Critique of Frederick M. Nunn’s “Professional Militarism in Twentieth-Century Peru

Frederick Nunn's Professional Militarism in Twentieth-Century Peru: Historical and Theoretical Background to the Golpe de Estado of which appeared in the August 1979 issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review, represents a search for the long-term origins of the Peruvian military ideology which governed Peru's policymaking after the 1968 coup. Nunn argues that the essence of Peruvian military ideology derived from several decades of indoctrination of officers by French military missions between 1896 and 1940. Peruvian officers exposed to this training came to be convinced that they had a social and modernizing role to play in their government and that they were capable of civilizing Peru. Many of the post-1968 regime's seemingly contradictory policies, Nunn argues, can be explained as a function of this ideology, the historical roots of which have been overlooked by most analysts of the regime. The following is a short description of the government's major policies, a brief summary of other major writings about the regime, and a critique of Nunn's main arguments. On October 3, 1968, a handful of officers deposed Peru's discredited but constitutionally elected president, Fernando Belaiinde, and hastily organized a military government with generals at every cabinet post. During the next few years the Peruvian government embarked upon a series of remakable reforms including the expropriation of the vast sugar complexes of northern Peru, a workers' profit sharing program borrowed loosely from Yugoslavia, a code of regulations strictly governing the behavior of foreign investors, plans to mobilize the masses for some sort of institutional participation, and an international foreign

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