Peru Essay

Peru is located in western South America with an estimated population of 30 million. It is multinational, including Europeans, Africans, Asians and Amerindians. The national language of the country is Spanish, however a significant number or Peruvians still speak other native languages. Peru is a representative democratic republic that is divided into 25 regions. It is a developing country with a poverty level around 25 percent. Its main economic industries are mining, manufacturing, agriculture and fishing. The history of Peru spans multiple millennia and gone through several stages of cultural development in the mountain region and the coastal desert. About 15,000 years ago, humans are believed to have crossed the Bering Strait from Asia and moved south surviving as nomads. The Peruvian region was home to the Norte Chico civilization, one of the oldest in the world, and to the Inca Empire, the largest state in Pre-Columbian America. The Spanish Empire conquered it in the 16th century, which established a Viceroyalty with rule over most of South America. The nation declared independence from Spain in 1821, but consolidated only after the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824.

Relative deprivation theory is a helpful model for understanding the roots of terrorism in Peru. Various terrorist groups arose out of the failed leftist political parties who were unable to raise the living standards for the native Peruvians. The founders of these movements were from the middle class and wanted justice for the poor. Peru was still a mostly primitive society in the middle of the 20th century, with only the 0.1% elite classes controlling 60% the arable land, and the poor performing unskilled tasks in service of the hacienda owners (Osborn, 2010). In 1...

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... the world in coca cultivation, along with Columbia and Bolivia, and their production doubled in the 1990s (Lia, 2005). Terrorism in modern Peru has evolved from attacks by a collection of communist guerilla outfits with differing degrees of fundamentalism into utilitarian narco-terrorism, with the potential for anti-globalization violence. The evolution of terrorism in other parts of the world have taken a more fundamental turn with the rise of Global Jihadist, but Peruvians guerillas appear to have left the most extreme Maoist versions of their ideology behind. Hopefully this foretells of a much less violent future for Peru, even if there are still unresolved security problems. With the emergence of narco-terrorism, the future is more uncertain, and the trade-offs needed to separate terrorists from coca farmers are difficult to make politically and diplomatically.