Peasant activists affiliated with the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) seized the Pomacocha hacienda in Ayacucho in 1961. The invasion triggered over a decade of serious conflict between those peasants who supported local CCP activists and those who opposed them. The campesinos who challenged Pomacocha's CCP activists did so using the rhetoric of anticommunism, and they were in turn derided as “yellows,” or conservatives. Peasant anticommunism stemmed from conflicts over money, religion, participation, and especially political rivalries, as the staunchest anticommunist peasants in the community belonged to the rival APRA party. The Pomacocha case shows that landowning elites, the church, government officials, and the military had no monopoly on the Cold War rhetoric of anticommunism; peasants likewise mobilized counterrevolutionary discourses to further their own interests. Ultimately, anticommunism allowed campesinos to pierce through the political neglect that characterized indigenous peasants' relationships with the twentieth-century Peruvian state.

With his television blaring in the corner, Don Isidro Durán spoke of the men whom his neighbors had once chosen as leaders, men those neighbors labeled “colonels.” As Don Isidro described the indigenous political mobilization that rocked his rural Ayacucho community back in 1923, he explained that these colonels led their supporters in military exercises and proclaimed that President Augusto B. Leguía was “bad for the Pueblo.” Although the elderly Durán spoke with the authority of an eyewitness and the eloquence of a local intellectual, the indigenous leaders he described are essentially absent from the extensive literature on indigenous politics during Peru's 1920s. That absence is surprising, for reports of various popularly appointed colonels fill Ayacucho's archival records during Leguia's oncenio (his 1919-1930 presidency). These Ayacuchano civilian colonels were typically literate, indigenous men witxiout formal standing in the Peruvian armed forces. During the first years of the 1920s, Ayacucho peasants embraced rliese indigenous men as leaders because of their profound anger at official government authorities and their agents.

This article challenges the notion that the APRA party's poor electoral showings in Peru's southern sierra during the 1930s reflected regional lack of interest in the party and that APRA held little appeal for indigenous peasants. Focusing on two rural districts in the department of Ayacucho, the article reveals that APRA was indeed a formidable presence in rural Ayacucho during the 1930s. With its calls for regional inclusion and decentralisation, APRA appealed to progressive hacendados, schoolteachers and even wealthy peasants, who linked APRA's national discourses to their local struggles for political power and land.