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By Root 716 0

forcing the peasants into their own version of the mita, this time for the glory of the crown. Things had not progressed much in the one hundred twenty years of the Republic. The villagers in the countryside now were being lured to work for new masters on the sugar and cotton plantations; they did not volunteer their most productive years for free, as their ancestors had done before them, but they accepted pittances: a few soles, a thatched roof over their heads, a ration of meat and a little rice. Antonio and his peers were part of that cycle: boys who had grown up watching their fathers rise from their mothers’ beds at midnight and trudge out to a mine or a field or a factory, to push cane through a trapiche until dawn. When their turn came, boys would take up that trek with their fathers, a hard route traced by every generation in the grinding Peruvian wheel of fortune.

The eloquent Haya de la Torre, born into one of the buenas familias of Trujillo, was convinced he could reverse the treadmill. While George and I were running from house to fence, keeping an eye on the bruja and the loco, Haya de la Torre was doing business out of the Colombian embassy compound, preaching revolution to men like Antonio. He railed against the gradual handover of land to “rapacious” American companies like W. R. Grace—particularly in his home province of La Libertad—the very corner of Peru where my father was raising American smokestacks.

The sugar and paper haciendas of W. R. Grace were prime targets for the anticapitalist forces of Haya de la Torre’s APRA. The company, which had grown rich in Peru as an exporter of bird dung, was now a major trader between North and South America. It owned Grace Line, the first steamship company to operate between the Americas, which dominated all shipping back and forth over the equator, and Panagra, the premier air carrier of the Americas. The Grace family had gone from guano to paper, from tin to railroads, and from a modest start in a ship chandler’s shop to ownership of an airline and a shipping fleet.

Grace was like any other major U.S. venture in Peru. In some ways, it brought improvements. It provided steady work in an unstable time. It delivered expertise. It built towns, set up schools, established clinics. But Grace was not in the country to do charity work. It was there to do business. Peruvian hands were cheap and Peruvian resources were plentiful. There was sugar, paper, copper, steel, oil to be had—in quantities unrivaled in other parts of the world. And, without too much fuss, a company—like a military general—could stride into the main square, start up an industry, and put the profits into whatever pockets it chose.

For Grace, as for any capitalist giant in Peru in the ‘50s, APRA socialists spelled trouble. The Apristas recruited actively among the young in the cities and then spread discontent in the countryside, persuading field-workers and factory laborers of their rights, building the union rolls, spinning visions of a great Utopia. My father’s bosses in New York were well aware of the nervousness the socialists were sowing in the Peruvian hinterland. There was nothing happening in the north of Peru that was not also happening in places like Detroit and Chicago. But in Peru, the stakes were higher, the situation more explosive. The protections of the law were not always guaranteed—who knew if the police would be able to stand up against an angry strike, an anarchist incursion, a massacre, a revolution? And if the law did prevail, it might take a fascist turn, in the direction of a military state.

The powers that be at W. R. Grace, in their sleek Manhattan offices on Hanover Square, understood as well as any distant colonial power that the way to manage their holdings in Peru was to place bright locals in governing positions. My father was a prime candidate to run their empire and impose a shinier, American version of the mita: He was a U.S.-educated engineer with an American wife and solid Lima connections; a Peruvian with one foot in the old oligarchy and the other in a growing