Fernando Belaunde Terry
Fernando Belaunde Terry was overthrown by the army in 1968 and elected again by the voters in 1980, twelve years later, almost unchanged. He was an architect, trained in Texas, and he thought about Peru as a problem of roads. His first government built the marginal highway along the eastern slope of the Andes to open the jungle to settlement, extended schooling, and worked through a programme of community labour that drew on Andean village practice. It ended over oil. A dispute with an American company at La Brea was settled on terms that looked like a surrender, a page of the contract was said to be missing, and the army removed him in October 1968 and sent him to Argentina. The general who replaced him, Juan Velasco, nationalised the oil fields within a week and then carried out a land reform far larger than anything Belaunde had proposed. He came back in 1980, in the election that ended twelve years of military rule. On the day of that election a small group burned the ballot boxes in a village in Ayacucho. It was the first action of the Shining Path, and his government did not take it seriously for two years, then handed the emergency zones to the armed forces, which killed on a scale nobody had expected. The economy went with it. The debt crisis, a drought and then a severe El Nino cut output and drove inflation into three figures. He completed his term, which in Peru is worth saying, and handed over to an elected successor for the first time in forty years. He was widely liked to the end and is remembered as a decent man in an indecent decade.
- Lived: 1912 CE – 2002 CE
- Nationality: Peruvian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
