Regions of Peru

Since its 1821 independence, Peru had been divided into departments (departamentos) but faced the problem of increasing centralization of political and economic power in its capital, Lima.

Unlike the previous system, the regional circumscriptions have an elected government and have a wide array of responsibilities within their jurisdiction.

As political and economic power increasingly concentrated in Lima, the capital city, several administrations attempted to decentralize the country with little success.

[2] During the later years of the 1985–1990 presidency of Alan García, the government faced the prospect of losing the 1990 presidential elections because of a widespread economic crisis and faltering public support.

As a way of creating an alternative source of power, the regime established twelve autonomous regions on January 20, 1989, in the hope of winning some elections at this level.

A framework law on decentralization (Spanish: Ley Marco de Descentralización) issued on January 30, 1998, confirmed the permanence of transitory councils, now under the supervision of the Ministry of the Presidency.

New regional governments were elected on November 20, 2002, one in each of the former departments and the former Constitutional Province (Spanish: Provincia Constitucional) of Callao.

However, this did not turn out to be the case as the new regional governments were absorbed by local problems and showed little initiative in national politics.

Thus, on January 24, 2007, the council was abolished and replaced by the Decentralization Secretariat (Spanish: Secretaría de Descentralización), a dependency of the Prime Minister office.

[21] Area and population information on the following list has been retrieved from official data by the Peruvian National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (Spanish: Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática, INEI).