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The Changing Meaning of Cooperation: Rural Electrification in Cold War Peru, 1964–1976
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2022
Abstract
This article deals with the politics of Peruvian rural electrification during the Cold War years. In 1964, the inhabitants of the Mantaro Valley established the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro Ltda. 127, with the help of the central government and American aid agencies in the context of the Alliance for Progress. At first, this rural electric cooperative was seen as a legitimate way to channel traditional communal practices through an institution that was seen as modern, capitalist, and Western. However, in the fluid context of Peru's Cold War, electric cooperative development quickly became a heated political battleground. After a “revolutionary” military regime took power in 1968, the armed forces eventually defined the cooperative as an obsolete institution and quickly adopted their own cooperative model, free from any capitalist “vices,” as they sought to implement their own “revolution from above.” While the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro represented a successful combination of local discourse, foreign aid, and modern technology, its history also shines a light on the volatile politics of infrastructural development: as its political and economic meaning changed wildly as different political regimes oversaw its expansion and eventual downfall.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History
Footnotes
I thank Paul Gootenberg, Brooke Larson, Eric Zolov, Javier Puente, and Mark Rice, and the anonymous readers at The Americas for their comments on this article. I am also grateful to William Evensen, former Peace Corps volunteer, and Luis Carlos Arroyo, former member of the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro, for sharing their personal experiences. Special thanks to the staffs at the Biblioteca Municipal Alejandro O. Deústua in Huancayo, Junín, and the US National Archives for providing access to their archives. Research and writing were made possible by funding from a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council, a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship of the American Council for Learned Societies, and Stony Brook University.
References
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