El VRAE: Alan García’s Failed Domestic Policy

Since early 2006, almost fifty members of the Peruvian armed forces and the national police have died in the region of el VRAE (a Spanish acronym for the valley of the rivers Apurimac and Ene). For approximately two decades, this region has been the setting of an ongoing series of lethal encounters between government and criminal forces. These events have produced a political nightmare for the President, Alan Garcia, whose mismanagement of the escalating conflict is widely acknowledged. His critics charge that these lamentable events are also a clear sign of the government’s inadequate, insensitive, and hapless response to the major social problems affecting the Andean nation, in particular the status of the indigenous population living outside the capital city, Lima.

The central government has a history of alternating violence and indifference in its policies toward this distant region. El VRAE remains an isolated area seized by extreme poverty and the persisting presence of the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso. After years of low-levels of conflict and episodic government outbursts aimed at taming the violence, relative indifference to this extremist group has resulted in Sendero establishing growing connections with the well-organized and locally active criminal network of drug traffickers. The virtually nonexistent state presence in the region and a failed U.S-sponsored drug policy (which some would argue was somewhat inappropriate for Peruvian society from its inception) has created a dangerous mix that escalated until the resumption of large-scale conflict in 2006, after a number of years of relative quiescence.

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