The Best Recipe for Revolution: New and Old Left Debates over Armed Struggle in Peru, 1958–78

The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of myriad New Left political groups that reinvigorated an atrophied traditional Left in Peru. One of the oldest leftist parties (the Peruvian Communist Party - PCP) splintered into two after the Sino-Soviet split, while simultaneously shedding younger dissident leftists who formed their own parties. APRA, the traditional populist party rival of the Communists, suffered a similar splintering from its more radical youth leadership, who broke off to form their own party highly influenced by the Cuban Revolution. This multiplication of leftist organizations held also a multiplicity of theories and ideologies on how to address the “crossroads” which the Left and Peru confronted during this period. The internal fissures that developed between these different Lefts during their moment of flowering was a legacy re-inscribed and deepened throughout the later democratic era of the 1980s. This paper explores the contentious debates waged over whether to choose armed insurrection, grassroots mobilization, or collaboration with a leftist military government, which claimed to offer a revolution imposed from above.  The failed guerrilla insurrections of 1965 and the leftist military coup of 1968 created a crisis of conscience among Old and New Lefts, that inspired deep fissures and polarized positions that undermined attempts at a unified Left. Each side of these friction-fueled debates revealed very different notions and approaches to the capture of power and implementation of socialist change. The initial positions taken also offered different visions of violence as a tool and democracy as a goal, which influenced later leftist actors in the 1980s and 1990s.