I spent my earliest years under a Corbynista dictatorship. Peru in the early 1970s was run by a Leftist general called Juan Velasco who, claiming to speak for The Many Not The Few, nationalised industries, seized private property, blocked imports and, in an early example of deranged identity politics, sought to impose the indigenous language, Quechua, even in schools where none of the children spoke it. It was Velasco who inspired Hugo Chávez: the young Venezuelan cadet had visited Lima in 1975 and – incredibly, given the palpable poverty and chaos – decided that Venezuela could do with something similar.
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