| Sumario: | Inspired by recent political processes in Peru that include a civil war and the emergence of a militaristic and ultranationalist pro-indigenous political movement, this essay examines the historical relationship bet-ween the peasantry and the army from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It speculates on the changes that the transition from a caudillista army in the nineteenth century to a professional army in the twentieth century brought about. The essay questions the widespread idea that the rural highlands and their inhabitants were excluded from the national life and citizenship “forever” and contends that peasant participation in the civil wars of the nineteenth century was a channel for insertion of the peasantry into national politics and fostered an incipient form of citizenship consciousness. Yet, as the army professionalized, the relationship between the armed institutions and the peasantry became increasingly more hierarchical and vertical. This process was parallel to the consolidation of the first constitutional civilian regimes of the twentieth century, in which, paradoxically, the exclusion of the peasantry became more severe. In the final instance, it was the dictatorships (both civilian and military) those to be more receptive than the constitutional democracies to the interests of the peasantry.
|
|---|
Biblioteca Digital de Vanguardia