My sister in law let me borrow The Other Path, in its 2002 paperback. This is the delightfully-named Hernando de Soto's neoliberal Bible for Latin America. If you took International Studies 'neath the elms in dear old TrinCol, CT; this was the Satanic Bible.
I haven't finished this book yet. I can for now offer some basic philology.
The title deliberately confronts the luminoso of Guzman, graduate of Peru's version of Trinity College. Beyond that: I see some translation-decisions which may or may not distract the reader. I, as a reader, accepted such decisions, as easing me into the alien world of 1980s Perú. "Popular" is here to be understood as the Roman populares, that is the street-merchants of Rome. Also-latinate "violent" and "invasion" don't have the valence, in Peruvian Spanish, as an American might understand.
Perú, I need hardly mention, had a nasty history. To bring this blog's readers up to speed: after Bolivar, the criollos took over. No longer could the "indíos" appeal to the Crown over their masters' heads. Here was imposed an apartheid, avant la lettre, if I may code-switch. Lima, the capital, was to remain Spanish, or at least not indio (think, Cape Town; or, Mérida up here norte); any investment in the Quechua and other hinterlanders was to be directed toward keeping those "peasants" (per de Soto) on their farm.
Problem: the farm boys didn't want an eternity of peasant-heid. Why should they? They were "liberated".
So the farm boys "invaded". They flocked to the cities, especially Lima - tried to, anyway. Lima, as Mérida-de-Sul, resisted, off-and-on. In the 1940s the Lima élite tried what Trujillo and others were trying, to BLEACH the locals by inviting Europeans; where Trujillo wanted Jews, the Limans wanted "Scandinavians" (Argentines can pipe up, anytime). Peru simply had too many Quechua for that BLEACH to work.
Then the political establishment pretty much gave up. Peru got a series of Left-elected governments and military takeovers who also promoted Left ideals, up to 1978ish. De Soto doesn't mention any Yanqui interventions; it's possible that the doodle dandy simply wasn't much involved, seeing Peru (correctly) as a mess.
Under this sloppy post-criollo Leftism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Peru looked the other way when the countryfolk... invaded. It wasn't legal for them to squat in Peru-owned land, but they did it anyway and - trapped by ideology - Peru's "leaders" couldn't lead. Some politicians exploited this mess. Some were "Marxist", or at least claimed as much. For de Soto, the "mess" was just the free market in a failure of institutions; a lot of the squatters / "invaders" accepted the protection of Marxists/Marxians despite being entrepreneurial because nobody else was helping. This "informal" regime in Lima made it a lawless slum - if less actively dangerous than (say) Detroit or Jo'burg, if you weren't in the way. De Soto's glossary has a "slum" as different from an "informal": the former being in private land, the latter Peruvian-government land; but I don't see the difference.
De Soto's book, then, exists as a counter-manifesto for the invaders. De Soto was on the side of the entrepreneur, or at least got out into the (illegal) markets to listen to such.
De Soto reminds me of William Lind in his "fourth generation warfare" book. "Non Violent Resistance" comes up when people on the outs attract media attention, making a moral crusade out of a land grab. And then we can bring "Moldbug" Yarvin: 4GW tactics like the "nonviolent" (de Soto: "violent") landgrab be possible only where the government is complicit. Yarvin wasn't (probably isn't) on the side of the grabbers. Lind ... well, it's not his land being grabbed. De Soto to his credit accepts that "nonviolent" is newspeak for violence, but bends over for the violation.
In 1978, a Moldbugger took Lima, with a mandate to crack those squalid sidewalk vendors and squatters. By then, the latter had a generations-long tradition of existence, to themselves and to the community at large. Here's about when Guzman shows up. Whose Path is not the urban Marxian path.
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