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.

Chapter 2 studies how personal self-transformations in exile triggered the rise of new social and hemispheric consciousnesses among Apristas who were deported abroad in the 1920s. It traces as a case study the rocky relationship that the young student activist and future APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre maintained during his first years in exile with the foreign allies, specifically the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves, who assisted him, and who tried to politically influence him. Transnational solidarity networks, the chapter shows, would herein assist in crucial ways APRA’s early formation as a persecuted political group. But this reliance on foreign assistance came with a price for the movement’s autonomy: it cracked open a space for progressive US allies and Christian missionaries to peddle their own agenda to Latin American critiques of empire.

Chapter 5 explores the roles of APRA exiles and the workings of APRA’s transnational solidarity networks during the 1930s and early 1940s, a period during which Apristas suffered unremitting state persecution in Peru. It argues that the survival of Peruvian APRA then hinged on its capacity to remain connected to the external world. Communities of APRA exiles stationed abroad connected with non-Latin American allies, especially with past Christian and pacifist allies like Anna Melissa Graves, to create and sustain solidarity networks that worked in favor of the persecuted PAP in Peru. The chapter details the role that communities of exiled Apristas played in sustaining the integrity of their movement in Peru. It also studies the contribution and collaboration of foreign intermediaries and allies of the party and highlights their significance for the cohesion and the political survival of APRA in Peru.

The introduction provides an overview of the history of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and of its anti-imperialist project of Latin American unity. It details the contributions that the book brings forth not only to the study of the Peruvian APRA and populism, but also to the scholarship on Latin American exile, trans-American solidarity, and hemispheric critiques of empire. The introduction offers a methodology for centring the complexities of transnational solidarity work at the core of the historical analysis. Finally, it presents a summary of the book’s chapters and main arguments.