“Popular Participation Is Revolution”: Development through Organized Self-Help in Revolutionary Peru

Within months of seizing control in October 1968, the Peruvian Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces undertook to reverse longstanding attitudes towards urban squatter settlements, beginning with legislation that renamed the “barriadas” (a term now deemed derogatory) as “pueblos jovenes” (young towns, or young communities).

Neither capitalist nor communist, Peru’s “humanist revolution” promised a new society based on the values of “full participation” and social mobilization. The cooperative ethos of squatter settlements, evident in the shared labour of communal construction projects, became a privileged image: framed by slogans such as “Popular Revolutionary Work: Popular Participation is Revolution,” it offered an alternative model of development, based on the values of self-help and mutual support. No longer considered marginal, the self-built community heralded both the emergence of a new revolutionary polity and the revival of a social solidarity that was framed as essentially Peruvian, rooted in a tradition leading back to the Incas, which had been damaged but not destroyed by capitalism, colonialism, and neocolonial exploitation.

This paper focuses on the operations of two new agencies created by the Revolutionary Government to organize and train the citizens of the former barriadas---the Oficina Nacional de Desarrollo de Pueblos Jóvenes (National Office for the Development of “Young Towns”), which was essentially a community development program; and the Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social (SINAMOS, or National System of Support for Social Mobilization) which was established to promote the ideals of “participation” and “popular organization”---reflecting on how the “self-help” paradigm is pushed to its limits throughout this period of revolutionary experimentation.