On 3 October 1968, General Juan Velasco Alvarado carried out a coup d’état that also brought an abrupt change to the economic, social, political and cultural life of Peru. Half a century on, the debates and questions about the nature of that regime, as well as its consequences (positive for some, negative for others) have accumulated, without clear-cut answers having been given. To tackle these questions, the panel is made up of two well-known intellectuals who both participated in their own way in the Velasco regime. Héctor Béjar is a Doctor in Sociology from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and won the Latin American Casa de las Américas Non-fiction Prize for his book Perú 1965: Una experiencia guerrillera. Hugo Neira is a Doctor in Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an acute and prolific observer of the Peruvian reality for more than five decades. The conversation will be moderated by the political scientist Alberto Vergara.
