Daniel Hannan grew up in a large Anglo-Peruvian community — which has since disappeared:
When I was four years old, a mob attacked our family farm. There was a back entrance, a footpath into the hills, and my mother led me there by the hand. “We’re going to play a game,” she told me. “If we have to come this way again, we must do it without making a sound.”
My father was having none of it. He had a duty to the farm workers, he said, and wasn’t going to be driven off his own land by hooligans bussed in from the city.
He was suffering, I remember, from one of those diseases that periodically afflict white men in the tropics, and he sat in his dressing-gown, loading his revolver with paper-thin hands.
This was the Peru of General Velasco, whose putsch in 1968 had thrown the country into a state of squalor from which it has only recently recovered. Having nationalized the main industries, Velasco decreed a program of land reform under which farms were broken up and given to his military cronies.
As invariably happens when governments plunder their citizens, groups of agitators decided to take the law into their own hands. It was the same story as in the Spanish Second Republic, or Allende’s Chile: The police, seeing which way the wind was blowing, were reluctant to protect property.
Knowing that no help would come from the authorities, my father and two security guards dispersed the gang with shots as they attempted to burn down the front gates. The danger passed.
Not everyone was so lucky. There were land-invasions and confiscations all over the country. The mines and fishing fleets were seized. Foreign investment fled and companies repatriated their employees. The large Anglo-Peruvian community into which I had been born all but disappeared.