The crooked timber that bore fruit: Peruvian fascist intellectuals of the 1930s and the echoes of their influence nowadays

In contrast to European and other Latin American experiences, researchers understand Peruvian fascism as a simple mimicry (a political alternative of the 1930s that regimes and movements look to replicate) or the product of transnational propaganda looking for public support to Mussolini and Franco. To avoid this reductionism, this paper proposes a double-sided definition based on Vajda (1976) and Paxton (1998) to understand fascism as a movement and an ideology. That enables us to identify the Peruvian fascism by studying the actions and ideas of three intellectuals who sympathized with it: José de la Riva-Agüero, Raúl Ferrero Rebagliatti, and Víctor Andrés Belaúnde. I argue that their discourse is a symbiosis between Peruvian authoritarian political tradition and European fascisms. Even though these fascist intellectuals did not create a strong political movement, they incepted political concepts regarding social policy, the government, the nation, the relations between State and the church, and anti-Marxism in public discussion. As a result, they passed on elements of the political repertory supported by the current new right-wing populism in Peru.