“There does not seem to be any one place […] where the Aprista ideology has been synthesized and made available to those interested in finding out what it is,” the political scientist Harry Kantor once surmised about the fragmented nature of APRA’s ideological production in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹ A quick look at the hundreds of articles, pamphlets, and edited collections produced by Apristas before the return of democracy in Peru in 1945 suffices to prove Kantor right. This was especially the case with Indo-América, the name that APRA officially gave to its maximum program, or program for all Latin America.Footnote ² The resilience of this project as an ideological utopia of continental solidarity and as a political weapon for anti-imperialist resistance relied on a surprising ideological malleability. The concept of Indo-América, as this chapter details, proved adaptable to changing circumstances and experiences.

Scholars have focused on the international scene to shed better light on APRA’s changing ideological positions. They advance that the Good Neighbor policy (1933), first, then the Second World War shortly thereafter, are responsible for softening APRA’s initial attacks against the United States. They highlight, correctly so, that Nazism replaced the United States as the greatest imperialist threat in Aprista’s political doctrine. “The war,” stresses one prominent scholar of APRA, “also led the Apristas to accentuate the democratic features of their program.”Footnote ³ To be sure, the growing perils of Nazi and Fascist intervention in Latin America did affect how APRA came to envision its call for continental solidarity. In fact, these fears affected the construction of Latin American identity in intellectual circles throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Some leftists and radicals even reinvested the concept of Hispano-America to oppose the rise of European fascism. They momentarily reclaimed Hispanic culture as the basis for an imagined continental community that stood in solidarity with the Second Spanish Republic against rebel conservative factions.Footnote ⁴ By the late 1930s, Apristas similarly demanded a revision of the maximum (or continental) program in a way that would adapt its anti-imperialist claims before the rise of Fascist threats worldwide.Footnote ⁵

Not everybody in the party celebrated this flexibility. With hindsight, many Apristas condemned the changes that underpinned the ideological evolution of APRA toward the right of the political spectrum, and that of its Indo-American project of hemispheric unity in particular. The most disillusioned left the PAP in the 1940s and 1950s and attacked the party leadership for betraying APRA’s foundational anti-imperialist principles of the 1920s.Footnote ⁶

Historians of Peru have partly absorbed and replicated these critiques, suggesting that APRA’s ideological change from the radical left to a moderate populist right were due to Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s insatiable thirst for power. His cunning pragmatism, argue these Peruvian-centric studies, led Haya de la Torre to change the APRA doctrine whenever he deemed it necessary to serve his political ends. This APRA leader was indeed a pragmatic and savvy political figurehead whose instincts led him to compromise on numerous occasions. Yet by insisting on the personal attributes of a single APRA leader rather than interrogating the collective dynamics that underpinned the ideological production of APRA, these studies fail to weigh the impact of persecution and exile, and the political struggles for survival that these experiences brought to bear on the many meanings of APRA’s project of hemispheric unity.Footnote ⁷ Imagining Indo-América altogether as a vindication of Latin American sovereignty and of democracy and social justice for the Americas was not the project of a single individual; it stemmed from the fragmented experiences of dispersed networks of anti-imperialist activists desperate to retrieve basic political liberties in their home country.

Chapter 6 focuses on the evolution of APRA’s maximum program for all Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s in light of these analytical premises. It suggests that Apristas’ reasons to develop and hold on to their continental program during the 1930s and 1940s were not merely ideological, but also political. This chapter analyzes specifically the impacts that APRA’s engagement with transnational solidarity networks had on the evolution of its ideology, particularly that of its project of hemispheric and anti-imperialist unity. While scholars usually advance that APRA’s interest for its continental project waned after it turned into a national party in the early 1930s, Chapter 6 suggests that, quite to the contrary, it is during the 1930s and early-1940s that APRA consolidated the concept of Indo-América and propelled it to the centre-stage of its political doctrine. Recurrent state persecution against PAP, combined with APRA’s innovative political strategies in exile, contributed to building an Indo-American project based on the defence of political rights and democracy rather than the bulwark against US imperialism that APRA’s continental program originally asserted in the 1920s. It similarly curbed its advocacy of social justice in Peru and focused ever more forcefully on the defense of civil liberties.

To fully appreciate these ideological changes in APRA’s program, Chapter 6 contends that preserving in its doctrine a call for Latin American solidarity, which Apristas came to bill ever more regularly with Indo-American solidarity on one side and associate ever more closely with a democratic inter-American order on the other, offered tangible political and personal opportunities to those who ran the high command of APRA. By the 1940s Indo-América, APRA’s celebrated vision for Latin American unity, turned into a political instrument in the service of the Hayista faction. Ambiguity and adaptability, as we shall see, explain part of Indo-América’s ideological power, but also the tensions and contradictions that nestled within it.

Transnational Solidarity Campaigns and Indo-América

The rise of Indo-América as a new hemispheric consciousness in APRA during the 1920s and early 1930s was embedded as much in the legacy of anti-imperialist struggles against an aggressive US foreign policy as in the lived experience of exile and the struggles for political survival following the return to the homeland. Yet the ideological consolidation of Indo-América as a political project, one of anti-imperialist resistance and hemispheric unity, happened most decisively from exile during the 1930s and the early 1940s, a period of recurrent persecution against Apristas in Peru. Surprisingly, few scholars have underscored the odd correspondence during that period between APRA’s moment of most fervent ideological production, on one side, and the moment of fiercest censure and persecution recalled by the history of the party, on the other.Footnote ⁸ This correspondence, however, was not a coincidence. Rather, the production of Indo-América as a political concept of anti-colonial resistance and Latin American solidarity, which took place during that period, was closely entwined with the transnational solidarity campaigns that Aprista exiles organized to stop persecution in Peru.

Social scientists have studied how advocacy groups that want to successfully externalize a specific agenda when their demands are blocked at the national level do so by turning this agenda into universal claims. For these advocacy groups, the strategy of extending the appeal of local demands seeks to interest international allies that would otherwise feel disengaged from their cause.Footnote ⁹ To ensure the political survival of APRA, the Hayista faction and its widespread networks of exiled Aprista activists put forth a defensive strategy that worked precisely along these lines. Within APRA’s five-point maximum program lay Indo-Americans’ best defence against foreign oppressors and the only path toward their liberation.Footnote ¹⁰ At least this is the message that Apristas, who painstakingly portrayed abroad their organization as working for the rest of the continent, wanted to convey. Apristas, in short, used Indo-América as a way to universalize their demands in the context of local repression.

Consider for example the communiqué that the APRA leader Víctor Peralta wrote in June 1935 in an attempt to alert continental public opinion to the persecution that Apristas endured in Peru. Peralta was at the time incarcerated in El Frontón, a detention centre located off the coast of the Peruvian capital which was infamous for its brutality toward inmates.Footnote ¹¹ Interestingly, his cry for help was specifically addressed to those Peralta called his “Indo-American brothers.”Footnote ¹² Peralta explained that because freedoms of expression didn’t exist in Peru, Apristas had to resort to the outside world to be heard; they had to bring their appeal before “todas las organizaciones revolucionarias y conciencias libres de Indo América y del Mundo.”Footnote ¹³ Peralta requested solidarity of action in the face of the injustices that Apristas endured in Peru on account of their ongoing activism, not only for Peruvian democracy and social justice but also in support of the oppressed people of the continent.

Because of APRA’s commitment toward Indo-América, reasoned Peralta, the fate of Apristas in Peru should be the concern of all Indo-Americans. “Nosotros sabemos que nuestros hermanos de Indo América, por cuya unión política y económica luchamos,” he wrote, “sabrán en estos momentos de tragedia peruana recoger el S.O.S. de nuestros hogares en abandono, no para enviarnos sus barcos mercantes con cargamento de víveres como suele hacerse para auxiliar a las victimas de los terremotos, sino para mandarnos sus cruceros de guerra cargados de su protesta enérgica.” What Apristas wanted, he claimed, was to hear “el rugido de nuestros hermanos explotados de América India.”Footnote ¹⁴ Nowhere in this letter did Peralta call for Indigenous solidarity to oppose creole oligarchy. Nor did any references refer to the rights of the Indigenous peoples in Peru or Native Americans elsewhere in the Americas. The references to América “India” and Indo-América that dotted Peralta’s communiqué alluded exclusively to APRA’s fight for political and economic Latin American sovereignty.

That Peralta used Indo-América as a political instrument to advance the cause of APRA internationally, and that he did so without references to Indigenous agency, was all but exceptional. For one, despite earlier, if superficial references to a common Latin American indigenous legacy, from the mid-1930s onward, the concept of Indo-América more accurately referred to APRA’s project of hemispheric unity for Latin American sovereignty and democracy rather than an alleged utopia of Indigenous resistance in the Americas. Apristas praised José Vasconcelos’ approach to the ideal of a mixed race in the Americas, “el primer caso de raza positivamente universal,” and imported his racial mysticism into their continental designs.Footnote ¹⁵ As a result, while APRA’s domestic program sought solutions to integrate the Indigenous population of Peru into the nation-state, at the continental level Apristas expanded beyond essentialist definitions of who were Indigenous actors and what constituted indigeneity.Footnote ¹⁶ “No necesitamos tener predominio de sangre india, española o italiana para sentir y pensar como indoamericanos,” claimed exiled Apristas in 1937, for they trusted that the “nuevo espíritu iniciado en América” forced itself upon those who lived in Indo-América.Footnote ¹⁷ This telluric framing of indigeneity claimed to be inclusive of everyone in Latin America, but in fact it rested on APRA’s capacity to de-racialize Indigenous references in its continental program. This approach to Indo-América from the 1930s onward presented one important advantage for the persecuted APRA: it made its vision for hemispheric unity more malleable in the face of international public opinion.

By the mid-1930s, the telluric use of Indo-América as an imagined continental community had become ubiquitous in the transnational solidarity campaigns put forth by Aprista exiles. If publicizing the support that APRA was able to garner from Indo-American allies was crucial to bolster APRA’s legitimacy before Peruvians, as seen in previous chapters, the reverse was also true. Courting foreign allies similarly forced on Apristas the necessity to show that their organization was working for all Latin Americans – which many in the party came to bill Indo-Americans, though not exclusively – not just for the Peruvian people. This organizing strategy incited the upholding of their maximum program despite the focus given to the Peruvian scene. It also confirmed that Indo-América was the reality of all, stressed Apristas. And APRA proposed not only to unveil this Indo-American reality, but also to theorize it for them.

One way to do so was by framing the social and political problems that were plaguing Peru as a cautionary tale for the rest of Indo-América. For example, as publicizing abroad the persecution of Peruvian Apristas turned into a core objective of APRA’s continental diffusion in the 1930s and 1940s, Apristas began to accompany these descriptions of violence not only with calls for Latin American solidarity to protect PAP, but also with implicit warnings against the imminent dangers Latin Americans similarly faced. In these accounts, Apristas’ suffering in Peru and exile hung over Indo-América like the sword of Damocles.Footnote ¹⁸ Apristas’ efforts to highlight in their maximum program the ways in which Peru’s historical development was the same as that of other Latin American countries further reinforced these forewarnings. Problems faced by Peru, advocated Apristas, were problems Indo-América faced as well.Footnote ¹⁹

As the previous section details, this argument was vividly portrayed in the analyses that Aprista exiles wrote on the concurrent threats of imperialist and Fascist penetrations of the Americas in the mid-to-late 1930s. They argued that Peru’s intimate experience with foreign imperialism yielded important lessons for the rest of the continent. “La penetración fascista en Indoamérica es un hecho que nadie puede negar,” the Aprista José de Goyburu noted in the prologue to Avance del imperialismo fascista en el Perú. “El estudio que el compañero doctor Fernando León de Vivero hace de la penetración italiana, alemana y japonesa en el Perú,” he stated, “así nos lo demuestra.”Footnote ²⁰ In the 1930s, APRA’s transnational advocacy campaign for the return of democracy in Peru increasingly associated Peruvian president Benavides with fascism, rather than presenting him as a pawn of US imperialism as they did previously. A Fascist regime supported by a small oligarchic minority had taken over Peru, argued Apristas by the late 1930s. Their political analyses, which committees in exile took pains to circulate broadly in Latin America and in the United States, repeatedly touted the repressive rule of the Benavides government as evidence of the growing advances of fascism in the Americas.Footnote ²¹

Apristas presented their democratic and revolutionary program as the only viable way to save the middle classes in the Americas from Fascist ideas. “El camino para detener el avance fascista en Indoamérica es el aprismo,” advanced one APRA leader in 1938.Footnote ²² “En los momentos que la Europa Fachista [sic] provoca a una guerra, que será desvastadora [sic],” wrote another, “Indoamérica quedara como preciosa reserva de cultura y civilización, si las izquierdas de todos los países de Indoamérica se unifican con programas que miren y defiendan a las grandes mayorías explotadas, en frente únicos, contra el imperialismo, el fachismo y las tiranía nacionales.”Footnote ²³ Even when the civilian Manuel Prado Ugarteche rose to power in Peru in 1939, Apristas continued to rebuke Peruvian authorities at home and abroad for being Fascist and contrary to the true Indo-American ideals of democracy and civil liberty.Footnote ²⁴

The work of imagining Indo-América during the 1930s and 1940s remained mostly the prerogative of APRA leaders in exile. The space of exile was particularly propitious, if not mandatory according to Aprista exiles, to originally reflect upon the changing realities of Indo-América.Footnote ²⁵ In effect, with the notable exceptions of Haya de la Torre and Antenor Orrego, the Apristas who stayed in Peru between 1934 and 1945 were either too consumed by national politics and by the need to efficiently organize political action in the midst of state persecution, or too remote from the continental scene to seriously engage with the production of political analysis on the fate of Indo-América.Footnote ²⁶

As a result, a rich intellectual production on the meaning and ambitions of APRA’s vision of hemispheric unity only saw light outside Peru. The communities of Peruvian Apristas exiled in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico produced the brunt of this political work. They disseminated Indo-American knowledge across the hemisphere by way of their publications in exile, such as Trinchera Aprista in Mexico and the Boletín Aprista in Argentina. The Comité Aprista of Santiago (CAP of Santiago) played a crucial part in the upkeep of APRA’s maximum program throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Chile’s long period of stable democracy between 1932 and 1973, in effect, provided Apristas exiled in that country with a safe haven from where they produced political propaganda and worked to spread the Aprista doctrine across the continent. It is in Chile that the Hayista faction, with the Ercilla press, published its most cited work on Indo-América.Footnote ²⁷ Smaller and lesser-known communities of Aprista exiles in the United States also worked to produce and disseminate political knowledge on Indo-América in North America, notably in the booming Hispanic press in the United States.

Nevertheless, given the extent of the public opinion campaigns, it was important for Aprista ideologues in exile to maintain a serious dialogue between Peru and the rest of the continental scene. Consequently, even when publication topics aimed directly at Peru – and because these publications appeared outside Peru – Apristas took pains to justify their publications and ideas before a foreign, Indo-American audience. They carefully explained the continental relevance of their Peruvian-centric studies by highlighting the economic and political lessons that their publications could yield to “Nuestra América.”Footnote ²⁸ Significantly, then, even in the cases where analyses focused on Peru, Apristas always included an introductory section to prove the relevance of these studies to the rest of the Americas. The work on Indo-América that APRA leaders and ideologues were conducting outside Peru evidenced the commitment of APRA to working for the redemption not only of the Peruvian people but also of all citizens of the Americas.

As Apristas used Peru to educate their Latin American peers about the dangers to which the Southern Hemisphere was exposed, they also assiduously framed themselves as champions of Indo-América. Their political writings portrayed Apristas as expert-interpreters, who were able to translate what they saw happening in Peru for the larger benefit of the Latin American people.Footnote ²⁹ Prologues added to Peruvian-centric analyses boasted about the continental commitment of Aprista authors, introducing them to readers as devout Indo-American thinkers and activists. The Aprista Pedro E. Muñiz had dedicated his life with absolute abnegation, assured the APRA leader Carlos Manuel Cox in one such prologue, “a la causa de la redención de las mayorías productoras de nuestra América.”Footnote ³⁰ Cox defined Aprismo as a constructive and serious political movement of continental dimensions, fully able to “conducir a los pueblos y naciones oprimidos de América, a la ansiada meta de progreso, bienestar, soberanía e independencia económica.”Footnote ³¹

Though the study that Cox was then introducing focused primarily on the Peruvian national context, his presentation hoped to convince readers outside Peru that APRA also worked for their benefit. At other times, book prefaces reprinted excerpts from European and US allies who praised Apristas’ help in bringing to light the problems of the Americas.Footnote ³² Likewise, biographical notes introducing APRA leaders outside Peru stressed the ideological contributions they were making to the anti-imperialist struggle against foreign powers and oligarchic minorities and for the liberation of the Americas. A 1935 publication dedicated to the work and life of the APRA leader Magda Portal, which appeared in Buenos Aires, Argentina, thus enthused about the significance of her activism for the “independencia integral” of “nuestra América.” “Su tenacidad en la brega, su esclarecida mentalidad, su fidelidad inquebrantable,” added the book’s editors about Portal’s remarkable qualities, which served as a model for men and women “en todo el continente.”Footnote ³³

Because Apristas appealed to continental public opinion as a means to retrieve personal liberties and basic political rights in Peru, the concept of Indo-América had to evolve as a political project that catered not only to Peruvians, but also to Latin Americans across the Americas. This helps to explain why the first attempt to ideologically consolidate the meaning of Indo-América came in 1935 in the form of a book, titled ¿A donde va Indoamérica? This publication claimed to be the first official work to introduce the concept of APRA’s Indo-América to a non-Peruvian audience. The editors state in the preface that this was a mandatory read for anybody on the continent who wanted to gain awareness of the Indo-American realities and problems; “con ojos propios,” they stressed, without a “nieblas europeizantes.”Footnote ³⁴ However, far from being the ultimate Indo-American handbook, as implied by the Apristas responsible for its publication, ¿A donde va Indoamérica? in fact consisted of reproductions of collected essays about the meaning and future of the Americas that Haya de la Torre had authored between late 1928 and 1931, a period in which the use of Indo-América by Apristas was still scarce and ill-defined. Yet the value of this book should be assessed in light of its political significance rather than its ideological contributions. The entanglement between the ideological production of Indo-América on one side, and APRA’s political activism abroad on the other, stemmed from the necessity to advocate for the return of democracy in Peru.

Rapprochement between Indo-América and North America

APRA’s call for continental unity always was, and stayed, at the core of its political program from its foundation onward. Yet the justifications Apristas gave for imagining a regional alliance against foreign enemies changed over time. Not everybody in Latin America understood this shift at first, let alone the nature of APRA’s anti-imperialist project of hemispheric unity. Many contemporary critiques of APRA’s Indoamericanismo, for instance, scorned the concept for failing to represent Latin America’s racial and ethnic diversity. “¿Por qué indoamericano?” asked one such opponent, as reported in the pages of Trinchera Aprista in 1937; “¿Acaso todos son indios en Sudamérica?”Footnote ³⁵ Many more pointed toward the incongruity of such a name for a continent that included countries like Argentina, which claimed to have a population of almost exclusive European descent, while others noted the exclusion of people from African descent from the Indo-American appellation.Footnote ³⁶

To these critics Apristas replied with pragmatism. Indo-América was more practical a term than, say, the use of “ibero-lusitano-Franco-Africa-Americanos” to encompass the rich cultural and racial diversity of the American people.Footnote ³⁷ Of course Indo-América was never only a practical term or an exclusive anti-imperialist project of hemispheric unity. From the mid-1930s onward, Indo-América as a political concept also came to signal the advent of a new historical period – one in which Latin Americans would finally break with all forms of “colonialismo mental” inherited from past colonial and neocolonial periods.Footnote ³⁸ As such, APRA’s Indo-América was also an attempt to construct a historical consciousness of continental unity.Footnote ³⁹ Problematically, however, the universal appeal for the inclusion of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, which scholars like Luis Arturo Torres Rojo have praised in APRA’s Indo-América, relied on its capacity to de-racialize indigeneity. In other words, the success of Indo-América’s resilience as an ethos of Latin American and anti-imperialist solidarity during the interwar period and beyond rested precisely on disinvesting this political concept of all Indigenous agency.

This was all too clear by the early 1940s. Apristas then advocated the use of Indo-América “not as an exclusive revindication of the Indian, but, on the contrary, as a kind of effective integration of all the demographic components of this part of the globe.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Leaders of the Hayista faction came to associate broad psychological characteristics, such as patience, resilience, or love for the land with Indigenous subjects in the Americas. This vague framing of indigeneity meant that even predominantly white cities like Buenos Aires, Argentina, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Santiago, Chile, according to Apristas, shared “Indian” features with the Indigenous populations of Latin America.Footnote ⁴¹ Apristas repeatedly cautioned against misinterpretation of the use of Indo-América; this wasn’t a “racist” term that demanded people “‘regress’ to political and social forms of the pre-colonial period,” Luis Alberto Sánchez, one of APRA’s main ideologues, stated in a 1943 article published in the Hispanic American Historical Review. Neither did it call for a racial war against white people, Apristas claimed. Rather, for white and mestizo Apristas who were close to the Hayista faction, Indo-América aimed to restore the dignity and the economic and moral independence of the people of the continent by way of political unity between its more than twenty republics, while concurrently making overtures to critics of empire from the North.

It isn’t surprising, therefore, that APRA’s fierce anti-US sentiments, which initially accompanied its anti-imperialist project of hemispheric unity, gave way to more moderate positions vis-à-vis the northern hegemon starting in the mid-to-late 1930s. The inspiration for this program still heavily relied on the five-point platform that Apristas had designed in 1926 as part of the foundational doctrine of their anti-imperialist APRA. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the handful of Peruvian exiles who resided in Paris placed resistance against “yankee imperialism” at the forefront of their priorities. From this principal position four other points ensued, including (1) the political unity of Latin America and (2) the nationalization of land and industry in the region. The APRA also requested in the 1920s (3) the internationalization of the Panama Canal, which at the time was controlled by US authorities, and (4) proclaimed its solidarity with the oppressed people of the world.Footnote ⁴² A decade later the continental program read a bit differently. Apristas had traded the first principal of opposition to US imperialism to opposition to “all imperialisms.” The fourth point now demanded the “interamericanization” of the Panama Canal instead of its “internationalization.”Footnote ⁴³

These changes reflected APRA’s evolving worldviews with regard to Pan-Americanism. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the US presidency in March 1933 certainly had something to do with it. The Roosevelt presidency indeed heralded a period of changes in the conduct of US–Latin American foreign relations. The inauguration of the Good Neighbor Policy on April 12, 1933, which thrust the principles of non-intervention and non-interference to the forefront of US foreign policy in Latin America, had a positive impact on Latin American public opinion toward the United States as well as Washington’s Pan-American project. By stating that a “common ideal of mutual helpfulness, sympathetic understanding and spiritual solidarity” traversed the Americas and enshrined ideals of mutual respect and “neighborly cooperation” into the cornerstones of a democratic Western Hemisphere, this US foreign policy signaled the coming of a new era for Pan-Americanism.Footnote ⁴⁴ The contrast with the belligerent positions adopted by previous administrations since 1898 in the conduct of US foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere was striking. Latin American diplomats framed this change of foreign policy in a favourable light. They extolled the recognition of juridical equality this new Pan-Americanism bestowed on nations of the continent as well as the end it put to the Monroe Doctrine. The wave of editorials in the Latin American press reflected a similar sense of relief in the public opinion.Footnote ⁴⁵

Calls for the need to bring spirituality and friendship in an otherwise commercial and financially driven Pan-Americanism, which Christian intermediaries and APRA sympathizers like Charles Thomson, John A. Mackay, and Samuel G. Inman had been advocating for well over a decade, made their way into this new era of US–Latin American relations.Footnote ⁴⁶ Roosevelt’s attention to “the entire material, moral, and spiritual welfare of the people of this hemisphere” contrasted greatly with his predecessors’ shaping of Pan-Americanism in light of mere financial and commercial interests.Footnote ⁴⁷ APRA allies felt reassured by this policy and worked to ensure that the Roosevelt administration’s actions were in line with these idealist and pro-democratic positions.

Because courting foreign allies was so central to APRA’s survival and certainly because many of them were convinced that a combination of domestic reforms from within and inter-American collaboration from without would have the power to keep US imperialism in check, Apristas increasingly presented the United States as a champion of democracy in the Western Hemisphere. The concomitant rise of European fascism confirmed this rapprochement in the 1930s. Before the threat of war and fascism in Europe on one side, and the repeated denial of civil liberties in Peru on the other, the struggle for democracy moved to the foreground of the Indo-American project, leaving many in the movement to wonder what to do with their belligerent positions against the United States. “Si el control yanqui es inconveniente y lesivo para la independencia de una republica latino-americana,” reasoned, for example, one APRA ideologue in December 1938, “la implantación de intereses imperialistas japoneses o alemanes en el canal tendrán que ser peor.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In the changing global context, the United States was depicted as a desirable lesser evil. Significantly, this fear affected the democratic left in similar ways elsewhere in Latin America, as reported by US diplomats in post in San Salvador, about an editorial appearing in La Prensa on the threat of totalitarianism in the Americas. Robert Frazer commented the following to the Secretary of State on February 9, 1938: “It is interesting to note the change in the attitude towards the Monroe Doctrine which, having been considered for decades a menace if not an actual threat to Latin American sovereignty, becomes now, at the first sign of danger from a non-American source, a shield and a defense behind which American democracy may shelter.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Yet anti-Fascist unity never inspired Apristas to bow before US interests like obedient wards. On the contrary, the rapprochement between the APRA and the United States was never a linear, let alone ineluctable process. Despite what scholars often suggest, Apristas did not altogether abandon their anti-US positions following the inauguration of the Good Neighbor policy. One year after the Good Neighbor Policy, most Apristas in fact continued to hold straightforward anti-US positions in their approach to economic imperialism. “Frente al gran peligro del coloso del norte,” noted the APRA leader Oscar Herrera in a 1934 analysis for the APRA: Revista Aprista, “las pequeñas diferencias desaparecen en significación y es deber de la hora aunar la defensa.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Even when, four years later, Apristas relinquished their most aggressive attacks against the northern giant, their writings suggest that they stayed wary of US influence well into the 1940s. The article that Haya de la Torre wrote in August 1938, “El Buen Vecino. ¿Garantía definitiva?,” which appeared in Chilean, Mexican, and US publications, tackled the conundrum of trying to envision the future of Indo-América in relation to its most imminent dangers.Footnote ⁵¹ In this article, Haya de la Torre ponders the position that Indo-Americans had to adopt vis-à-vis the United States now that the Americas faced a more scary threat: European Fascism.

Apristas’ conclusions on the question were prudent. They favoured a rapprochement with the United States, but they remained aware of the possible caveats of cooperation between Indo-América and North America.Footnote ⁵² Particularly worrisome for Apristas was the temporary nature of Roosevelt’s foreign policy. They claimed to trust the good faith of Roosevelt’s administration, but they knew only too well that the Good Neighbor policy represented the policy of only one, non-permanent US administration. As a result, they viewed in Roosevelt’s promise of improved Latin America–US relations a guarantee of security for Indo-América, yet “por lo que la experiencia histórica nos demuestra,” Haya de la Torre noted, this guarantee of security was unstable and most likely all too ephemeral. “Se trata solo de una política que puede variar con el cambio de persona o de partido en el Ejecutivo de los Estados Unidos.”Footnote ⁵³

Apristas benefited from the growing climate of fear within the US political elite vis-à-vis the safeguard of liberal democracy in the Western Hemisphere. Yet they never hurriedly ran toward the United States. On the contrary, they argued that an alliance against the “Internacional Negra” should never devolve into “nuestra sumisa e irrestringida unión con el ‘buen vecino’ poderoso.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Apristas still forcefully opposed US-led Pan-Americanism. They proposed instead to build a coalition of democratic forces between the people of the Americas. They called this front the Democratic Front North-Indo-American (Frente Democrático Norte-Indoamericano), hoping to kill two birds with one stone: competing with the Pan-American Union, while resisting the rise of international fascism by way of continental solidarity. Apristas insisted on the democratic and popular nature of this front:

Magda Portal’s years of militancy in APRA from the margins of persecution similarly affected her outlook on Indo-América in the late 1930s. She was also inclined to make concessions, and think of alliances with the United States, as evidenced in her essay “La union impossible,” which she wrote from exile in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in August 1939. This essay sheds light on what Portal deemed to be profoundly Indo-American as of the late 1930s. Nazism, Fascism, and communism, she argues, opposed the democratic principles that underpinned the independence of the Americas and the project of Simon Bolivar, the nineteenth century creole who fought for the political independence of the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Portal defined anti-imperialism in light of the fundamental, Indo-American principles of democratic liberty and political sovereignty, linking them back to the experience of the nineteenth-century cycles of independence.Footnote ⁵⁶ To keep war against European powers at bay and protect Indo-América, Apristas were willing to envisage an alliance with the United States. Apristas remained wary of the northern power, Portal claimed, but as of January 1940 she also conceded to seeing useful complementarities between South and North America.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the essay she wrote in Chile, in 1940, entitled “Identidad y Diferenciación,” Portal first insists on continental differences between North America and South America, but her final argument stresses the complementary of both Americas. On the one hand, Portal takes great pains to describe how two Americas constitute the continent. Pointing to the spiritual and emotional incompatibility between North America and South America, Portal reverted to the arguments advanced years before by the Latin American Modernists. Latin America was spiritual and deep, whereas North America was materialistic and shallow. Only by establishing harmony and balance between Indo-América, the bearer of spiritual progress, and North America, the bearer of material progress, would humanity secure a peaceful future.Footnote ⁵⁸

The political practice of the past fifteen years of militancy in dialogue with US solidarity activists determined in many ways how they imagined their anti-imperialist project of hemispheric unity. Apristas believed in the people of the Americas and in the democratic forces that resided in grassroots unity. The fact that Apristas never experienced democracy at a national level helps to understand APRA’s growing understanding of democracy in light of continental cooperation. Democracy, for Apristas like Haya de la Torre and Magda Poral, came to be attached to the notion of hemispheric unity. The lack of basic political rights in Peru, perhaps more so than the changing world order, provoked important changes in how they were willing and able to imagine their continental program for Latin America, or for the Indo-American community.

Good Neighbours in a Changing Inter-American Order

In 1936, talk of the upcoming presidential election yielded the hope of an auspicious game change in Peru. Aprista activism intensified abroad in anticipation of these elections. APRA leaders in exile published articles in foreign journals advocating PAP’s demands to participate in the forthcoming elections. They also toured South America to give conferences and take part in interviews in which they promoted PAP’s electoral program.Footnote ⁵⁹ These efforts were conducted to no avail. The PAP was once more denied the right to participate in Peruvian elections due to charges of being an international organization.Footnote ⁶⁰ When the presidential candidate from the Social Democratic Party – Luis Antonio Eguiguren, whom Apristas supported – appeared to be on the brink of victory, “Benavides canceled the election and remained in power for another three years.”Footnote ⁶¹ Communities of APRA exiles reacted promptly and forcefully to this umpteenth denial of democracy in Peru, disseminating in their mouthpieces and in the foreign press criticism of the Benavides government for refusing to register PAP candidates.Footnote ⁶² Yet what difference could this make? Apristas had persistently censured the gruesome rule of the Benavides government in international publications without result. At the end of 1936, APRA’s illegal status still lingered in Peru. The PAP was barred from the normal democratic process. Scores of Peruvian Apristas continued to live in exile. As a result of this impasse, the Hayista faction looked poised to delve deeper into new forms of transnational political activism.Footnote ⁶³ Changing global and inter-American contexts furnished them with new tools to advance APRA’s political struggle for the return of democracy in Peru on the international stage.

In the aftermath of the electoral defeat of October 1936, PAP began to feel that backroom negotiations with political authorities and individual networking were no longer the right political strategy to adopt. The thank you letter that Haya de la Torre sent to the French pacifist Romain Rolland in April 1937 expressed more dissatisfaction than it did gratitude regarding his latest intervention before Peruvian authorities.Footnote ⁶⁴ Rolland’s gesture was certainly appreciated, but Apristas showed reservations regarding how much sway individual initiatives could hold over authorities in Peru. The Hayista faction realized that letters from renowned intellectuals were not sufficient anymore. Rather, what the party leadership expected from Rolland was his intervention to attract the attention of the League of Nations (LN) to APRA’s predicament in Peru. Peruvian Apristas hoped very much that, compelled by international pressure, Benavides would agree to let a “comisión imparcial auspiciada por la SDN” come and visit Peru.Footnote ⁶⁵

Interestingly, this letter to Rolland reveals that the PAP had already designed a detailed mandate to give to the League of Nations emissaries when they came to Peru. Apristas demanded that international observers direct their attention to the conditions in which political prisoners were being held in Peruvian jails as well as investigate the domestic situation in Peru more broadly. Separating truth from lies in what the Benavides administration showcased in international forums was the mantle the PAP now passed along to international organizations like the LN. “Quisiéramos que alguna vez se deje oír la voz de la SDN a favor de los pueblos oprimidos de América Latina. […],” Haya de la Torre pleaded on behalf of the Peruvian people. “Quisiéramos que siempre la voz de los hombres libres del viejo Mundo, dejen oír una palabra mas enérgica y más conminatoria [sic] contra los horrores que aquí cometen los grotescos imitadores del fascismo europeo.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Touting domestic affairs in Peru, and particularly state repression against PAP, as a case of continental responsibility to resist Fascist intervention had by then fully entered the movement’s repertoire of political action. Moreover, the mounting threat of Fascist imperialism in Europe furnished the PAP with the prospects of worldwide moral concern: “¿Podremos esperar de Ud.,” Haya de la Torre asked Rolland, “y de todos los hombres libres de Francia y Europa, la ayuda moral que necesitamos para defender al pueblo peruano?”Footnote ⁶⁷

More importantly still, renewed denial of democracy in Peru in September of 1936 took place against a backdrop of Inter-American developments anchored ever more firmly in the hemispheric principles of peace and democracy. By the end of the decade, the rise and consolidation of European Fascism and Nazism on one side and the clear and present threat of a conflict with the Axis powers on the other, encouraged further changes in APRA’s maximum program. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1937 had appeared for many in the Americas, including Apristas, to be a kind of last-call for the preservation of democratic principles in the Western Hemisphere. The havoc this war brought about in Europe was a foil for precisely what Inter-American diplomats wanted to avoid at all cost. Specifically, the Roosevelt administration became increasingly wary of Nazi plans for Latin America. Latin American diplomats communicated directly with Summer Wells from the State Department to warn the United States against the rise of fascism in Latin America. US informants to South America similarly reported on the dangers of Nazi conspiracy in the region.Footnote ⁶⁸

These world events bolstered the diplomatic legitimacy of the Good Neighbor Policy and called for its expansion to the whole continent.Footnote ⁶⁹ Discussions held at the Buenos Aires (1936) and the Lima (1938) Inter-American conferences signalled hemispheric security efforts and confirmed unity of action in the face of European Fascism.Footnote ⁷⁰ The holding of the VIII Inter-American Conference in Lima by the end of 1938 constituted a golden opportunity for an APRA leadership in search for fresh ways to attract international attention to its cause. The Hayista faction was poised to use this event to promote the cause of PAP internationally. To do so, APRA leaders devoted time and energy months in advance to muster forces and prepare a sound plan of attack, coordinating lines of combat between the National Executive Committee (CEN) of the party and other committees in exile abroad, those of Chile and Mexico in particular. The Hayista faction trusted that the Lima Conference represented the best assets in a bid to revive the transnational campaign they had been spearheading for the past four years.

In October of 1938, two months before it took place, the CEN in Peru confirmed that it was ready to stage its offensive at the Lima Conference.Footnote ⁷¹ APRA leaders placed confidence in the plan of attack prepared in view of the forthcoming event. They hoped that a combination of forceful propaganda circulating in Peru and external pressure from Latin American delegates might induce the Peruvian authorities to “free a large number of political prisoners at the time of the Pan American Conference.”Footnote ⁷² A first wave of propaganda was published in exile and before the conference took place in Lima. Starting in the summer of that year, APRA exiles in Chile and Mexico worked to convince Inter-American foreign emissaries to take up the case of the PAP as a symbol of anti-Fascist unity in Peru, and, more broadly speaking, address what had gone wrong with democratic governments in the Americas. This strategy aimed to influence public opinion abroad through the sway of social movements and prepare those in Peru by way of propaganda.Footnote ⁷³ Reporting on the growing continental solidarity that organized in favour of APRA, their writing argued that “intimidated by continental condemnation,” and also very “conscious of the pressure being brought to bear,” Peruvian authorities were now searching for ways to dodge the demands “of the civilized world.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The ways in which they couched their requests also show that Apristas knew how to play with the desire of Roosevelt to frame himself as the champion of democracy in the Western hemisphere and as a friend to Latin America. “It is well known that President Roosevelt has always condemned usurpers and tyrants,” stressed the September issue of APRA’s clandestine publication Cuaderno Aprista. “No one is ignorant of the fact that the great Yankee democrat, freely elected and reelected by millions of his fellow-citizens, abominates all those who seize the power of government by artifice and by force, to become the hangmen (executioners) of their peoples.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Apristas took Roosevelt at his words when he promised democracy and security to the Western Hemisphere. They demanded that the US president respect the principles of peace and democracy in the Americas that were ratified at the 1936 and 1938 Inter-American conferences. APRA leader Alberto Grieve Madge travelled to New York City in August 1938 to the Segundo Congreso de la Juventud por la Paz. There, he took the floor to denounce the lack of respect for the most “elementales derechos democráticos del pueblo” and to publicize APRA’s position: “Nosotros recogimos las palabras del Presidente Roosevelt en Buenos Aires durante la Conferencia Interamericana en diciembre de 1936,” he noted, astutely adding shortly afterward that “Las reiteradas expresiones del mandatario norteamaericano conducen a suponer que atentan contra la paz interna y constituyen una amenaza para la paz internacional los gobiernos americanos que se divorcian de la democracia.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Apristas criticized the lack of international mobilization for PAP by requesting that the word of the US president and the principles of democracy enshrined in the inter-American order be respected. These democratic principles provided Apristas with a discourse of intervention based on the legitimacy of the growing inter-american order. They denounced Pan-Americanism on one hand, while using Inter-American institutions on the other to demand intervention in Peru to impose democracy. Their activism at the Lima Conference, then, aimed to prepare the ground in favour of APRA by mobilizing public opinion and working to sway foreign delegates to Lima or exert direct pressure on Roosevelt to reinstate civil liberty in Peru.Footnote ⁷⁷ This brings us back to the recurrent tension between internationalism and nationalism in the growth of APRA during the interwar period. By the late 1930s, Apristas forthrightly demanded foreign intervention in order to halt the non-democratic regime in Peru and restore civil liberties in their country.Footnote ⁷⁸ Significantly, these claims were voiced not only to non-state US actors, as we have seen in previous chapters, but also to foreign diplomats and state representatives.

The recrudescence of aprista activities on the eve of the Lima Conference was so intense, it attracted comments from diplomatic agents. One US report summarized: “Minister for Foreign Affairs informs of an increasing amount of Aprista propaganda reaching Peru by mail from Mexico and United States. Aprista representatives gathering at Labor Conference in Mexico City and will do anything to annoy Peruvian Government during Inter-American Conference in Lima.”Footnote ⁷⁹ These two communities of Aprista exiles prepared political material that specifically aimed to inform the delegations attending the Inter-American conference in Lima about the situation of repression that prevailed in the country at that time.Footnote ⁸⁰

The other wave of propaganda happened during the conference. The PAP deployed every effort to court the flock of journalists who had just converged in the Peruvian capital. APRA leaders met with foreign correspondents and official delegates from Chile, Mexico, Cuba and the United States, within the precincts of Incahuasi, the name given to the hiding place of Haya de la Torre in Peru.Footnote ⁸¹ Aprista prisoners, in turn, conducted a hunger strike for the duration of the Inter-American conference. They also clandestinely forwarded to international allies, often by way of their loved ones and other Peruvian allies, detailed descriptions of the detention conditions they were subjected to, hoping to have international observers corroborate the horror stories listed in their accounts.Footnote ⁸² “Hay quienes ponen en duda nuestras afirmaciones!” the wife of an Aprista prisoner told Mexican delegate Esperanza Balmaceda de Josefe on 10 December 1938.Footnote ⁸³ “Vaya los Delegados a las prisiones y demanden la presencia de los presos,” she wrote to Balmaceda de Josefe. “Sus revelaciones fieles les demostrarán pasajes dantescos del ‘Infierno Verde’.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Foreign delegates to the Lima Conference bore one quality deemed essential for Apristas: they embodied political capital internationally. As mentioned earlier, the holding of the Buenos Aires Conference in 1936 sanctioned the growth of an Inter-American system oriented toward ideals of democracy deeply rooted in concepts of continental security. As such, members of the delegations who traveled to Lima in 1938 to further the development of this regional order represented the “noblest of democratic ideals” for those truly committed to advancing the development of a democratic Western Hemisphere.Footnote ⁸⁵ The delegates to the Lima Conference’s symbolic power for the Americas as a whole added leverage to the type of work and interventions that these delegates would engage in upon returning in their respective countries. This explains why Apristas were willing to adapt their maximum program in a way that opened a venue for collaboration with Inter-American institutions. If it made sense ideologically, for the threat of Fascism felt impending, adapting Indo-América in a way that positioned APRA against communism and Fascism, reinforced, politically, its struggles to advance the return of democracy in Peru. The Inter-American institutions furnished the Hayista faction with new tools to promote internationally APRA’s political struggles for the return of democracy in Peru.

Internationalism vs Nationalism

By 1938, however, disagreements about how best to defend PAP and fight to retrieve basic political liberties in Peru were rife within the movement. Those who believed in Indo-América did not always agree on how to write about it. Correspondence between APRA leaders in exile and in hiding in Peru opens a window on the lack of unanimity within the party regarding Indo-América’s role and place in the Aprista doctrine. The internationalism of the Hayista faction, together with its insistence on APRA’s maximum program, provoked resentment among sections of the party leadership. Many deemed it was time for PAP to focus its energy back on Peru rather than Indo-América. Meanwhile, APRA leaders and close allies of the Hayista faction residing outside Peru faulted Haya de la Torre for the lack of foresight in his new designs for Indo-América. “Su concepción continentalista parece como relegada, luego de lo que hubiera sido impulsión de juventud,” stressed the Argentine Gabriel del Mazo in his correspondence with the APRA leader Magda Portal in 1940.Footnote ⁸⁶ Portal had by then managed to escape to Argentina and then Chile, where she took residency in November 1939 and began working with the community of Aprista exiles established in the Chilean capital. She agreed with del Mazo. Both blamed Haya de la Torre for obstinately refusing to leave Peru. Portal argued that Haya de la Torre’s prolonged isolation in Peru, and his implication in trivial party matters, caused him to lose touch with larger continental realities. In turn, del Mazo suggested that exile bestowed on intellectuals and political activists the experiences and stimulation necessary to reflect originally upon the Americas. Their verdict was unequivocal: Haya de la Torre’s prolonged confinement in Peru had made him lose touch with continental developments.Footnote ⁸⁷ Indo-América endured in APRA with different meanings, changing forms and premises depending on where or with whom one reflected upon its nature.

By the fall of 1937, the Hayista faction’s insistence on focusing on the international scene reverted to inter-American platforms to lead its battle for civil liberties. The struggle to exist as a political party in Peru depended on Indo-América, both as a concept and as a practice of political solidarity and support from other Indo-American countries. But a new electoral cycle in Peru concurrently resuscitated the hopes of democratic participation at the national level. As a result of the Hayista faction’s failure to retrieve civil liberties by appealing to the continental scene, a crisis of leadership in APRA burst into the open in 1939–1940.

Part of the party leadership in Peru reproached Haya de la Torre for this defeat. In the course of 1939, plans emerged to remove him and declare the Aprista Alfonso Vasquez Lapeyre as leader of the PAP in his stead. Vásquez Lapeyre’s plot to overthrow Haya de la Torre came to fruition in August of that year. The internal coup began with the takeover of the Tribuna, the official mouthpiece of APRA in Peru, on August 24, 1939. Vásquez Lapeyre addressed an editorial to his “compañeros de toda la republica,” in which he declared himself the Secretary General of the PAP and announced that he was from now on the person in charge of the party. “Ha querido el destino que recaiga en mi,” he wrote, “modesto militante, la responsabilidad de conducir a buen puerto la gloriosa nave aprista. Izo, pues, el pabellón de la armonía, de la abnegación y de la sinceridad, seguro de que nadie osara arriarla jamás.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Vásquez Lapeyre asked for the cooperation of the Aprista masses. He also included references to persecution and exile in recognition of the suffering of APRA militants. One can feel in his discourse the need to assert his authority as the new leader of APRA.Footnote ⁸⁹

This crisis of leadership casts a spotlight on a series of conundrums the party had to face: Who was in the best position to fight to restore full individual liberties to Peruvian Apristas: Apristas in Peru or their peers in exile? What was the best way to do so? Participate from within the national scene, with perhaps the price of compromise with national enemies? Or use Indo-American solidarities as a way to exert pressure on the Peruvian government? In the latter case another compromise would be necessary, that of curtailing APRA’s aggressive attacks against the US government and, as a corollary, moderating their initial critiques of structural inequalities in the Americas. What would be gained and what would be lost from these contrasting positions?

For Apristas who supported Vásquez Lapeyre, the answer to these questions lay in the national scene. Calls to focus the organizing efforts of the party on Peru rather than on Indo-América began to emerge in the previous year. Consider, for example, the letter that one Aprista exile in Santiago de Chile wrote to the Aprista Committee of Mexico on December 8, 1938. This document highlights a degree of discontent regarding the overwhelming attention granted to the international scene. In what follows, the author argues that the APRA movement had to refocus its attention onto Peru:

Alfonso Vasquez Lapeyre dovetailed with this position. He promised to focus on the national scene and to act so as to restore civil liberties in Peru as soon as possible. The group that ousted the Haya de la Torre clique was tired of the party’s illegal status, from which nothing could be done for the masses of Peru, it argued. Moreover, the forthcoming national elections seemed to offer a perfect opportunity to retrieve civil liberties and act within the national political scene.Footnote ⁹¹ They promoted peace and cooperation rather than confrontation with the enemy and insisted on the nationalist and democratic nature of the PAP.Footnote ⁹² The PAP is for Peru, stressed Vasquez Lapeyre, blaming the previous leadership for having forgotten this fact and for “un minúsculo grupo de exaltados sin función en el Partido, sin visión y sin entraña.”Footnote ⁹³

On October 10, 1939, three days before the release of the tenth issue of La Tribuna under the control of the Vásquez Lapeyre faction, a small pamphlet from La Tribuna, subtitled “edición clandestina de protesta” appeared. The format of this clandestine publication differed from the official version of La Tribuna. It was smaller and showed that the Hayista faction had access to less resources to publish the journal it used to control. APRA leaders in exile, including Arturo Sabroso Montoya and Luis Heysen, were in communication with Haya de la Torre in Peru in order to address the situation.Footnote ⁹⁴

The Hayista faction would not relinquish the party leadership without a fight. It rapidly organized in order to regain its authority inside Peru. Communities of Aprista exiles wrote petitions and sent out messages of solidarity in Peru in which they confirmed their allegiance to the leadership of Haya de la Torre. They likewise censured the new National Executive Committee that claimed to be organizing PAP henceforth. Furthermore, the editorial staff of the Editorial Ercilla, in Chile, sent a note to Peru in August 1939, condemning the recent take over of La Tribuna. Another party document signed by over ninety Aprista exiles argued that this was a fraud, reiterating their faith in an APRA movement united under the leadership of Haya de la Torre:

Another form of mobilization took form in print. The Hayista fraction attempted to publicize within Peru its most recent doctrinal work abroad. It announced, for example, that new books were to reach Lima shortly, and invited every party follower who wanted to read them to contact the National Secretary of Culture (Secretario Nacional de cultura). The authors of these books were APRA ideologues we are by now familiar with, as you can see in the following statement: “Todos los cc. Que quieran recibir obras de Haya de la Torre, Antenor Orrego, Luis Alberto Sánchez, Juan y Manuel Seoane, Ciro Alegría, Cossio del Pomar, Pedro E. Muñiz, etc., que tanta resonancia han hallado en Indoamérica podrán recibirlas pidiéndolas al Secretario Nal. De Cultura.”Footnote ⁹⁶ It was important to highlight, as they had in the past, the relation between these ideologues and the rest of Indo-América. These efforts to reassert to the rank and file members of the party the legitimacy of the APRA leaders who manned the Hayista faction suggested that Aprista exiles, the foreign press, and regional Aprista forces from all over Peru supported them.

By February 1940, the Hayista faction had recovered the party leadership, illustrated by the control it resumed over La Tribuna. References to the outside world immediately returned to its pages, as all references to “Indo-América” had disappeared since the takeover in August 1939. The celebrations for Haya de la Torre’s birthday described in the February 29, 1940 issue suggested that APRA exiles and the international community rejoiced at these festivities. Internationally, it publicized the solidarity of APRA exiles with the leadership of Haya de la Torre: “Los desterrados apristas en Chile, Nueva York, México, Buenos Aires y La Paz se reunieron en grandes asambleas la noche del 21 para esperar el 22 de febrero. Se pronunciaron discursos de saludo a Haya de la Torre.”Footnote ⁹⁷

APRA leaders also returned to international allies as a means to gain legality in Peru. Thanks to connections with foreign allies, the current CEN was now in position of power to ask that foreign governments intervene by requesting that civil liberties be restored in Peru.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Hayista faction claimed to serve as the only legitimate intermediary to the outside world and to allegedly powerful allies.

This episode of contested leadership provides a privileged view of the political intrigues and divisions that ran through the PAP in 1939–1940. These political intrigues in turn show how difficult betrayals were at a personal level. They give access to details that shed light on how internal political debates were pursued within intimate spheres, including how longtime friends and colleagues tried to exert power over one another.Footnote ⁹⁹ Archival documents help to identify the role that communities of exiles played when the legitimacy of one leader was being questioned. This crisis of leadership points to the crucial question of legitimacy within the APRA movement. Securing legitimacy, these moments reveal, was part of the everyday struggle as well. Outlawed, the PAP received no institutional legitimacy from anyone – no state, no governmental apparatus, no democratic system, and no open party politics. Its only legitimacy derived from transnational networks of peers, activists, comrades, and colleagues.

Significantly, once the Hayista faction retrieved power within the PAP, it returned ever more firmly to internationalism and to Indo-América’s project as a bulwark against the advance of facism in the Americas. The Hayista faction had to maintain its hold of the continental project for pragmatic and political reasons. The adaptation of Indo-América, as seen in this chapter, came about as a result of the Hayista faction’s use of the maximum program to attract international public attention and to legitimize its power internally in the PAP. Local struggles and party politics contributed to a great extent to bringing forward the internationalist character of APRA’s approach to democracy, social justice, and continental solidarity. In effect, the global world order cannot explain in and of itself the ideological changes that underpinned the maximum program of this anti-imperialist movement. Rather, the need to resist recurrent state persecution and to survive politically played as much of a role, if not more, in making sure that Indo-América would survive in the Aprista doctrine beyond the foundational years.

Pressuring Roosevelt into the 1940s

APRA’s focus on Fascist imperialism rather than US imperialism helped to solve a growing paradox in their movement. Apristas walked a tightrope between their anti-imperialist theses, which rejected foreign intervention and established the sovereignty of Indo-America nations on one side, and their repeated demands that the continental democratic community intervene in Peru’s domestic affairs on the other. Direct pleas for US intervention to help restore and safeguard democracy in Peru and protect Latin America from dictatorial rules peppered their political writings from the late 1930s onward. Sometimes these pleas were indirect and aimed at a democratic US public. In a reflection authored in 1941 on the Indigenous question in South America, entitled “Racial Minorities and the Present International Crisis,” Luis Alberto Sánchez underscores the need for US subjects to implicate themselves in the current problems of Peru. Because foreign capitals had amply benefited from the economic exploitation of Indo-América, advanced Sánchez in an intricate argument, it was to the foreign capital’s advantage to protect these benefits by making sure that totalitarianism did not make more headway in Indo-América. It was the foreign capital’s responsibility “to fulfill a human task and for its own advantage,” noted Sanchez, to act not as an obstacle “but rather an inducement in the task of obtaining effectiveness of the democratic regime in each of the American countries.” The conclusion was unequivocal. “To give real life to democracy, is to start democracy among us,” concluded Sanchez. “Anything else would be to serve, today or tomorrow, the aggressive and sullen force of totalitarianism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Between this command and an explicit invitation for US capitalists to intervene in Latin America and dethrone dictatorships there was but a step.

At other times APRA leaders demanded US intervention in Peruvian affairs much more explicitly. Correspondence between leaders in exile showcases that Apristas enthusiastically welcomed, and even sought, Roosevelt’s pressure on Peruvian authorities, as revealed in the letters of the Aprista Andrés Townsend Eszurra to Portal: “Muy bien la carta de Ciro y acorde con tu estimación de ‘que la publicidad y no la reserva ayudan a la causa de Juan y Serafín,” he wrote on October 14, 1941.

APRA leader and labour organizer Arturo Sabroso Montoya directly wrote to the US Vice-President Henry Wallace on April 12, 1943, in an effort, he claims, to establish relationships between democratic forces of the Americas. In his letter to Wallace, Sabroso described the workers of Peru as the bearers of democracy in the Western Hemisphere who were pleading for a rapprochement between continental allies who were democrats in the face of foreign, non-American Fascist regimes. Significantly, Sabroso’s letter put Roosevelt on par with heroes of Latin American independence as a symbol of the forefathers of democracy in the Americas. “Como salutación mas genérica al pueblo todo de los Estados Unidos, cumplimentamos fervorosamente al ilustre Presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Sabroso noted as an introductory note, “cuyo nombre ya resuena en nuestros hogares como el de los grandes conductores democráticos del presente, y en el futuro quedara grabado por la Historia, como lo esta el de Bolívar, Juárez, y demás próceres de nuestra primera independencia.”Footnote ¹⁰² Though he perhaps truly believed in the virtues of these political actors, it is crucial here to bear in mind that this APRA leader was strategically appealing to figures of power to gain more clout for his outlawed movement.Footnote ¹⁰³ Adapting Aprista discourse in a way that pointed to common agendas between them and the allies they courted was a necessary means to an end. Here, my study shows that we need to study the specific political strategies that affected the types of political discourse and that were, at times, vehemently condemned within the rank and file of the Aprista group.

APRA’s rapprochement with the United States suggests that the growth of wartime pro-US sentiments in the Latin American left were a result not only of the fear of Fascism but also of direct political gains the left could make by engaging with the inter-American order. Scholars who study the international history of the Western Hemisphere have recently begun to re-conceptualize the Pan-American order by taking into account the role that Latin American diplomats played in the development of inter-American relations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Part of the left, such as the APRA movement in Peru, also attempted to use these new platforms to advance their agenda back home. Certainly, this can also explain why Indo-América was less rigid as a concept than other points of the Aprista program. At first, in the 1920s, the meaning of APRA’s imagined continental community evolved because it occurred in a moment of sheer creation. It then continued to evolve in the 1930s, this time partly because this concept had to remain flexible as Apristas sought to justify their international pleas for help. They needed to construct a sense of belonging between continental actors and the APRA movement. In fact, this is crucial to understanding the rise of Indo-América as a bulwark against Fascism as well as this project’s lack of interest, in the end, in the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It would be hard to claim that the changing international order had nothing to do with it. But even more significant was what Indo-América and Latin American solidarity represented a political instrument for Apristas to gather supporters and defend their political organization back home. And the truth is, it worked. Many allies established dialogues with Apristas in the late 1930s to early 1940s, precisely because they viewed them as either allies in the fight against fascism or paragons of democracy in the Western Hemisphere, or both.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Conclusion

The repressive political context in Peru deeply affected APRA’s ideological production on Indo-América. One significant consequence of the experience of persecution and exile is that Apristas were engaged in a creative process that required them to constantly coax foreign allies. They wanted solidarity activists, and, starting in the late-1930s, state representatives as well, to defend their cause in international forums and supply resources for their movement. Because Apristas needed to appeal to continental public opinion in an attempt to retrieve basic political rights in Peru, Indo-América had to remain alive as a project able to sustain anti-imperialist aspirations for the continent at large. It also increasingly had to be framed as a symbol of democracy, anti-communism, and anti-fascism in the Western Hemisphere for APRA to receive the international support it was seeking. Calling attention to the notion of Indo-American unity and Latin American solidarity, in other words, empowered Peruvian Apristas to formulate a line of defence that extended beyond the purview of the nation-state.

Central in PAP’s political struggle during the 1930s and 1940s was the capacity to appeal to international democratic forces and to representatives of free speech in Indo-América. In APRA’s political writings, the political climate in Peru portended what risked happening in Indo-América if the left failed to mobilize against foreign imperialism and oligarchic minorities. APRA exiles prided themselves on having been able to analyze the problems of the Latin American continent. They claimed to be equally aware of their political responsibility vis-à-vis their peers abroad. Even when reflecting upon Peruvian issues, therefore, Aprista ideologues did so in a way that stressed the relevance these questions had for the larger Indo-American scene.

It is from this vantage point that we must approach the evolution of the Indo-American project from the mid-1930s to early-1940s rather than by way of exclusive discursive analyses. Without granting attention to the political processes that undergirded APRA’s ideological changes, in effect, we risk providing a seamless historical narrative where fragments and contingencies prevailed. Neither the inauguration of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1933, nor the advent of the Second World War six years later can in and of themselves satisfactorily establish a causal relationship between the international context and APRA’s changing political discourse, for these approaches fail to understand the intricate interplay between the local scene and the global context in fashioning one of Latin America’s most important and enduring projects of hemispheric unity. APRA did not move to the right of the political spectrum or abandon its vindication of Indigenous groups – however superficial they were in the first place – because of international events. Nor did it as a result of the betrayal of its foundational principles in exile once Apristas returned to Peru. Rather, we should envision the ideological and evolutionary changes in APRA not as a linear process but as a mosaic of contested ideas and visions rooted in the connections between the local and the global. We must likewise reckon with the fact that US historical actors participated in shaping the development of APRA’s anti-imperialism from the start, and even before its founders in fact officially established their political movement in the mid-to-late 1920s.