The dominant class and industrial development in Peru

From 1968, a reformist military regime in Peru implemented an industrialising development strategy which was fundamentally at odds with the interests of the traditional ‘oligarchy’ that had dominated the primary export phase of the country's development. In order to understand this new phase of development it is necessary to reject the idea of a monolithic ‘oligarchy’ before 1968, and to see the Peruvian dominant class as already internally differentiated. An important sector of that class was by 1968 committed to the development of industry and of the urban economy generally. Its interests were explicitly at variance with those of the exporting fractions of the Peruvian dominant class.