Revolutionizing the Tragic City

Abstract

This article studies how the Peruvian government reacted to the massive May 31, 1970, earthquake in the country’s leading fishing port and the home to its only steel mill. While earthquake did not damage the boomtown of Chimbote like it did the highlands, the progressive, antioligarchical military government seized on the destruction of the earthquake to assert power in ways it could not have exercised before. The generals set out to remake Chimbote in their image, preparing a nine-volume, two-thousand-page plan that would convert the port into an industrial paradise. While this plan proved too ambitious for a crumbling (politically, socially, and economically) Revolutionary Government, their plans exemplify the role of creative destruction and its limitations. The earthquake provided the generals with their only opportunity to get Chimbote’s growth under control and to implement their ideas of creating a progressive and participationist Peru. The plan’s collapse, much like the revolutionary government itself, left Chimbote as a city of failed aspirations.