Peru

The territory of modern Peru contains some of the oldest complex societies in the Americas. The Norte Chico or Caral civilisation, flourishing on the central coast from roughly 3000 to 1800 BCE, built monumental platforms and sunken plazas without pottery or evident warfare, and is often cited as the earliest known urban culture in the hemisphere. It was followed by a long succession of Andean polities, including the Chavin religious horizon, the coastal Moche and Nazca cultures, the highland Wari and Tiwanaku states, and the late Chimu kingdom centred at Chan Chan. From the early fifteenth century the Quechua-speaking Inca, ruling from Cuzco, expanded under Pachacuti and his successors to forge Tawantinsuyu, an empire stretching from southern Colombia to central Chile and bound together by an extensive road network, terraced agriculture, and a tributary labour system known as mita.

Spanish forces under Francisco Pizarro reached the empire in 1532, exploiting a recent civil war between Atahualpa and Huascar to capture and execute Atahualpa the following year. The Viceroyalty of Peru, established in 1542 with its capital at Lima, became for two centuries the wealthiest and most administratively important Spanish possession in South America, sustained by silver from Potosi (then within its jurisdiction) and by indigenous labour. Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century narrowed the viceroyalty's territory and provoked widespread unrest, most notably the 1780 to 1783 rebellion led by Tupac Amaru II. Independence came late, proclaimed by Jose de San Martin in Lima on 28 July 1821 and secured militarily by the campaigns of Simon Bolivar and Antonio Jose de Sucre, culminating in the Battle of Ayacucho on 9 December 1824.

The nineteenth-century republic was marked by recurrent caudillo rule, a guano-export boom, and the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879 to 1883) against Chile, which cost Peru the nitrate-rich province of Tarapaca and left lasting territorial grievances. Border conflicts with Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia continued into the twentieth century. Civilian and military governments alternated through the Aristocratic Republic, the Leguia oncenio, and the populist challenge of the APRA party founded by Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. A reformist military regime led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, in power from 1968, nationalised key industries and undertook a sweeping agrarian reform before being displaced in 1975 and succeeded by a return to civilian rule in 1980.

The 1980s and 1990s were dominated by hyperinflation, an economic collapse, and an internal armed conflict against the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement that, by the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, claimed nearly seventy thousand lives. President Alberto Fujimori, elected in 1990, defeated the insurgencies and stabilised the economy but governed through a 1992 self-coup and was later convicted of human rights abuses and corruption. After his flight from office in 2000, Peru re-established competitive electoral democracy, though the subsequent decades have seen sustained political instability, with multiple presidents impeached, resigning, or imprisoned, and a brief constitutional crisis in December 2022 when Pedro Castillo's attempted dissolution of Congress led to his removal and the accession of Dina Boluarte.

Peru today is a unitary presidential republic governed under the 1993 constitution, with an elected head of state, a unicameral Congress, and a multi-tier system of regional and municipal authorities.