Through the use of guerrilla tactics, both the National Liberation Army (ELN) commanded by Héctor Béjar and Javier Heraud, and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), led by an APRA militant, Luis de la Puente Uceda, and Guillermo Lobatón, tried to instigate a revolution, being unsuccessful.

[7] A dispute with the International Petroleum Company over licenses to the La Brea y Pariñas oil fields in northern Peru sparked a national scandal when a key page of a contract (the 11th) was found missing.

[8] The Armed Forces, fearing that this scandal might lead to another uprising or a takeover from the APRA party, seized absolute power and close down Congress, almost all of whose members were briefly incarcerated.

[citation needed] General Velasco seized power on October 3, 1968, in a bloodless military coup, deposing the democratically elected administration of Fernando Belaúnde, under which he served as Commander of the Armed Forces.

A root and branch education reform was implemented, seeking to promote inclusivity among all Peruvians and move them towards to a new national way of thinking and feeling; the poor and the most excluded were prioritized in this system.

[11] A cornerstone of Velasco's political and economic strategy was the implementation by dictate of an agrarian reform program to expropriate farms and diversify land ownership.

The former landlords who opposed this program believed that they did not receive adequate compensation for their confiscated assets and lamented that the state officials and peasant beneficiaries mismanaged their properties after the expropriation.

The deposed Belaúnde administration had attempted to implement a milder agrarian reform program, but it was defeated in Congress by the APRA-UNO coalition with support of the major landowners.

Within this framework, the Velasco administration engaged in a program of import substitution industrialization, imposing tight foreign exchange and trade controls.

[15] In 1971, Velasco described the economic policy as one aimed at overcoming capitalism in Peru, stating that The various laws that create Labor Communities constitute, as a whole, the reform of the traditional capitalist company.

Consequently, no one should be surprised that our economic policy is aimed at overcoming capitalism as a system in Peru and, therefore, at reforming the structure of Peruvian capitalist companies as profoundly as necessary.

[16]In a 1975 speech Velasco described his revolution as one that rejected both capitalism and communism, stating that there is marked confusionism in the public treatment of fundamental ideological problems.

I reiterate once again that our Revolution seeks to build a social, economic and political order essentially different from the one proposed by the capitalist and communist models.

Politically, this means that within the Peruvian Revolution we cannot adopt any attitude that directly or indirectly favors, in the present, or in the future, the maintenance or triumph of the systems that it challenges.

This was due to the government's socialist-leaning policies, but also because of a belief on the part of the Peruvian public that the U.S. generally favored other nations first, such as Chile in the context of their territorial dispute (in spite of its support of Peru over the Tarata dispute), or Colombia, in the context of the United States' mediation in favor of the Salomon-Lozano Treaty in order to compensate the country for its loss of Panama.

John N. Irwin II was appointed special Ambassador to negotiate a solution and recommended against formal application of sanctions required by U.S. law.

Eventually, the dispute was resolved in the context of a broader claims agreement so formulated as to permit Peru to maintain the position that it had not agreed to compensate IPC.

[24] According to various sources Velasco's government bought between 600 and 1200 T-55 Main Battle Tanks, APCs, 60 to 90 Sukhoi 22 warplanes, 500,000 assault rifles, and even considered the purchase of the British Centaur-class light fleet carrier HMS Bulwark.

[24] The enormous amount of weaponry purchased by Peru caused a meeting between former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Chilean US-backed dictator General Augusto Pinochet in 1976.

[23] Some analysts believe the fear of attack by Chilean and US officials as largely unjustified but logical for them to experience, considering the Pinochet dictatorship had come into power with a coup against democratically elected president Salvador Allende.

[30] In 1974, a then relatively unknown Hugo Chávez and around one dozen fellow cadets and soldiers, all youths, traveled to Ayacucho, Peru to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the eponymous battle.

[citation needed] Twenty-five years later, as president, Chávez ordered the printing of millions of copies of his government's new Bolivarian Constitution only in the form of miniature blue booklets, a partial tribute to Velasco's gift.