Peru

• 1. Introduction

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  Peru traces its heritage back to the 10th millennium BCE and the Caral-Supe civilization, the earliest civilization in the Americas. That single fact tells you the scale of this country in western South America. People were building complex society along the Pacific coast here while most of the world had no cities at all. The land itself refuses to settle into one shape. Arid plains run along the Pacific. The Andes climb from the north to the southeast. The tropical Amazon basin spreads out in the east, fed by the Amazon River. More than 32 million people live across these extremes, with the capital and largest city at Lima. At 1,285,216 square kilometers, Peru is the 19th largest country in the world and the third largest in South America. How did a place with one of the longest histories of civilization end up with a presidency that changes hands almost yearly? Why does a net producer of food leave half its population food insecure? And how did a small ethnic group from Cusco build the largest known state in the pre-Columbian Americas? The answers run from sun gods to silver mines to a string of impeachments that has not stopped.

• 2. The Four United Provinces

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  Tawantinsuyu was the name the Inca gave their empire, translated as "The Four Regions" or "The Four United Provinces." The Incas of Cusco began as one of the small and relatively minor ethnic groups, the Quechuas. As early as the thirteenth century they started to expand and absorb their neighbors. The pace stayed slow until the middle of the fifteenth century, when conquest accelerated under the emperor Pachacuti. Under Pachacuti and his son Topa Inca Yupanqui, the Incas came to control most of the Andean region, with a population of 9 to 16 million inhabitants. Pachacuti promulgated a comprehensive code of laws and rebuilt Cusco magnificently, ruling as the God of the Sun. From 1438 to 1533 the Incas used conquest and peaceful assimilation alike. They reached from southern Colombia to northern Chile, between the Pacific Ocean and the Amazon rainforest. Quechua was the official language, though hundreds of local languages and dialects were spoken across the territory. Inti, the sun god, was elevated above local cults such as that of Pachamama, while many local sacred Huacas were still worshipped. The Sapa Inca was considered the "child of the sun." That belief would matter when a civil war split the empire from within.

• 3. Conquest And The Cross

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  Atahualpa became the last Sapa Inca after defeating and executing his older half-brother Huascar, in a civil war sparked by the death of their father, Inca Huayna Capac. In December 1532, a party of conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro defeated and captured Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca. They were supported by the Chankas, Huancas, Cananis and Chachapoyas as Indian auxiliaries. The capture was only the first step in a campaign that took decades. The last Inca resistance fell when the Spaniards annihilated the Neo-Inca State in Vilcabamba in 1572. The Indigenous population collapsed, overwhelmingly due to epidemic diseases brought by the Spanish, alongside exploitation and socio-economic change. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo reorganized the country in the 1570s around gold and silver mining, with Amerindian forced labor as the primary workforce. The great silver and gold lodes at Potosi and Huancavelica made the viceroyalty an important provider of mineral resources. Peruvian bullion fueled a trade network reaching Europe and the Philippines, with Callao as the furthest endpoint of the route in the Americas. Christianity spread alongside the silver. Spanish clerics believed the Native peoples "had been corrupted by the Devil," and it took only a generation to convert the population. Churches rose in every city, and some replaced Inca temples, such as the Coricancha in Cusco. Peruvian Catholicism kept a syncretism in which native rituals merged with Christian celebrations, a blending that still marks the country's religious life.

• 4. Crossing The Andes

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  In the early 19th century, while most South American nations were swept by wars of independence, Peru remained a royalist stronghold. The Criollo oligarchy enjoyed privileges and stayed loyal to the Spanish Crown. The liberation movement started in Argentina, where autonomous juntas formed as Spanish authority weakened. Jose de San Martin created the Army of the Andes and crossed the Andes in 21 days. In Chile he joined the Chilean general Bernardo O'Higgins and won the battles of Chacabuco and Maipu in 1818. On the 7th of September 1820, a fleet of eight warships arrived at Paracas under San Martin and Thomas Cochrane of the Chilean Navy. They took Pisco on the 26th of October. San Martin established his headquarters at Huacho on the 12th of November while Cochrane blockaded Callao. San Martin's strategy was diplomacy, sending representatives to urge the Viceroy to grant independence, but all negotiations failed. Viceroy Jose de la Serna abandoned Lima, and San Martin occupied the city and declared Peruvian independence on the 28th of July 1821. He created the first Peruvian flag and was declared Protector of Peru. Simon Bolivar then took charge of fully liberating the country. With Antonio Jose de Sucre, he won the Battle of Junin on the 6th of August 1824 and the decisive Battle of Ayacucho on the 9th of December that year. Upper Peru was later established as Bolivia, a separation that ended the brief Bolivarian dream of a single Latin American Confederation.

• 5. Guano And War

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  From the 1840s to the 1860s Peru enjoyed stability under the presidency of Ramon Castilla, funded by increased state revenues from guano exports. The droppings of Peru's seabirds became an economically important export. The money modernized the country with railways, the bureaucracy grew, the indigenous people stopped paying tribute, and slaves achieved their freedom. By the 1870s the guano resources had been depleted and the country was heavily indebted. On the 5th of April 1879, Chile declared war on Peru, unleashing the War of the Pacific, which lasted until 1884. Peruvian historiography is unanimous that the deep cause was Chile's ambition to seize the nitrate and guano territories of southern Peru. The naval combat of Angamos was fought on the 8th of October 1879. The Chilean ships Cochrane, Blanco Encalada, Loa and Covadonga cornered the monitor Huascar, the main ship of the Peruvian navy. Its commander, Admiral Miguel Grau, died in the fray and became Peru's greatest hero. Almost five years of war ended with the loss of the department of Tarapaca and the provinces of Tacna and Arica in the Atacama region. The War of the Pacific was the bloodiest war Peru has fought. A final peace treaty in 1929, the Treaty of Lima, returned Tacna to Peru while Arica stayed with Chile.

• 6. The Strongman Decade

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  Alberto Fujimori assumed the presidency in 1990 with inflation running at 7,650 percent. His policies dropped it to 139 percent in 1991 and 57 percent in 1992. Behind that turnaround sat the Plan Verde, a scheme drafted by the armed forces that involved the genocide of impoverished and indigenous Peruvians, censorship of the media, and a neoliberal economy controlled by a military junta. According to the head of the National Intelligence Service, an understanding was reached between Fujimori, Vladimiro Montesinos, and military officers tied to the plan before his inauguration. When Fujimori faced opposition, he dissolved Congress, suspended the judiciary, and arrested opposition leaders in the auto-golpe, or self-coup, of the 5th of April 1992. He then rewrote the constitution and privatized numerous state-owned companies. His fight against the insurgent group Shining Path was marred by atrocities on both sides, including the Barrios Altos massacre and La Cantuta massacre by government paramilitary groups. He broadened the definition of terrorism to criminalize left-wing opponents, using the terruqueo, a fearmongering tactic that accused opponents of terrorism. His National Population Program resulted in the forced sterilization of at least 300,000 poor and indigenous women. In November 2000 Fujimori resigned and went into self-imposed exile. In April 2009 he was convicted of human rights violations and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the killings and kidnappings of the Grupo Colina death squad.

• 7. A Revolving Presidency

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  On the 7th of December 2022, hours before Congress was set to begin a third impeachment effort, Pedro Castillo accused it of creating a "congressional dictatorship" and tried to dissolve the legislature. Congress held an emergency session the same day, removed him, and replaced him with Vice President Dina Boluarte, the country's first female president. Castillo was arrested while dropping off his family at the Mexican embassy and charged with rebellion. This pattern of removal is not new. The 1993 Constitution, written by Fujimori and his supporters without opposition participation, contains broadly interpreted impeachment wording that lets the legislature impeach the president without cause. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was forced to resign in 2018. Martin Vizcarra was removed in 2020, a move widely seen as a coup by Congress, after which President Manuel Merino faced protests and resigned in five days. The Boluarte government grew unpopular and triggered the 2022-2023 Peruvian political protests, which demanded a new constitution. Authorities responded with violence, including the Ayacucho massacre and Juliaca massacre. On the 10th of October 2025, Congress removed Boluarte and Jose Jeri was sworn in as interim president. In February 2026 Congress removed Jeri, and Jose Maria Balcazar was elected interim president to lead the country until the general elections scheduled for the 12th of April 2026. Many presidents have ended in prison or worse. Alan Garcia killed himself in April 2019 as police arrived to arrest him over the Odebrecht bribery scheme.

• 8. Land Of Extremes

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  Almost 60 percent of Peru's area sits within the selva, the jungle covered by Amazon rainforest in the east. The Andes run parallel to the Pacific and divide the country into three regions. The costa is a narrow, largely arid plain. The sierra holds the Altiplano plateau and the country's highest peak, the 6,768 meter Huascaran. Peru contains 4 percent of the planet's freshwater, and the Amazon, at 6,872 kilometers the longest river in the world, covers 75 percent of Peruvian territory. The combination of tropical latitude, mountain ranges, and the Humboldt and El Nino ocean currents gives Peru a vast diversity of climates. Precipitation ranges from less than 20 millimeters annually in deserts to more than 8,000 millimeters in the rainforest. That variety produces extraordinary biodiversity, with 21,462 species of plants and animals reported as of 2003, 5,855 of them endemic. The country shelters over 1,800 species of birds, the puma, the jaguar, and the spectacled bear. This natural wealth underwrites the economy. In 2019 Peru was the world's second largest producer of copper and zinc, and mining represented 61.3 percent of exports in 2023. It is also the world's largest producer of quinoa and maca, yet a 2022 FAO report found half the population moderately food insecure, what its director called "the great paradox of a country that has enough food for its population." That paradox now plays out beside award-winning Lima restaurants like Central and Maido, which have made the capital a global culinary capital.