Abstract
The significance of extractives, the exclusionary properties of export-led growth and the preferential policy attention received by the Coast provide key elements to understand the nature of development and conflict in Peru. The accelerated integration into the global economy reenforced an exclusionary social structure. The modern trade pattern amplified inter-regional and center-periphery group dimensions. In turn, trade policy followed a pendulum trajectory dominated by a laissez-faire setting that favored the white coastal elites. On their road to progress, indigenous peoples became cholos on the Coast and experienced improved living conditions, but had to deal with everyday forms of exclusion. Indio became a synonym for ‘backward’. The label is still used for those inhabiting the Andes and the Amazon who have not benefited from the trade pattern. The expansion of resource-intensive exports reinforces and recreates group identities, as well as inter-group gaps that shape a prone-to-conflict developmental path.
Abstract
L’importance de l’industrie extractive, les aspects exclusifs de la croissance tirée par l’exportation, et les politiques préférentielles dont bénéficie la région côtière du Pérou, constituent des éléments clés pour comprendre la nature du développement et des conflits dans ce pays. L’intégration accélérée du pays dans l’économie mondiale a transformé la structure sociale du pays, qui depuis l’ère coloniale est marquée par l’exclusion sociale. Le nouveau modèle commercial a amplifié les disparités entre les régions ainsi qu’entre les campagnes et les villes. La politique commerciale a suivi une trajectoire pendulaire marquée par un laissez faire qui a favorisé l’élite blanche de la région côtière. Au cours de ce processus de montée sociale, les peuples indigènes des Andes ont migré en masse vers la côte péruvienne et sont devenus des ‘cholos’; ils ont vu leurs conditions de vie s’améliorer, mais ont dû faire face, dans leur vie quotidienne, à diverses formes d’exclusion. ‘Indio’ est devenu synonyme de ‘arriéré’. Cette étiquette reste attachée aux populations vivant dans les Andes et dans la région amazonienne, et qui ne bénéficient pas du nouveau modèle commercial. L’expansion des exportations de ressources naturelles recrée et renforce des identités de groupes, et donc les écarts entre ces derniers, écarts qui donnent naissance à des trajectoires de développement sujettes au conflit.
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Notes
Discurso en el Politeama.
Nuestros Indios.
CADE (Conferencia Anual de Ejecutivos), running since 1961.
Ministerio de Inclusión Social (MIDIS), a new house for old and new needy-targeted social programs.
Ley de Consulta Previa a los Pueblos Indígenas u Originarios, 23 August 2011.
The analysis has been refined in the context of the CRISE research center at Queen Elizabeth House. See especially Stewart (2008) and Thorp and Paredes (2010). The historical literature drawn on includes seminal works such as Thorp and Bertram (1978), Gootenberg (1989), Thorp (1991), Boloña (1993) and Gonzáles de Olarte (1994).
To understand the rise and evolution of conflict, contentious agency needs to be analyzed in its structure of political opportunities. See Tarrow (1998) and McAdam et al (2001).
Center of the Spanish domains in South America, the Viceroyalty of Peru was the last Spanish colony to declare independence in the region.
CEPALSTAT.
An antecedent of this form of semi-slavery and non-free labor also existed under Inca rule. Conquered peoples became mitimaes, displaced from their homeland for mandatory labor.
‘Perú, país minero’.
Only the natural gas fields of Camisea.
See monthly reports at www.defensoria.gob.pe/conflictos-sociales-reportes.php.
For an illustration, see García's The Dog in the Manger, discussed below.
See BBC News (2011); La República (2011); and The Economist (2011). On contentious collective action at Yanacocha, see Scurrah (2008) and De Echave et al (2009).
‘… Latin America was the most protectionist region of the world (except for the United States in the immediate post-Civil War era) from at least 1865 to World War I’ (p. 206).
The last case has created the most visible opposition from the manufacturing interests (Sociedad Nacional de Industrias) to the national economic policy in the last two decades.
The Inca identity, in turn, is not dominant in the Andes, as the Inca was a Cusco-based polity and various civilizations pre-dated and were later dominated by the Incas.
Montaña was the term most commonly used in colonial Spanish America for the subtropical eastern Andes.
Press conference of 25 March 2009 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=56Ea1qjiB0s). See also www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2Vf4WfS5t08.
28 October 2007.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the excellent comments and suggestions provided by the reviewers and to Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies that hosted me as a postdoctoral fellow while writing this article.
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Orihuela, J. The Making of Conflict-Prone Development: Trade and Horizontal Inequalities in Peru. Eur J Dev Res 24, 688–705 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2012.21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2012.21