APRA's Show of Weakness

Beaten in general elections last June, Peru's worker-peasant APRA Party last week fell back on a familiar maneuver: a 24-hour general strike. The occasion proclaimed by leaders of APRA's 500,000-member Confederation of Labor was "indignation" over the dismissal of 300 workers at a Lima ceramics factory and police killings of two Indian peasant squatters in the backlands. Neither seemed quite enough to justify a nationwide strike, and few Peruvians were taken in. The strike was obviously intended to show President Fernando Belaunde Terry that APRA, though outvoted, was still too powerful a political force to trifle with.

Belaunde quickly proved that he too could be adept at maneuver. The night before the strike, his government made a fast deal with an influential, Communist-dominated division of APRA's own union, extracting a no-strike pledge in return for settlement of the ceramics factory dispute. The rest of the union, loudly deploring Belaunde's alliance with Communists, went ahead with the general strike. But the government counter-maneuver left the union off bal ance. In Lima, where the strike would count most, business went on almost as usual--the union was able to pull out only about 20% of the factory workers. Laborers in the southern highlands mostly ignored the strike call. And only in APRA's northern provincial strongholds was the shutdown effective. APRA's intended mass demonstration of strength turned into a show of weakness.

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