Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre

Peruvian political leader

• Born: February 22, 1895
• Birthplace: Trujillo, Peru
• Died: August 2, 1979
• Place of death: Lima, Peru

Haya de la Torre was the founder of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), an inter-American, democratic political movement that stimulated parties to modernize the old elitist orders in Peru and throughout Latin America.

Early Life

Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (VEEK-tohr raw-EWL AH-yah-day-lah-TOHR-ray) was the eldest of five children born to Raúl Edmundo Haya and Zoila María de la Torre. Though not wealthy, both parents claimed to be part of the criollo (Spanish descent) elite that controlled Peru’s economic and political fortunes. Haya de la Torre attended local private schools, and at age eighteen he was enrolled in Trujillo’s University of La Libertad. While pursuing a law degree, he joined an avant-garde literary club and student government. When his first play, a comedy, was performed, Haya de la Torre became convinced that his future lay in politics, not the fine arts.

In 1917, Haya de la Torre attended a meeting of the newly formed National Student Federation in Lima. While there, he visited Manuel González Prada, the aging founder of Peruvian indigenismo (Indianism). Since the 1880’s, González Prada had been urging the Peruvian elite to reverse its centuries-old practice of despising Indian culture, and the Indians themselves, by integrating the Indians into society. Shortly after the convention, the prefect of Cuzco, a kinsman, hired Haya de la Torre as his secretary. Haya de la Torre moved to the capital of the ancient Inca empire in August, 1917, and traveled widely in the highland Indian communities of southern Peru. The poverty of the Indians and the labors of Protestant missionaries greatly impressed the pretentious criollo. After being in Cuzco only a few weeks, Haya de la Torre inherited a sizable sum of money from an uncle. He left the mountains, was enrolled in the University of San Marcos at Lima, and submerged himself in extracurricular activities.

Haya de la Torre joined the university reform movement that was sweeping Latin America, and he persuaded the student federation to support the textile workers’ strike for an eight-hour day. The participation of the students proved to be decisive, and in January, 1915, the grateful workers elected Haya de la Torre president of the newly formed Federation of Peruvian Textile Workers. Although flattered, Haya de la Torre turned the presidency over to a worker and devoted his energies to organizing a free university for urban workers and Indian migrants to the city. Students and professors from San Marcos taught classes at no charge in a variety of disciplines to the poor with the hope of bringing the lower classes of Peru into the mainstream of the national culture. This work with organized labor and the popular universities from 1918 to 1923 laid a foundation for Haya de la Torre’s political activity for the next five decades.

When President Augusto Leguía planned to dedicate Peru to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in May, 1923, Haya de la Torre led students and workers in a massive protest march. After police fired into the crowd and killed two marchers, the president canceled his plans. In October, 1923, Leguía charged Haya de la Torre with sedition and imprisoned him. When Haya de la Torre embarked on a protest hunger strike, Leguía deported him to Panama and suppressed the new labor unions and popular universities.

Life’s Work

The exile lasted until 1931. In those eight years, Haya de la Torre traveled widely and studied at first hand the newly emerging government systems in Mexico, the Soviet Union, and Europe. When he left Peru, he considered himself a Marxist, and, after working briefly with the education minister of revolutionary Mexico, José Vasconcelos, Haya de la Torre went to the Soviet Union in 1924. He interviewed many of the high-ranking Communists, including Leon Trotsky. From Bolshevik Russia he went to fascist Italy and liberal England. He was enrolled in the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford and thrived in the socialist milieu of England’s universities of the 1920’s. In 1927, he attended the Communist-dominated World Anti-Imperialist Congress in Brussels and declared that Soviet Socialism was nonexportable. Calling himself a revisionary Marxist, he earned the hostility of the Communists that lasted until his death.

From Europe he traveled to the United States and then went on a speaking tour through Central America. When he reached Panama, the government at the request of Peru deported him to Germany. He spent the remaining three years of his exile as a student, author and journalist, observer of the growing National Socialist Party, and nursemaid to a Latin American movement he had founded in 1924.

While in Mexico City, Haya de la Torre had announced to university students the formation of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA). Referring to America south of the Rio Grande as Indo-America to stress the importance of the indigenous populations Haya de la Torre urged all nations to integrate all races and classes and to break free of the imperialist influence of the United States. Small Aprista movements began in the European exile communities of Latin Americans, and a few began in Latin America. Haya de la Torre’s labor and student followers in Peru formed the Partido Aprista Peruano (PAP) and prepared for the end of the Leguía dictatorship and the restoration of electoral politics.

Military coups in 1930 and 1931 permitted Haya de la Torre to return to Peru and take personal control of PAP and campaign for the presidency in the October, 1931, election. With Haya de la Torre at the helm, PAP became the focal point of a mass movement, not merely a political party. Although he diagnosed Peru’s ills in Marxist terms, Haya de la Torre prescribed a corporatist remedy. Discarding class conflict and a revolutionary vanguard, Haya de la Torre called for class cooperation, social unity, and the democratic process. He organized Aprista clubs in all social groups and promised to establish a parliament composed of functional groups. PAP called for the nationalization of industry, the inter-Americanization of the Panama Canal, and resistance to imperialist that is, U.S. influence. PAP added workers’ restaurants, recreation halls, and medical centers to the revived popular universities. Uniformed youth cadres led massive rallies in marches, songs, and chants that virtually idolized Haya de la Torre. The party slogan was “Only Aprismo will save Peru,” and melodramatic photographs gave the party’s jefe máximo (greatest chief) heroic proportions.

Actually, Haya de la Torre was short just over five feet tall and had a stocky build that got chunkier with age and oversized features on a large head thick eyebrows, a powerful aquiline nose, and stirrup-shaped ears. The lifelong bachelor governed party affairs with a firm, autocratic hand. He could be spellbinding whether speaking to thousands in the Plaza de Acho bullring or to one or two individuals in an intimate setting.

Haya de la Torre’s principal rival was Luis M. Sánchez Cerro, the officer who had toppled Leguía. Sánchez Cerro led a mass movement that appealed to the nonunion workers and cholos (Indians adapting to Western culture), who readily identified with the dark-skinned military hero with Indian features. When election officials announced the results of the most spirited, bitterest campaign in Peruvian electoral history, Apristas cried fraud. Sánchez Cerro had won by a comfortable margin.

In December, 1931, militant Apristas rose in rebellion in several places in Peru and began a sixteen-month period of violence that ended with the assassination of Sánchez Cerro on April 30, 1933. When the rebellion began, the government imprisoned and tortured Haya de la Torre, charging him with masterminding the revolt. Then and thereafter, Haya de la Torre affirmed his commitment to nonviolence. Sánchez Cerro’s successor, General Oscar R. Benavides, released Haya de la Torre and hundreds of other Apristas in a general amnesty.

One year later, the Benavides government outlawed PAP and arrested thousands of party members. Haya de la Torre eluded the dragnet and chose to stay in Peru rather than flee. For the next ten years, he was an internal exile, providing leadership to his warring clandestine party while staying constantly on the move to avoid arrest. Benavides barred PAP from the 1939 elections, and his successor, Manuel Prado y Ugarteche, continued the ban.

As World War II neared its end, Benavides persuaded Prado to legalize PAP in exchange for Haya de la Torre’s promise to refrain from running in the 1945 election. Benavides’s change in attitude may be partly attributed to Haya de la Torre’s moderation of his anti-North American rhetoric. He saw in the Good Neighbor Policy a fundamental change in the United States’ Latin American policy. The nightmare of Nazism prompted Haya de la Torre to reduce the similarities of his program to European corporatism, and he concluded that, to progress, Peru would have to embrace rather than repudiate international capitalism.

In 1945, Haya de la Torre and his followers joined a coalition that elected José Luis Bustamente y Rivero president, but the coalition fractured when Bustamente’s nominations slighted the Apristas. In retaliation, the Aprista-dominated parliament deadlocked the operations of government. In October, 1948, Aprista cadres in the navy rebelled but were swiftly quelled. General Manuel A. Odria ousted Bustamente and ferociously attacked the APRA movement.

Haya de la Torre secured political asylum in the Colombian embassy in January, 1949, and he remained there until April, 1954, because the Odria government would not grant him safe passage to leave the country. A compromise with Mexico, after two inconclusive decisions of the World Court, enabled Haya de la Torre to go again into exile, this time for three years.

Odria permitted APRA participation without fielding candidates in the election of 1956, but in 1962 PAP was allowed to participate fully. Haya de la Torre’s principal opponent was Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who headed Acción Popular. Haya de la Torre won 32.98 percent of the necessary 33 percent of the vote. His old nemesis, the military, seized power, annulled the election, and promised a new, honest election in June, 1963. In that election, Belaúnde captured 39 percent of the vote to Haya de la Torre’s 34 percent. Bitter over the stolen election and defeat, Haya de la Torre entered into a parliamentary coalition with the same Odria who had sought his arrest and execution one dozen years earlier. The APRA-controlled parliament severely hampered Belaúnde’s government for the next five years. As Belaúnde’s term neared its end, his Acción Popular was in disarray, and Haya de la Torre appeared positioned to win the presidential sash he had been pursuing since 1931; the military, however, intervened once again. A leftist reform military government ruled for the next twelve years. Within six years the government’s domestic programs and foreign policy strikingly resembled APRA’s goals of the 1930’s. When the regime decided to return political power to civilians, it permitted APRA to participate in the constitution-writing process.

In the 1978 elections to the constituent assembly, Aprista candidates won 35 percent of the vote and had the largest delegation. The assembly elected Haya de la Torre its president, and the aging Aprista served as the ceremonial president of Peru during the transition from military to civilian rule. In 1979, his party nominated him for president and supporters secured his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

These honors were final tributes to APRA’s founder, now known in Peru as “El Personaje,” the personage. Haya de la Torre suffered from a blood disease, a heart condition, and lung cancer. Three weeks after signing Peru’s new constitution, he succumbed to his ailments and died on August 2, 1979, at age eighty-four. Peru and Venezuela declared a day of national mourning, and two million people attended his funeral procession.

Significance

Many political observers were convinced that PAP was dependent on the magnetism and leadership of Haya de la Torre, but the party did not dissolve at the death of its founder. The party’s candidate, Alán García, won the national election in 1985, and PAP has proved to be one of the most durable parties in Peru’s highly volatile political environment. The APRA movement has had enduring influence outside Peru. APRA sunk strong roots in pre-Castro Cuba and permanent roots in Costa Rica, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Haya de la Torre’s many books and hundreds of articles found a ready audience throughout Latin America during the nearly six decades of his career. His introduction of mass politics to Latin America, his programs of fundamental social reform, and his commitment to democratic processes made him one of the most important political philosophers in twentieth century Latin America.

Bibliography

Alexander, Robert J. Prophets of the Revolution. New York: Macmillan, 1962. One chapter is dedicated to Haya de la Torre. Alexander is an admiring, but not uncritical, student of Haya de la Torre and APRA. He claims that all major revolutionary movements in Latin America have been influenced by Haya de la Torre.

Beals, Carleton. Fire on the Andes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934. Beals met Haya de la Torre in Mexico and described his movement as the first in Peru based on principles rather than on personalities and greed. Beals feared Haya de la Torre was too Mussolini-like but believed that APRA would renew antiquated Peru.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Latin America: World in Revolution. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1963. In this book, Beals bitterly assails Haya de la Torre for betraying his principles and selling out to the United States.

Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl. APRISMO: The Ideas and Doctrines of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Edited and translated by Robert J. Alexander. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973. This major English-language collection of Haya de la Torre’s writings is prefaced by a scholarly biographical sketch.

Kantor, Harry. The Ideology and Program of the Peruvian Aprista Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953. Reprint. Washington, D.C.: Savile Books, 1966. This reprint of the admiring study brings events up to printing date.

Klarén, Peter F. Modernization, Dislocation, and Aprismo: Origins of the Peruvian Aprista Party, 1870-1932. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. Excellent study of Haya de la Torre’s early years and the conditions that gave rise to the Aprista movement.

Scheina, Robert L. Latin America’s Wars: The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900-2001. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003. This book, the second in a two-volume military history of Latin America, includes a chapter about Haya de la Torre’s activities in Peru, “The Peruvian Senior Military Versus the Apristas, 1930-1968.”

Stein, Steve. Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Careful analysis of the campaign and election of 1932. Concludes that Haya de la Torre lost fair and square. Most other students assume that Sánchez Cerro stole a landslide victory from APRA.

Werlich, David P. Peru: A Short History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Best survey of Peru in print. Traces Haya de la Torre and APRA through the decades. Concludes that Haya de la Torre’s convoluted philosophy accommodated itself rather easily to changing events.