labor unions are active. Within the last decade, modern housing developments for workers have been built in Lima and other coastal cities. Popular restaurants, which offer well-balanced meals at very low prices, are among measures that have been taken for the improvement of the condition of the workers.
The 1941 education laws represent a new and more practical approach to her educational problems, particularly as they relate to the Indian. In those communities where Quechua is still the chief language, primary education will be in this ancient Indian tongue, with Spanish later. Vocational, agricultural, industrial, and commercial education is planned.
Teacher-training centers are being set up, and traveling units are beginning to tour the Indian villages, setting up cooperatively-run schools, teaching sanitation, etc. There
are also plans for the creation of Indian community colonies, where the age-old skills of weaving, pottery making, and metal working will be organized on a cooperative basis. Under the Department of Indian Organization and Economics (created in 1943) experimental farms to teach better agricultural and livestock methods will be set up. The first two of these have been established.*
Formerly, education in Peru had followed the classical pattern. A century before Harvard, in 1551, San Marcos University was established at Lima. Dedicated to traditional instruction in the humanities and in the professions, San Marcos has nevertheless seen most of Peru’s liberal movements initiated within her halls. There is a Catholic University in Lima, and universities at Cuzco, Trujillo, and Arequipa. These are now under the Ministry of Education, and since its creation in 1934, the number of pupils in primary schools has almost doubled.
Patio of the University of Cu^co.
w The churches and houses of Peru, as well as the clothes worn by her people, reflect the three strains in her culture—the Indian, the colonial, and the modern. In the Andes, colonial churches were sometimes built from the stones of Inca and pre-Inca buildings, and colonial cathedrals here and on the coast often were designed by Spain’s best architects and hung with the works of her best painters. But along with Spanish canvases are Inca motifs in gold and silver, and Indian artists who worked on the cathedrals introduced the mythological figures of the ancient religions into their excellent carvings. Palaces with latticed balconies look out on twentieth century office buildings, and in her streets Indian women, with their bright, full skirts and Panama hats or ancient headdresses, offer contrast to the smart costumes of urbanites.
In the arts, too, the old and the new mingle. Historians still dip into the voluminous chronicles of the conquistadores and padres, although some of the originals were lost in the two fires which have swept the National Library—during the
ar of the Pacific and again in 1942. Peru’s history, legend, and land have inspired her writers, two of whom, Ricardo Palma and Jose Santos Chocano, have received hemisphere acclaim—Palma for his satires, particularly his Lradiciones Peruanas, and Chocano for his poems. Some modern artists turn to the Indian for inspiration—especially Jose Sabogal and Camilo Blas. Composers utilize the old Indian tunes, and the dramas which once were presented at Inca festivals have been put into Spanish.
Modern Peru is the inheritor of two great traditions—the communal agricultural pattern that was old before the Incas and the Spanish colonial belief that wealth and land belonged to the intrepid few. By reconciling these ideas, which so long were causes for conflict, her people today are moving forward to the destiny inherent in the richness of their land.
Published by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs Commerce Department Building, Washington, D. C.