Elbio Paz Armenta (1892-1949)
Born on June 12, 1892 in Trujillo, Peru, Elbio Paz Armenta was the son of a wealthy father of white Spanish descent and a mestizo mother of Spanish, Quechua and Aymara descent. Ever since a relatively young age, Armenta was a proud Peruvian patriot and an admirer of the military of Peru and many other nations throughout history. His father was a veteran of the First Atacama War (1881-1884) and as a child Armenta was raised partly on war stories from his father. During his youth, Armenta read a lot of books about history and military history, including books on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Charlemagne, William the Conquer, Genghis Khan, Napoleon I, among others. Armenta was also an admirer of the autocratic, imperialistic and militaristic Second French Empire, its Emperor Napoleon IV and the glory of the Bonaparte dynasty, both past and present. He was also an avid learner of languages, and by his 40th birthday he could speak Spanish, Quecha, French, Portuguese, English and German.
In 1910, Armenta began his military education at the Chorrillos Military School in Lima, Peru. Armenta graduated from the academy in 1915. Armenta then served as an infantry officer in the Peruvian Army from 1915 to 1922. During this time in the Peruvian Army, Armenta toured numerous different nations, such as Mexico, the United States, Spain, France, Great Britain and Germany. Armenta was particularly impressed by the militaries of the victorious German Empire. In 1922, he was promoted to Major. In 1926, he was promoted to colonel. Finally in 1930, partly through favoritism, he was promoted to the rank of General.
In 1932, Peru experienced a severe economic recession. General Armenta, who at this point was one of the most famous military men in the country, claimed that President Javier Antonio Prado (1873-1940) was an ineffectual, lazy and greedy ruler and that Peru needed a new, strong and powerful leader to lead the once proud nation back to glory. Armenta toured the country spreading his message and all the while appealed to the impoverished, rural and indigenous people of Peru, among others.
In 1936, elections were held in Peru, and the incumbent President Prado of the Liberal People’s Party won the election by a narrow margin, leading many people to claim that the election was rigged. Within this volatile climate, on May 20, 1936, General Armenta launched a military coup against President Prado. General Armenta and soldiers in the army loyal to him stormed the presidential palace and parliament in the capital of Lima. After quite a few deaths between the soldiers on different sides, Prado was captured by Peruvian army soldiers and after a month of imprisonment was forced into exile in Mexico. As a result, General Armenta became President of Peru and with other men in the government loyal to him established the
Partido Sol Rojo or the Red Sun Party, a socialist and authoritarian political party. Armenta also declared himself Generalissimo of Peru and the Peruvian Armed Forces.
The first twelve years of Armenta’s militarily-backed regime saw the establishment of new schools, new infrastructure projects, new public works programs and new government housing, many of which were established in rural and impoverished areas. His regime also saw a limited redistribution of wealth, the establishment of socialized medicine, new immigration from Europe and Asia and a sharp decline in crime rates. However, his regime also saw numerous and atrocious human rights abuses. Freedom of speech was suspended, with those who criticized Armenta deemed traitors to the motherland and foreign sellouts. Freedom of the press was suspended, with the only newspapers, magazines and radio shows allowed to exist being those that were either state-owned or did not criticize Armenta, with the latter still being heavily regulated by government censors. The government nationalized the estates of numerous large landowners and descendants of colonial families, with many of these landowners being killed on-site by army soldiers. Numerous opponents within the government were purged and either executed, imprisoned for life or exiled. The secret police, the
Policia National Peruana, was known for its utter brutally and ruthlessness, with average people being abducted and disappearing for seemingly no reason. All in all, numerous political dissidents were arrested and brutally tortured and murdered by the aforementioned secret police.
As the 1940s came around, President Armenta decided to plan for his personal pet project and something to distract the population and to ingratiate them even more to his rule, this being a war against Chile to regain land lost during the First Atacama War. On July 5, 1945, Armenta signed the Treaty of Cobija with Bolivian dictator and President Celso Serrano. The treaty was a diplomatic and military alliance between the authoritarian regimes of Peru and Bolivia with the long term goal of regaining land lost to the Chileans during the First Atacama War. According to numerous historians, Armenta and Serrano, who met personally many times both before and during the Second Atacama War, got along somewhat well, yet at the same time clashed and argued over numerous petty matters.
On the evening of November 3, 1948, Peru and Bolivia launched a surprise attack into northern Chile. The Second Atacama War (1948-1949) had begun. Before long, the United States of America and other nations in the Americas came to the aide of the beleaguered Republic of Chile. In less than years’ time, the war began to go very badly for the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance. After the fall of Piura, the surrender of Bolivia, and the continued American and Mexican advance, on December 23, 1949 riots erupted throughout Lima that police were either unable or unwilling to contain. The next day, on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1949, protesters armed with munitions besieged President Armenta and his supporters inside Lima’s Plaza Mayor. Around the afternoon, a confrontation between Armenta and other leaders of the
Sol Rojo party ended badly when Armenta stormed out of the meeting after the other men insisted that the time had come for him to step down. Armenta, fearing that a coup to remove and perhaps also kill him was imminent, committed suicide that evening in his bedroom by shooting himself in the head with his personal handgun. He was 57 years old.
Armenta is one of the most infamous and murderous dictators of the 20th century. Somewhat due to the fact that his body was quickly cremated after his suicide, numerous conspiracy theorists have claimed that Armenta survived the war and fled via airplane from Peru to Spain, where he lived quietly as a recluse under an assumed name until he died in the 1970s.