4 - Life and Freedom for Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre: Surviving Chaos in the Peruvian APRA Party, 1932–1933

Summary

Chapter 4 studies the consequences that state repression in 1932–1933 had on the political capacities and on the calls for Latin American solidarity of the Peruvian APRA. It argues that trans-American solidarity buttressed the rise of APRA as a populist movement from the 1930s on. The simultaneous experiences of persecution and exile in the early 1930s on one side, and of political contests to control the rank-and-file of the party on the other, pressed upon the Aprista community, and more specifically upon the Hayista faction within that community, the necessity to cling to a discourse of Latin American solidarity to ensure political survival in Peru. The chapter shows that being connected to the outside world supplied to the Hayista faction two crucial political advantages as it vied for political control of the movement. For one, the APRA leaders who had experienced exile in the 1920s and who were deported in the early 1930s had access to transnational solidarity networks that others in the party lacked. Also, in addition to providing access to external resources, international connections gave the Hayista faction the opportunity to acquire symbolic capital in Peru.

On the night of August 22, 1932, a patrolman apprehended Manuel Villalobos Hihuayin as he meandered down “Veinte de Septiembre” street in Lima. Villalobos reeked of liquor. Thirty-two years old, Villalobos was originally from the northern province of Chiclayo. He was single and eked a living from construction jobs he contracted here and there. It was quite plausible that his habits included enjoying a few drinks at the local pulpería after a long day of work. This time, though, Villalobos was completely drunk. That he drank too much did not represent an offence to public order per se, but it did get him into trouble that night.¹ According to a police report filed three days later, Villalobos’ crime consisted of having given “vivas al Apra,” to which accusation he retorted having no recollection of what he did or said that night. But, even as the suspect denied any allegiance to the Peruvian APRA party (PAP) or to any other political group, and though Villalobos confessed to being so inebriated the night of his arrest that he neared unconsciousness, Peruvian authorities turned a deaf ear to his plea of innocence. Villalobos was charged with subversive activities and condemned to thirty days in prison.²

Earlier that year, police officers detained Jorge Alzamora for similar reasons. He spent two weeks in prison after the prefecture of Lima found him guilty of having publicly professed comments favourable to the cause of APRA.³ Similarly, on July 12, 1932, Antero Muñoz was caught distributing political fliers, deemed subversive, to passers-by in Lima. The following month, Muñoz, who had confessed to his membership in PAP, was condemned to 180 days in jail.⁴ On July 14, 1932, a certain Don José Loaiza denounced to his neighbourhood superintendent of Chorrillos the seditious activities conducted by Aprista Moises Morales. Although Loaiza’s deposition brimmed with cracks and approximations, Morales was nonetheless taken into custody shortly thereafter.⁵ The same happened to Aprista Carlos Alberto Izaguirre Alzamora and his brother Julio, both arrested in August 1932 at their home on charges of possession of subversive propaganda. Similar fates were suffered by the employees of the Hermanos Faura printing house: Eugenio Asencio Moscol, Orlando Vásquez Solano, Alberto Zuzunaga Effio, Victoriano Gonzáles Trochou, Emilio Espinoza Landaberi and Alfonso Abad Navas. The courts indicted the printers for clandestinely running off Aprista material.⁶

These actors were all abruptly detained and brought to stand before biased trials, where the whims of a few clerks were tantamount to the rule of law. The archives of the Peruvian Ministry of the Interior in 1932–1933 are full of similar cases. The Emergency Law, instigated in February 1932 by the government of Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro, contained strict and dire provisions regarding the fate of political dissidents.⁷ It thwarted freedom of expression. It allowed police forces to apprehend and incarcerate those who “disobeyed,” namely Peruvian citizens suspected of Communist or Aprista affiliations. As such, the episodes of arbitrary arrests above reflect a much larger, and grimmer reality of prevailing state persecution in Peru. They signify the climate of fear and suspicion that the Sánchez Cerro government sought to instill among the Peruvian population. The preserve of national order had its price, according to military officers. In 1932, any excuse, any inkling of dissent became a reason to cart off potential agitators. These episodes of arbitrary arrests also point, more specifically, to an oppressive surveillance apparatus that rendered political organization for PAP particularly difficult following the presidential election of October 1931.

Chapter 4 studies the consequences that the return of full-fledged persecution in 1932–1933 had on the political capacities of PAP. When analysing the growth of the populist APRA in the early 1930s, scholars seldom consider the extent to which repression limited the party’s political capacities in terms of internal cohesion and intellectual production. Yet the return of state repression in Peru following the 1931 election and the victory of Sánchez Cerro over PAP’s presidential candidate threw the young party in disarray, leaving the door wide open for internal struggles to fester. The simultaneous experiences of persecution and exile in the early 1930s and of political contests to control the rank-and-file of the party, I suggest, pressed upon the Aprista community, and more specifically upon the Hayista faction within that community, the necessity to cling to a discourse of Latin American solidarity to ensure political survival in Peru. The underlying tensions between the local and the global analyzed in this chapter, then, shed light on the crucial interplay between APRA’s experience of international solidarity work and the coordination of political struggles within the movement itself. Latin American solidarity for Aprismo was not just an idea to be debated. Before anything else, Latin American solidarity was a question of survival. It was a plan, a practice to be set in motion in order to defy the creole oligarchy within the nation.

Chapter 4 more specifically details how being connected to the outside world supplied to the Hayista faction two crucial political advantages as it vied for survival. For one, the APRA leaders who had experienced exile in the 1920s and who were deported in the early 1930s had access to transnational solidarity networks that others in the party lacked. Following the arrest of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in May of 1932, as this chapter explains, a number of foreign allies organized a movement of solidarity with PAP. Their cross-border calls for a new democratic order in the Americas took Haya de la Torre as a symbol of their fight against both right-wing dictatorships and communism. The Hayista faction used this solidarity campaign to their advantage, wagering on the publicity that a pro-democratic international public opinion afforded to PAP. Hence, in addition to providing access to external resources, international connections gave the Hayista faction the opportunity to acquire symbolic capital. They disseminated in Peru stories of APRA’s international connections and reputation, much like they had two years earlier as described in Chapter 3. However, by 1933 this discourse of international prestige and connections was conspicuously associated with the figure of a single leader: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. By publicizing the international fame of Haya de la Torre, the Hayista faction bolstered the legitimacy of PAP before Peruvians and simultaneously asserted the faction’s leadership within PAP’s rank-and-file. Internationalism and trans-American solidarity, this chapter makes plain, prompted the Peruvian APRA’s rise as a populist movement from the 1930s onward.

Persecution and the Dismantling of PAP

The new wave of political repression launched against PAP in 1932–1933 originated in Peru’s presidential elections in October 1931. The official count declared majority for Sánchez Cerro, who had won with 50.7 percent of the votes. His main opponent, the presidential candidate for PAP, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, came second with 34.5 percent of the votes.⁸ PAP immediately decried the legitimacy of Sánchez Cerro as president of Peru. The party argued that fraud had tarnished the electoral process, a claim not entirely ludicrous given the country’s past history of electoral frauds but persuasively debunked by the scholarship since.⁹ On December 8, 1931, on the day of Sánchez Cerro’s inauguration, Haya de la Torre rebuffed the latter as president and declared himself the only true and moral leader of Peru.¹⁰

As a result of PAP’s refusal to comply with the electoral results, confrontations between governmental forces and APRA followers escalated rapidly. Apristas called for general strikes and organized large demonstrations in the streets of Lima to dispute Sánchez Cerro’s victory.¹¹ Meanwhile, in the northern part of the country, where PAP had collected the majority of its votes, feelings of resentment translated into political action. A series of face-offs broke out between small farmers and local authorities.¹² Rumours soon spread that PAP was organizing a revolutionary uprising and that party affiliates would not hesitate to resort to force and bloodshed, if need be, to take power and establish Haya de la Torre as president of Peru.¹³ The Peruvian government retaliated with a series of counter-revolutionary actions that aimed to quell aprista opposition. Sánchez Cerro passed a decree in November 1931 that prohibited all public meetings and demonstrations by political parties. Three months later, the Congress approved the Emergency Law that the government had designed to restore order in the country. This law suspended personal liberties and brought the level of persecution against PAP to new heights with the arrest and exile of twenty-three Aprista congressmen. By May 13, 1932, eight party leaders had been executed, twenty-six sentenced to prison, and thirty-seven more deported to Chile.¹⁴ It was this context that explained the many arrests described in the introduction of this chapter.

State persecution deeply affected PAP’s ability to operate as a viable and effective political organization.¹⁵ Failing to reckon with this grim reality risks replicating the widespread but misguided belief that PAP was an organized and highly disciplined entity from its inception in 1930 onward. As we shall see, this wasn’t the case. The experience of ongoing repression created a number of hurdles that shaped APRA’s complex and unsteady growth as an anti-imperialist and populist political movement.

For one, renewed repression in Peru made the task of educating inexperienced APRA militants more difficult. During an interview with the US ambassador Fred Morris Dearing in January 1932, Haya de la Torre acknowledged the hurdles that he faced when teaching ideological tenets of APRA to the party’s rank-and-file in Peru. Haya de la Torre maintained that party members “felt the rightness of the Party’s aim,” but yet the party faced “a long and tedious road to follow to bring the rank and file up to an understanding of the Party’s aims.”¹⁶ This passage confirms, on the one hand, the difficulty of adapting an ideology first conceived from afar to the everyday concerns and aspirations of the Peruvian people. Yet it also suggests that attempting to do so in a context where APRA followers were busier staying out of jail than engaging in serious reflection was close to impossible.

Additionally, political repression exacerbated latent problems of party directions, noticeable even to outside observers. US diplomatic reports hint at the lack of clear leadership in PAP in 1932. According to one such report, penned by Fred Morris Dearing in February of that year, simmering tensions between factions of APRA appeared likely to explode. Ambassador Dearing stressed the lack of control that Aprista leaders had over some sections of the APRA party. He wrote in his report, “above all Haya de la Torre’s central problem [is] that of controlling and reforming his lieutenants and party members can only be accomplished slowly.”¹⁷ The arrest and trial of Haya de la Torre on May 6, 1932, followed shortly after by the failed revolutionary uprising in Trujillo, only served to compound the situation.¹⁸ On 7 July 1932, a group of APRA militants captured the northern city of Trujillo in an attempt to launch an insurrectionary war against the Sánchez Cerro dictatorship.¹⁹ Those who participated in the uprising, a group opposed to the Hayista and pro-democratic faction, argued that violence had become necessary to oppose the persecution of APRA and to rise to power in Peru.²⁰ Instead of marking the beginning of a national revolution, as APRA rebels had envisioned, this episode ended dramatically three days later with many dead and injured. Governmental military forces rapidly and easily quelled the staged revolution.²¹

By the Peruvian winter of 1932, state persecution had successfully crushed the cohesion of the party, leaving even its most fervent affiliates at a loss for clear direction. The circumstances in which the Aprista Perla Lapoint tried, to no avail, to resign from the party earlier that year casts a spotlight on the level of disorganization that was by then endemic to PAP. On August 13, 1932, Lapoint was arrested and taken into custody. The police officer who handled his case reported that he first apprehended Lapoint around four in the afternoon, “por haber estado dando vivas al Apra en estado de ebriedad,” he wrote, and that after a summary search in his residence he found a number of incriminating documents. The documents effectively testified to Perla Lapoint’s involvement with APRA. Yet these documents were all dated 1931 and, as Lapoint remarked, he now felt completely dissociated from PAP and wanted nothing more than to formally leave its ranks. Giving notice of departure to a fragmented PAP, however, was easier said than done. When his interrogators asked what he meant by a failed resignation, Lapoint retorted it was on account of “no existir la directiva del partido aprista.”²² The state of chaos in the party was such, Lapoint regretted, that he no longer knew where to present his resignation to make it official.²³

APRA leaders readily acknowledged the state of chaos of their organization. Starting in March 1932, the National Executive Committee (CEN), under the direction of Haya de la Torre at the time, resolved to try to cope with the level of disorganization that beset not only the activities but also the resistance of the party in the face of state persecution.²⁴ It called an extraordinary plenary session in Lima to discuss the seriousness of the situation and reckon with the predicaments it faced. The party apparatus was dismantled. Its propaganda system was almost entirely shut down. Worse still, because of the impossibility of transmitting clear instructions to Apristas scattered across the country, the CEN had to reckon with the social disorder caused by individual party members who arbitrarily took their frustration to the streets and engaged in acts of violence.²⁵ The CEN attributed – in March of 1932 – the lack of discipline in Aprista ranks to the lack of central command in the party, as explained in the first issue of its underground mouthpiece, the Newsletters of PAP. Yet it concurrently condemned individual acts of violence for being impulsive, and, as a result, unworthy of the shrewd methods that ostensibly defined aprismo. Significantly, by portraying a wayward party in need of guidance, the Executive Committee indirectly championed its own cause. Implicit in this contention, in effect, was the role that the Lima-based leadership intended to recapture as the executive of PAP.

The CEN was on paper the top administrative unit of PAP. It was controlled by the APRA leaders who had experienced exile in the 1920s and who sided with the leadership of Haya de la Torre. Based in Lima, it sent out instructions to communities of APRA exiles abroad and coordinated the dissemination of pro-APRA propaganda throughout the country.²⁶ This access to underground networks abroad and in Peru, specifically the control it afforded over PAP’s political propaganda, increased the leverage of the CEN in the party. The CEN was officially under the control of Haya de la Torre following the 1931 elections and until his arrest in May 1932. By and large, it is possible to equate the CEN during the 1930s with the positions held by the Hayista faction. For this reason, the CEN and the Hayista faction are terms I use alternately to designate the Lima-based, pro-democratic and anti-communist faction of the APRA movement from the early 1930s onward.²⁷

By the first half of 1932, the CEN claimed that they had the capacity and the determination to “dignify” the political struggles that were then rocking Peru. Recalling the democratic tradition from which APRA came, the Hayista faction promised to instill order and method into a disorganized PAP.²⁸ To do so, one of the first noticeable initiatives launched by the CEN was to send to press a clandestine mouthpiece, entitled the Newsletter of the Peruvian APRA Party (Boletín del Partido Aprista Peruano). It usually came in the form of a rudimentary two-page leaflet that reported on the most recent undertakings of the CEN in Lima with the use of educational and upbeat articles.²⁹ Significantly, however, very few engaged in serious political reflection. From the uncertainty of clandestine retreats, there was indeed little time or energy left to engage in substantial analyses.³⁰ In 1932, in the midst of persecution, creating original political knowledge mattered less to APRA leaders than did the need to construct the image of a strong and active PAP. The arrest of Haya de la Torre on May 6, 1932, and the expressions of international solidarity it immediately triggered, gifted the CEN with a unique opportunity to accomplish that goal.

International Solidarity Campaign with Haya De La Torre

Following the passage of the 1932 Emergency Law and the renewed spike of persecution it unleashed against PAP, Haya de la Torre became a prime target of the Sánchez Cerro government. The new president was determined to stop this radical from continuing to encourage political dissent. Haya de la Torre hid for several weeks before police located him on May 6, 1932.³¹ News of his subsequent arrest spread rapidly. In Peru, a crowd of supporters spontaneously took to the streets of the capital upon hearing about the detention of this major APRA leader. Apristas marched on to the Plaza Mayor to oppose this new affront to Peruvian democracy and to what they correctly viewed as another assault on their political party. The exact number of participants is unknown, but according to the New York Times, the size or at least the energy of the demonstration was dramatic enough to cause commotion among Peruvian authorities.³² Yet the legal provisions that had led to the arbitrary arrest of Haya de la Torre applied to the protesters as well. The government refused to budge on Haya de la Torre’s detention. Persecution against political agitators expanded.

International supporters quickly mobilized around Haya de la Torre. Between May 1932 and August 1933, when an Amnesty Law was promulgated to free all political prisoners, many Latin American actors drafted congressional motions and petitions, sent out cablegrams, and used newspapers and magazines to express solidarity with APRA and to decry the repressive regimes of Sánchez Cerro and his successor, Oscar Benavides (who assumed power in 1933 after the assassination of Sánchez Cerro by a presumed Aprista). Joaquín García Monge, a well-known Costa Rican democrat and anti-imperialist advocate, inveighed against “the Peruvian tyranny of Sánchez Cerro.”³³ Sánchez Cerro’s oppression of Peruvian Apristas, he scolded on July 26, 1932, in the pages of the Diario de Costa Rica, ran counter to the democratic and continental Hispano-American citizenship that intellectuals across the Americas aspired to build.³⁴ He demanded the immediate release of Haya de la Torre. “Esta es una forma de barbarie que urge combatir,” stated García Monge. “Hay que organizar un movimiento de opinión para que el militarismo estúpido del Perú vea que la América tiene los ojos puestos sobre su sable levantado.”³⁵ Many Latin American actors echoed García Monge’s demand for democracy in Peru and for the release of the APRA leader Haya de la Torre. The San José Bar Association (Colegio de Abogados) and the Costa Rican University student association organized protests and issued pro-APRA communiqués addressed to Peruvian authorities.³⁶ Throughout Latin America, remarked the US ambassador to Peru, irate citizens came together in protest of the unfair treatment meted out to Haya de la Torre, “requesting that [the] Constituent Assembly of Peru” free him at once.³⁷ More significant still, an impressive number of legislative chambers in the region, including those of Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Costa Rica, unanimously approved bills demanding amnesty for Haya de la Torre.³⁸

The widespread coverage that Haya de la Torre’s arrest received in Latin America showcases the symbolic capital that he had successfully accumulated in Latin America in the course of the previous decade. His travels across the Americas in addition to his extensive correspondence with anti-imperialist peers had indeed contributed toward making him a renowned leftist intellectual in the region by the time of his arrest in 1932. This coverage likewise hints at the struggles for democracy and social justice that were rocking the entire continent at the time. The 1930s were years shaped by political violence not only in Peru but also throughout Latin America. Soon after the stock market crash in late 1929, military takeovers swept the region as a result of growing economic and social unrest. Despite regional differences, these military governments shared the same aversion toward civilian rule. They were likewise committed to restoring peace and order in their respective countries, using violence against their own population if needed. Given that context, then, many Latin American intellectuals and politicians saw in the imprisoned Haya de la Torre a symbol that bore meaning not only for Peru but also for their respective national contexts and for the future of the Americas more broadly. The petitions signed by solidarity activists outside Peru effectively turned APRA, and specifically an APRA placed under the leadership of Haya de la Torre, into a symbol of Latin American solidarity and continental democracy.

Consider for example the petition that a series of distinguished Mexican intellectuals presented to the Peruvian Congress in July 1932.³⁹ According to an article that appeared on July 3, 1932, in El Nacional, an important Mexican newspaper, “the purpose of these Mexican intellectuals in making this petition [was] not to create a conflict nor [sic] to criticize the action of the Peruvian Government, but, based on the merits of Haya de la Torre, to secure the liberation of the South American thinker.”⁴⁰ Particularly important here is the reference to Haya de la Torre as a South American thinker rather than a Peruvian politician. Although the Mexican petitioners claimed they wanted to respect the sovereignty of Peru, they simultaneously claimed to be speaking on behalf of a higher continental ideal. In their petition, interestingly, the latter principle superseded the former: by protesting what they viewed as the unjustified repression of Haya de la Torre, Mexican intellectuals claimed to be defending the culture and progress of American republics at large. The petition offered three main justifications to explain why they requested the immediate liberation of Haya de la Torre and his fellow imprisoned Apristas.⁴¹ Each provision made direct reference to a principle of continental solidarity, either in the form of a shared Indo-Latin identity or in the name of a democratic ideal that guaranteed freedom of thought and basic political rights:

1. 1. “The personality of Haya de la Torre, as one of the greatest Indo-Latins and representative of the restlessness and aspirations of the present young generation for the advancement of social ideas […], merits, in our opinion, protection and respect.

2. 2. Whatever may be the details of the internal political struggle in Peru, upon which we do not feel ourselves qualified to express an opinion, there exists a well defined continental interest, in the name of which we are acting, for the defense of the exponents of culture and progress without whose constant and efficient action our republics would be unable to fulfill their historic destinies.

3. 3. With the installation in Peru of a new government, the Indo-Latin mind trusts it will abolish the methods of coercion and terror which characterized dismal epochs, and, with ample generosity and feeling of the moment […], will grant to Haya de la Torre and companions the liberty and guarantees to which they are entitled.”⁴²

Later that year in Mexico, the states of Puebla, Michoacán, Nuevo León, and Coahuila urged the Congress of the Union, the legislative branch of the Mexican federal government, to use its influence before Peruvian authorities and other Latin American legislatures to demand at once the liberation of Haya de la Torre.⁴³ They requested that Peruvian and continental authorities protect the life and integrity of a Peruvian citizen who, they noted, was also a strong and valuable advocate of Latin American sovereignty. These actors justified their interference in Peruvian affairs by asserting that Haya de la Torre offered a model to emulate in the fight against foreign interests in Latin America.⁴⁴

State representatives from other Latin American countries likewise alluded to a sense of continental solidarity that coalesced around the figure of Haya de la Torre. In the course of the Peruvian winter of 1932, the Congresses of Colombia and Costa Rica unanimously approved bills requesting amnesty for him. In Colombia, the Senate spearheaded the protest. The proposition formulated by Colombian Senators Serrano Blanco, Tirado Macias Holguín Julio, Cote Bautista and Umana Bernal reportedly rose from a democratic sentiment, deep-rooted in Colombia, which justified the need to defend an individual who had worked to advance the spiritual and administrative sovereignty of Latin America.⁴⁵ Costa Rican representatives similarly referred to a principle of Latin solidarity in order to justify their defense of Haya de la Torre, as highlighted in the telegram they sent to Peruvian authorities in July of 1932: “The Congress of Costa Rica, by unanimous decision, has agreed to address the Legislative Body of this sister Republic in order to request, in the name of Latin solidarity, the intercession of its high good offices to prevent the execution of the reported death sentence against Haya de la Torre.”⁴⁶

It is difficult to evaluate how many solidarity activists ultimately participated in the liberation campaign in favour of Haya de la Torre in 1932–1933. As we shall see in the next section, several non-Latin American allies also played an important role in orchestrating this international movement of support, making it difficult to precisely assess the number of initiatives that directly stemmed from Latin Americans. Its historical importance relies less on the specific number of those who signed the petition, than on the dissemination of these stories abroad and in Peru. These petitions point to one important reality for PAP in the early 1930s and beyond: moments of crises were oddly beneficial to PAP precisely because they acted as catalystic moments that attracted attention to its political cause.

Significantly, these petitions also reveal the flexibility with which an imagined community of democratic support coalesced around the international defence of APRA. The petitioners referred to Haya de la Torre sometimes as a South American thinker, sometimes as a Latin-Indo thinker. Some praised the work that APRA was achieving for Hispano-America, while others focused instead on its contributions to Latin America. The difference in labels used to name the continent mattered less to Apristas than having non-Peruvian allies praise their political work and imagine them as activists who served the Americas as a whole, not just Peru. Therefore, it was to Apristas’ advantage to avoid dogmatism as they continued to hone their project of hemispheric unity and Latin American solidarity. Ideological flexibility was an asset a persecuted APRA could not afford to lose.

Christian Allies and Transnational Advocacy Campaign

Organizing a transnational advocacy campaign demanded a constant work of coordination and communication that weighed heavily on the shoulders of a few political refugees. Significantly, the international movement in support of Haya de la Torre could never have reached the magnitude it did without the assistance of key allies abroad, and especially that of Anna Melissa Graves and John A. Mackay, who used grassroots organizing and sustained correspondence to weave an intricate web of transnational support. Working together, these solidarity activists not only helped to expand this movement beyond the scope of Latin America; they were in fact responsible for setting much of this transnational advocacy campaign in motion. These international alliances were all the more important in the face of the changing global order of the interwar period.

“Hope proved elusive,” Ira Katznelson, a leading US historian of the New Deal, eloquently wrote about the 1930s – a period marked by the rise of Communism and Fascism and by what looked like the disintegration of democracy worldwide. “The rumble of deep uncertainty, a sense of proceeding without a map, remained relentless and enveloping. A climate of universal fear deeply affected political understandings and concerns.”⁴⁷ The Christian intermediaries who assisted Haya de la Torre in this solidarity campaign were not immune to this pervading feeling of alarm. In the 1920s, their fears originated in the recent experience of the First World War; by the early 1930s, the angst they felt was the result of forebodings about rising totalitarian regimes and impending global warfare. These actors sensed that Western civilization was at a historic crossroads. It would either face its internal contradictions or implode.

As to where to look for salvation, the Christian pacifists who were close to Haya de la Torre had a ready answer. “I have as I know you also have, unlimited faith in him,” Mackay wrote to Graves about Haya de la Torre on January 10, 1933.⁴⁸ These mentors continued to see in him, and more specifically by the 1930s in a Peruvian APRA party placed under his leadership, a harbinger of moral, spiritual, and social regeneration not just in Latin America but across the Western Hemisphere as well. Positive appraisals of a PAP placed under his leadership ran through their writing. “[Haya de la Torre] is undoubtedly the most brilliant figure of the new generation,” remarked Mackay in 1932, “and one who seems destined to play an important role in the future life of Peru and of the Continent as a whole.”⁴⁹ Mackay was so confident he billed the APRA movement “la fuerza revolucionaria más constructiva de hoy día en la América Latina.”⁵⁰ Graves shared his enthusiasm. In 1932, she was as enthralled by Haya de la Torre’s “singularly magnetic and lovable personality” as when she had first met him in Lima ten years earlier. Importantly, she was also as fiercely committed to viewing in APRA’s project of Latin American unity a first step toward world peace.⁵¹ The imminent threat of warfare she sensed around her as she travelled to Europe in the early 1930s confirmed her in her views. She was ready to fight tooth and nail to make sure Peruvian authorities did not stand in the way of her dream of world peace.

As a result, on May 20, 1932, when Graves learned about the arrest of Haya de la Torre, she immediately took action. Graves did what she did best. She sat in front of her Remington and, one letter at a time, set about to weave together a substantial patchwork of international support in favour of her protégé. To say that Graves was a dedicated correspondent is a euphemism. She was fierce. She was relentless. She was unforgiving. Above all, she knew like no other how to bring people together around a common cause when she set her mind to persuading others she was right. The spectacular number of letters either published or preserved in her personal archives testify to Graves’ staunch commitment to letter-writing as a form of political activism. For the remaining part of 1932, she worked doggedly to set an international protest in motion.

Graves’ efforts bore fruit. Public outcry over the arbitrary arrest of Haya de la Torre soon spread from Latin America to the United States and Europe. Solidarity activists, upon Graves’ request, wrote protest letters and drafted petitions addressed to Peruvian ambassadors in Washington, D.C., London, and Paris to request that the Peruvian government be held responsible in the face of a democratic international public opinion. These petitions denounced the harsh prison conditions under which Haya de la Torre was being held captive and protested “against the arrests of those apparently guilty of nothing but expressions of political opinion or membership in a political party.”⁵² International APRA supporters requested a fair trial or immediate deportation for Haya de la Torre. In the United States, the petition forwarded to the Peruvian embassy in Washington, D.C. was signed by renown US liberals, progressives and radical pacifists, including Carleton Beals, Jane Addams, John Dewey, Waldo Frank, Hubert Herring, Paul Kellogg, H. L. Mencken, Fred Rippy, Frederico de Onis, Jeannette Rankin, and Charles Thomson. In addition to rebuking the undemocratic action of the Peruvian government, this petition extolled the moral qualities and the “international significance” of the APRA leader. “We are sure that Your Excellency will respect this universal opinion concerning Haya,” it stressed, “for we feel that you are truly anxious to uphold the good name of Peru before the world as a country where liberty and free government may prosper.”⁵³

In Europe, solidarity activists likewise pressured the Peruvian authorities into releasing the APRA leader. “The political imprisonment of a man such as Haya de la Torre,” as stated by a dozen of British scholars and intellectuals in an open letter to the Manchester Guardian, “is a fact which in the eyes of international opinion, cannot but reflect discredit upon the Government which inflicts it.”⁵⁴ Many more pacifist activists and renowned intellectuals from France, England, and Spain took part in the solidarity campaign for his release. They included the French pacifists Romain Rolland and Georges Duhamel, the Spanish intellectuals Miguel de Unamuno, Gregorio Marañon, and Ortega y Gassett, and British scholars and academics Harold Laski, Dr. Marett, Rector of Exeter College, and Barrett Brown, the principal of the Ruskin College where Haya de la Torre had briefly studied in the late 1920s.

Although Graves was the clear conductor of this campaign, as revealed by the hundreds of letters she received in response to her invitations to join the protest in favour of Haya de la Torre, she enlisted other recruits in her efforts.⁵⁵ For example, Mackay assisted Graves in writing the petition drafts and helped to forward the petitions to the relevant diplomatic authorities.⁵⁶ He used his contacts in Peru in an attempt to improve Haya de la Torre’s prison conditions.⁵⁷ Mackay also kept his own missionary circles in Latin America abreast of the latest developments in Peru regarding the fate of persecuted Apristas. Significantly, nearly all the letters that Mackay received between the months of May and July of 1933, from US peers involved with the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, disclose acute interest and great concern for the life of Haya de la Torre.⁵⁸

To reach intellectuals in Europe, in addition to writing to her peers in Great Britain, Graves benefited from the help of Rolland, who reached out to his networks to help mobilize a protest in Haya de la Torre’s favour.⁵⁹ On the Latin American side, Graves corresponded with the Costa Rican democrat Garcia Monge, the Argentine intellectual Manuel Ugarte, the Mexican philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos, and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, urging them to take action to save Haya de la Torre’s life. These actors had been involved with Haya de la Torre and with the growth of the anti-imperialist APRA in the mid-1920s. All agreed to help Graves and to actively participate in the advocacy campaign underway.

Most petitioners outside Latin America, however, had never met or, for a few, even heard of the imprisoned political leader. Graves’ intervention was in these cases all the more crucial. Among those who learned about APRA and its imprisoned leader through Graves’ 1932–1933 efforts, several agreed to add their names to the petition not because they felt a sudden urge to defend a political party they barely knew, but because Graves, a peer pacifist activist whom they respected, asked them to. For example, although the Nobel Peace Prize recipients Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch showed no indication of knowing anything about APRA, both signed the petition upon Graves’ request.⁶⁰ They owed loyalty to Graves, their longtime activist friend and colleague from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, as well as to the ideals of peace, democracy, and civic rights that Graves’ initiative purportedly defended. Archival evidence suggests that in addition to signing the petition, Addams and Greene actively promoted this case of injustice within their immediate social circles.⁶¹ Similarly, when Graves first tested the waters with the pacifist Minister John Haynes Holmes, from the Community Church of New York, Holmes cheerfully thanked Graves, “for giving me this opportunity to help in a good cause.”⁶²

Significantly, others were seduced into the cause of supporting Haya de la Torre in the hopes of fighting communism. This is what appears to have secured the assistance of Christian actors such as Father MacGowan who, as the assistant director of the anti-communist National Catholic Welfare Conference, agreed to utilize his aura of authority to present the final version of the petition to the Peruvian ambassador in the United States.⁶³ By the early 1930s, as we have seen in Chapter 3, PAP and the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) had definitively and irreconcilably parted ways.⁶⁴ In the material that Graves and Mackay distributed in their solidarity networks and in their writings and correspondence, both insisted on this political break to depict Haya de la Torre’s leadership as a model of proper and desirable resistance all at once to imperialism and communism. “Quite as revolutionary and socially-minded in his outlook as Mariátegui,” concluded Mackay about Haya de la Torre in 1932, “he recognizes what the latter failed to recognize: that the human problem is spiritual before it is economic.”⁶⁵

When Graves first contacted potential supporters of APRA, she usually included a newspaper clipping of the open letter from the Manchester Guardian, which she had partially written, and which took pains to dissociate this political leader from any radical or violent wing of the APRA movement.⁶⁶ Despite initial communist inclinations, “towards the end of 1927,” noted the letter, “those members of the Apra who stood for revolutionary action repudiated [Haya de la Torre’s] leadership.”⁶⁷ The petition that Roger Baldwin prepared, upon Graves’ recommendation, for the International Committee for Political Prisoners similarly insisted on the non-communist nature of the APRA leader. “He is not a Communist,” confirmed Baldwin; “in fact he is identified with the least radical wing of the Apra movement.”⁶⁸ These documents suggested that between authoritarian regimes on one side and a Comintern class-based line on the other, an APRA placed under the leadership of Haya de la Torre posed an attractive lesser evil not only for Peru, but also for Latin America as a whole. In other words, this faction of APRA was attractive to international networks outside Latin America in part because of its anti-communist promise, a reality that only encouraged APRA’s pivot to the right during the 1930s.

This is true not only because the concomitant experience of persecution and of international solidarity forced on APRA an increasing reliance on international support to survive politically. To be sure, the “good-moderate-left/bad-radical-left trope,” which framed most of the campaign of support for Haya de la Torre, contributed to encouraging APRA, specifically the Hayista faction, to curb the revolutionary agenda it once held to comply with the image of a moderate Latin American left deserving of support.⁶⁹ But another element holds true to explain APRA’s changing positions in later years vis-à-vis US expansionism: the benevolent interventionism of US liberals and progressives in the domestic affairs of Peru was suddenly not something to frown upon. In view of the 1932–1933 advocacy campaign, where national and Latin American sovereignty began and ended looked much blurrier to Apristas than it had in exile or in the books they read.

It is hard to assess precisely what international solidarity with APRA ultimately achieved when it came to the liberation of Haya de la Torre in August 1933. Did General Benavides, recently succeeding Sánchez Cerro to the presidency of Peru, cave in to public pressure, attempting to save face before the international community of nations? Or did individual networking play a more crucial role than political accountability? Solidarity activists disagreed over who or what ultimately wielded the most influence in forcing the promulgation of the Amnesty Law on August 10 of that year.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, crucial to my argument in this chapter is the opportunity that this international solidarity campaign gave to the Hayista faction, as it attempted to ensure the survival of PAP in Peru and simultaneously secure party leadership. Haya de la Torre and his persecution became an organizing tool for developing an international solidarity campaign in favour of PAP. APRA leaders rapidly understood the extent to which Hayade la Torre, as a political figure, carried meaning and symbolic capital for a large variety of Latin American actors who faced a similar national context to Peru or feared that they might very soon. Some saw in Haya de la Torre the bearer of a socio-democratic model for Peru, and possibly for all of Latin America, capable of both challenging the right-wing military dictatorships and eschewing violence and rejecting communism to achieve this end. Others placed in him their hopes of witnessing the rise of another Augusto César Sandino, a hero who doggedly opposed foreign interests in Latin American countries and abhorred national oligarchies, heirs of crooked republican orders. The APRA leaders who sided with the Hayista faction rapidly and ubiquitously tapped into those discourses as a line of defence back home.

Publicizing in Peru APRA’s International Reputation

The National Executive Committee (CEN) of the Peruvian APRA Party (PAP) rapidly learned to capitalize on international public opinion in favour of the APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. To be sure, few other options were available. They could not lift a finger without having the state retaliate. A few attempts were made to have US diplomats intercede in favour of PAP, but they refused to get involved in an issue they deemed inflammatory.⁷¹ One option that remained available to persecuted Apristas, which required few resources and hardly any additional risk-taking, was to publicize in Peru the amount of support that Aprista exiles, and specifically Haya de la Torre, were securing at the international level. APRA leaders strategically used these foreign positions to build a storyline that aimed to convince Peruvians of one crucial point: Haya de la Torre was able to garner international support for his persona, the corollary of which was that he was also able to garner international support for his party and for Peruvians more broadly.

The CEN swiftly adapted its political propaganda to take benefit of the arrest of APRA’s leader, specifically focusing on the international outcry it created. In a way that recalls the messages of continental solidarity that the APRA journal advertised during PAP’s initial forays in Peru in 1930, references to the outside world began to proliferate in the underground publications controlled by the party direction after Haya de la Torre’s arrest on May 6, 1932. Issues of the Newsletter of PAP appearing after that date repeatedly represented the new wave of APRA exiles as crucial intermediaries between Peru and the rest of the continent. One article in the June 6 issue, tellingly entitled “El sueño de Bolívar meta ideal del P.A.P.,” reproduced the expressions of “solidaridad indoamericana” that a small contingent of Peruvian APRA exiles in Guayaquil, Ecuador, had recently forwarded to Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno, the president of their host country.⁷² According to the Newsletter, the Ecuadorian president favourably replied to their good wishes. He likewise allegedly celebrated the work of APRA in trying to bring about the “verdadero sueño de Bolívar,” that of bringing the Americas together.⁷³ The Newsletter argued in other issues that the political work of the recently deported Apristas was acclaimed outside Peru.⁷⁴ Reports publicized the proselytizing work of Aprista exiles like Manuel Seoane, Luis Alberto Sánchez, Pedro E. Muñiz, Carlos Cox, or Arturo Sabroso who allegedly organized networks and wrote political work abroad for the sake of the APRA movement, and as a corollary for the sake of Peru as well.⁷⁵

Whenever they could, APRA leaders in exile attempted to blur the distinction between PAP and the Peruvian people. These storylines suggested that all suffered under the same repressive government; that all were denied democratic rights at the national level. For example, the August 1932 issue of La Tribuna in exile, another publication controlled by the Hayista faction, reported on the concern of Argentinean people for the political situation in Peru in a way that equated Peruvians with Apristas. Read one passage: “Hoy más que nunca podemos afirmar que en la República Argentina hay una gran inquietud, una verdadera preocupación por el destino político de nuestra patria. La Argentina contempla el dolor en que nos debatimos compartiéndolo y sintiéndolo como un dolor propio.”⁷⁶ The use of the first-person plural pronoun gave the impression that all Peruvian citizens, and not only APRA members, were linked by a shared experience of sorrow and suffering in the face of state persecution. This strategy aimed to enable APRA leaders to speak in exile on behalf of all Peruvians.⁷⁷ Significantly, when the CEN reported in the pages of its Newsletter on growing continental solidarity protests against Sánchez Cerro, it similarly did so by highlighting that these protests demanded the end of indiscriminate violence against Peruvian citizens, not just against Apristas.⁷⁸

As the Hayista faction forcefully condemned state censorship in Peru for concealing the growing expressions of solidarity with the persecuted PAP, the renewed wave of deportations paradoxically created political opportunities that APRA leaders were sure not to squander. For one, the deportation of Apristas to Chile gave the CEN access to sites of literary production abroad, which bolstered its capacity to broadcast to a Peruvian audience the level of international backing that a PAP under the leadership of Haya de la Torre was able to attract.⁷⁹ Santiago de Chile, especially, rapidly gained grounds as an important centre of APRA propaganda. Archival evidence points to this city as the new publishing platform for La Tribuna, which reappeared in August 1932 under the title of La Tribuna. En el destierro.⁸⁰ In stark contrast to a few rough pages stapled together, which characterized issues of La Tribuna published in Peru prior to August 1932, the arrangement of the revamped edition of La Tribuna in exile hardly portrayed a party operating in hiding or suffering from repression and internal disorganization.⁸¹ Quite the opposite, its presentation was slick. Its four-page format resembled that of any respectable, serious daily paper. The professional look of this mouthpiece increased the authority of its contents.

In addition to producing political propaganda, importantly, the community of APRA exiles in Chile clandestinely forwarded copies of La Tribuna to Peru via the intermediary of APRA exiles stationed in Arica, a city in the northern province of Chile.⁸² The CEN had in turn devised a systematized and well-run propaganda apparatus that insured the diffusion in Peru of the political material they received from abroad. This work of mediation fell on the shoulders of subalterns and anonymous figures of the party. Indeed, the constant state surveillance to which APRA leaders were subjected in their home country precluded them from engaging in such activities. Apristas who were not known by the authorities shouldered the work of disseminating APRA’s political propaganda in the different regions of Peru, keeping members of the party in contact with one another and transmitting directives to the rank-and-file of the party.⁸³

By August 1932, Haya de la Torre’s international reputation was vividly deployed as an instrument of political prestige for PAP. The Hayista faction doggedly and increasingly disseminated explicit associations between the good reputation of the APRA movement abroad and the leadership of Haya de la Torre in Peru throughout the first half of 1933. Having access to more resources and benefiting from freedom of speech, the editors of La Tribuna in exile took it upon themselves to publicize the content of the international press and the advocacy initiatives that supported him. They aggressively printed the expressions of solidarity with this APRA leader that swept through the continent, as evidenced in the first issue published abroad in 1932. One article showcased the list of every single expression of support of either APRA or Haya de la Torre and which APRA exiles had tracked down abroad as of August of that year.⁸⁴ Others copied excerpts from foreign newspapers that evinced the alleged continental outrage mounting against the regime of Sánchez Cerro.⁸⁵ Yet another reproduced in full the cablegram requesting the release and deportation of the imprisoned leader that eighty-five congressional deputies and four senators in Argentina forwarded to Sánchez Cerro.⁸⁶

Between 1930 and 1933, the Hayista faction took pains to insist on the international reputation of APRA and the newly founded PAP as an instrument of political manipulation to increase the prestige, and, as a result, bolster the popular support of their political organization. By 1932–1933, this international reputation became increasingly and almost exclusively associated with the figure of a single leader, that of Haya de la Torre. The justification for billing this political figure as “un maestro y un conductor” for all Peruvians became tightly intertwined with the level of sympathy that he was able to rouse internationally, more so than in his capacity to rally the Peruvians around a common collective project.⁸⁷ Aprista publications positioned Haya de la Torre as some sort of Peruvian emissary on international matters, suggesting that the widespread outrage his arrest provoked abroad was helping put Peru on the map.⁸⁸ These APRA leaders also highlighted the international fame that Haya de la Torre had secured for himself even before his detention, explaining to Peruvians that his unfair imprisonment was generating international outrage precisely because his intellectual merits had been recognized around the continent beforehand.⁸⁹ Alluding to an international public opinion favourable to Hayade la Torre, whether by way of denouncing his recent imprisonment or applauding his past intellectual contributions, bolstered the political legitimacy of this APRA leader. It likewise underscored the political benefits that a PAP placed under his leadership would be able to secure for Peru’s democracy.

The reasoning behind the campaign to bring legitimacy back to Haya de la Torre was threefold. First, the PAP and the Peruvian people suffered the same ordeal at the hands of Peruvian authorities – being deprived of basic political rights at best, and enduring unfair persecution at worst. Second, Haya de la Torre commanded respect and galvanized public opinion outside Peru. Third, and quod errata demonstratum, a PAP placed under his leadership not only helped defend APRA militants, but it also guaranteed that foreign allies would mobilize to defend the political rights of Peruvian people. What APRA leaders attempted to do, then, was use these positions to build a storyline that could convince their Peruvian audience of one crucial point: Haya de la Torre could garner international support for his persona, the corollary of which was that he was also able to garner international support for his party and for his country.

Contested Homecoming

With the rise to power of General Óscar R. Benavides in May 1933, following the assassination of Sánchez Cerro by a presumed Aprista, the situation in Peru finally looked poised to improve for PAP. “There is a general optimism that the reign of terror is over, and that a brighter day is dawning for Peru,” stressed one observant close to the Anglo Peruvian college. “Political prisoners are daily being freed, and it is very evident that Benavides’ policy is one of tolerance […]. I believe, and everybody I have spoken to, does, that he is gradually working up to the release of the imprisoned leaders.”⁹⁰ The handful of APRA leaders who controlled the CEN in Peru held similar hopes. The new government had already mitigated state repression in Peru. Rumours of a forthcoming political opening were rattling the country.⁹¹

As a result, the CEN began to plan the return of exiled APRAs to Peru. At first, it only ordered the homecoming of specific leaders. On June 25, 1933, the CEN forwarded a letter to that effect to the APRA leader Arturo Sabroso, who had been living for a while in Valparaiso, Chile. Members of the CEN wanted to repatriate Sabroso in order for him to undertake “una serie de trabajos importantes para el Pap.”⁹² The nature of these tasks remained unspecified, though given his experience as a labour activist, the CEN most likely assigned him the task of starting to mobilize and organize unions on behalf of the party.⁹³ Significantly, the CEN stated, as of June 1933, that ordering the return of all APRA exiles would be too hasty at that point in time. The intensity of state repression had certainly decreased in Peru, but respect for all civil liberties had yet to be reinstated and solemnly guaranteed by official authorities. The CEN preferred to handpick the exiled leaders it needed most to start organizing the party anew.⁹⁴

Disagreement surged between the CEN in Peru and a number of APRA exiles regarding the proper tactic to adopt to plan their homecoming. The main point of contention concerned questions of timing. APRA exiles were eager to travel back home. The passage of an Amnesty Law would soon free political prisoners and guarantee the restitution of civil liberties for all citizens of Peru, but for many Apristas this was not necessary to begin coordinating the return of APRA exiles to Peru. On June 27, 1933, one Peruvian Aprista in exile in Valparaiso, Chile, expressed his point of view to Luis Eduardo Enríquez, the leader of the CAP of Santiago, in the following terms: “Como siempre lo he pensado y como tu dices es necesario que los deportados reingresen al Perú, porque es la única manera de reorganizar nuestras huestes en todos los departamentos. Si a los enemigos les conviene que estemos lejos nosotros debemos darles la contra ingresando.”⁹⁵ It was neither fair nor sufficient, berated these Apristas, that the CEN selected only a few chosen individuals for return.

That the CEN genuinely worried for the security of its members explains to a certain extent its reluctance to order the return of every APRA exile in June 1933. Another part of the explanation, however, and certainly a crucial one, is to be found in the work of the organization in the making. To better retain control over APRA, the CEN felt compelled to prepare the field to its own advantage before any other influential leader of the movement returned from exile. Handpicking the return of APRA leaders prior to a mass movement back home was an astute move for those who wanted to direct the organization.

When the Benavides government finally passed the Amnesty Law on August 11, 1933, thereby enabling every APRA exile to return to Peru and engage in national politics, the CEN was operational once again. Indeed, PAP had overhauled its program and organizational structure between the months of June and August of 1933. As evidenced by the chart finalized on August 31, 1933, detailing the composition of the new National Executive Committee of the Peruvian APRA Party, the organization of the party was firmly grounded with Haya de la Torre at the head, who, free at last, oversaw the entire committee in his role as general secretary of the party. A team of one secretary and one sub-secretary supervised the respective twenty ministries (secretarias) that formed the CEN, leading up to a total of forty-four members who were in charge of the direction of PAP (this number included the general secretary, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the sub-general secretary, Felipe Destefano, the national secretary, Manuel Arévalo, and finally the treasurer of the party, Manuel Pérez León).⁹⁶ This reorganization became possible as a result of the symbolic power that PAP had acquired abroad through the intermediary of one symbol, the APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre.

Conclusion

Chapter 4 shows that the Hayista faction built its legitimacy in the early 1930s by way of embracing a democratic discourse that associated PAP with international connections and increasingly, by 1932–1933, with the fame from which the APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre benefited abroad. Publicizing these tales of international solidarity with this figure helped those who manned the executive committee of the party assert their control over the meaning of Aprismo. As such, the 1932–1933 international solidarity campaign in favour of Haya de la Torre helped secure the dominion of the Hayista faction over PAP by August 1933 and the short-lived return of democracy to Peru. APRA leaders staffing the CEN wagered on the publicity that international public opinion could have for their organization. They looked toward the international scene to justify the importance of APRA in Peru. More importantly, the CEN displayed an apparatus of political symbols linked to the figure of Haya de la Torre to validate its leadership of the party. Haya de la Torre as an intellectual and a political figure became central to any strategy that aimed at courting international public opinion. His capacity to transcend a singular Peruvian identity made him a particularly powerful symbol throughout Latin America. Both his image and his life story were easily and extensively appropriated by different groups of actors and versions of the narrative began to proliferate across borders.

As Chapter 4 makes clear, past and current experiences of exile continued to provide political opportunities for the survival of APRA well beyond its foundational years in the 1920s. In the early 1930s, part of APRA’s success in building local support for its national-popular agenda was very much entangled, both in discourse and in practice, with its deep-rooted internationalism. It is not a coincidence that the rise of PAP as a populist movement in Peru was concomitant with the growth of its international solidarity networks. The substantial traction that APRA was able to gather abroad, as an anti-imperialist and moderate leftist movement praised for its advocacy of Latin American sovereignty, became a key political asset for persecuted Apristas. Another important outcome of APRA’s recurring use of foreign allies and exile to ensure the political survival of PAP was that it became impossible for these leaders to think of Peruvian politics without engaging in dialogue with international actors. This continued to be the case throughout the 1930s and in the early 1940s, as shown in the next chapter. Courting international public opinion and foreign allies became the prime strategy favoured by the APRA community to ensure its political survival in Peru.