Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform

“Beyond statistics and graphics, the Peruvian agrarian reform of 1969 was a human drama that had so far eluded comprehensive academic inquiry. Relying on his life-long Andean experience Enrique Mayer has successfully undertaken the task. The result is a vivid fresco in which beneficiaries and losers, officers and militants, appeared as the contradictory protagonists of a process that would transform Peru in unexpected ways. An impressive achievement.” —José Luis Rénique, author of La batalla por Puno. Conflicto agrario y nación en los Andes peruanos

“Enrique Mayer gracefully interweaves three accounts of the Peruvian agrarian reform: the eyewitness reports of those who spoke and wrote as it took place, the decades-old recollections of those who lived through it, and the insights of those who analyzed it as social scientists. This compelling work will be of great value to anyone concerned with Latin America, because it provides the fullest published description of one of the greatest social transformations in the region’s history. It will be of deep interest to all of those who seek to understand how human societies draw on both memory and forgetting to survive the traumatic upheavals that arise in situations of great injustice and that unloose violence and revenge. And it provides evocatively written stories for those who seek human drama. No reader will ever forget Mayer’s vivid tales of individuals who find themselves confronted with moral dilemmas as historical events sweep suddenly into their simple lives.”—Ben Orlove, author of Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science and Society