[3][4] This practice has occurred throughout Peru's history and has resulted with large levels of economic inequality, political alienation and other disparities in rural regions, with Lima acquiring the majority of socioeconomic benefits in the nation.
[5] Following the independence of Peru from the Spanish Empire, the economic elite focused their power on the coastal regions while the rural provinces were governed by existing serfdom practices by hacienda landowners.
One of them was the fight against the "Lima centralism" of President Alejandro Toledo,[19] who, in the context of the privatization of public companies in the 1990s, was responsible for the "national participatory budget" and for reforming the 1993 Constitution to promote subnational entities.
[21][22] The government of the president and military Juan Velasco Alvarado at the time, he sought to fix this problem with the agrarian reform of 1969,[23][24] in addition to trying to decentralize the media outside of Lima, due to geographical and linguistic difficulties.
[28] The wealth earned between 1990 and 2020 was not distributed throughout the country; living standards showed disparities between the more-developed capital city of Lima and similar coastal regions while rural provinces remained impoverished.
[28] In May 2021, Americas Quarterly wrote: "Life expectancy in Huancavelica, for example, the region where Castillo received his highest share of the vote in the first round, is seven years shorter than in Lima.
[4] Centralism has been described as "one of the structural evils that accompanied the Republic from its inception to the present", with the disparities between the provinces and Lima being one of the largest examples of income inequality in Latin America.