Peru. A Country Study. Area Handbook Series.

摘要

Once the center of the powerful and fabulously wealthy Inca Empire, Peru in the early 1990s was an impoverished, crisis-prone country trying to cope with major societal, economic, and political changes. The strong undercurrents propelling these changes flowed from what historian Peter F. Klaren describes as Peru's historical dualism : a wide racial, socioeconomic, and political division between the small white Criollo elite in Lima and the vast majority of the population, consisting of native Americans in the Andean interior and mestizos (those of mixed race; see Glossary), located mostly in the coastal cities. Until the 1980s, this dualism put Lima in sharp contrast to the native American interior. According to Klaren, however, this traditional dualism has been eroding both ethnically as a result of the increasing Andeanization of Lima and politically as a result of the dispersion of power away from the traditional triumvirate of oligarchy, church, and armed forces.