An Emerging Caudillo

"Some people may tremble when they hear what I will say," warned Peruvian President Juan Velasco Alvarado before delivering his independence day speech last week. No one in his audience was inclined to take the remark lightly. After six years of rule by Velasco's left-leaning military junta, Peruvians have learned that whatever the mercurial general says generally goes.

Recently, Velasco, 64, has shown signs of being too sensitive for words --the words of an independent press, that is. In June, he closed down Lima's most respected weekly magazine, Caretas, and drove its publisher into hiding. The reason: the magazine had taken issue with the government's view that a luncheon attended by several prominent editors was a subversive gathering. Said Velasco, justifying his action: "The magazine called us paranoid, said we were crazy."

Last week Velasco's regime struck again, this time expropriating Lima's five remaining independent newspapers. In predawn raids, police carrying submachine guns invaded the newsrooms of the papers, including Peru's oldest and most prestigious daily, El Comercio, and pulled the front and editorial pages off the presses. Then the government's own hand-picked editors, who had followed the police onto the premises, proceeded to pull freshly minted editorials from their pockets proclaiming the takeover as "a new day of freedom."

Peculiar Style. What many Peruvians fear is that Velasco will bring them even more of his emerging peculiar style of freedom and ruin the generally progressive advances made under his rule. The government does not enjoy wide popularity, but there is little question, even among diehard critics, that the junta has made impressive strides.

Its land-reform program, which has redistributed 14 million acres of Peru's farm land might well become something of a model for other South American countries. More than 1 million of the country's 15 million people received their own plots of land or have become members of land-owning cooperatives under the plan. Unlike Salvador Allende Gossens' ill-fated government in Chile, Peru managed to nationalize U.S. petroleum and copper companies without incurring American sanctions. The country, moreover, has enjoyed economic progress under military rule, with an annual growth rate of 5%, although countless Peruvian poor in the Lima slums still subsist outside the economy. Though some militant political parties are banned, Peruvians are allowed to belong to opposition parties and generally enjoy a wide range of civil liberties.

For these freedoms and successes, most Peruvians concede, Velasco certainly deserves a measure of credit. As an enlisted soldier who worked his way up through the ranks, he seems never to have forgotten his own humble origins (his father was a small shopkeeper), and his concern for Peru's poor seems genuine. But since coming to office in the coup that overthrew the constitutional government of Fernando Belaunde Terry in 1968, Velasco has become increasingly entranced with defending his power. Says one diplomat: "He has a will of steel, he understands people, and he is ruthless."

Associates describe him as increasingly dictatorial, perhaps because he believes that is the only way to survive against his reactionary enemies among the rich and his liberal critics in the navy. His cavalier actions could be as defensive as they are offensive. Yet his mounting intolerance to criticism has many Peruvians worried, causing one Lima journalist to comment last week: "What you are seeing is the emergence of a caudillo."

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