PERU is a country with a long tradition of rebellion and guerrilla warfare. Large sections of the native Indian population never accepted the imposition of Spanish colonial rule, and the reverberations from their various revolts rumble on to this day.
Peru made a series of revolutionary experiments. First it tried guerrilla war in 1965. This was an immediate and dismal failure. Some years later, in 1968, there was a military upheaval. A regime of generals and colonels tried to put through some of the socialist reforms that the left wing guerrillas had advocated. This helped to transform the country, but the work was done in such an unimaginative and authoritarian way that it did not succeed in sparking the imagination of the population as a whole.
Then came the chance of an old established party, APRA, the Popular Revolutionary Alliance. Established in the 1930s, with its roots all over the country, APRA should have been the answer to every democrats' prayers. Yet its government too was a failure, becoming terminally bogged down in a web of incompetence and corruption.
In these circumstances - a spiral of disaster - it is not surprising that new revolutionary movements emerged. One was Tupac Amaru, an orthodox familiar guerrilla group on the Cuban model, drawing on the lessons of the 1960s and hoping to do better this time. It had one or two spectacular successes in the 1980s but by the 1990s most of its leaders and many of its rank and file were in prison. The principal purpose of this month's seizure of the Japanese embassy in Lima was to secure their release. Latin America prisons are probably the worst in the world, and those In Peru are as bad as anywhere.
Another group that emerged in the 1980s - a rather better known movement than Tupac Amaru - was the group called Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. Claiming to be the only authentic heir to a Peruvian revolutionary figure of the 1920s, Jose Carlos Manategui, and influenced by the austere example of the Chinese communists of Mao Zedong, Sendero Luminoso embarked on a guerrilla war of unprecedented ruthlessness.
Some of the fierce determination to face down Sendero Luminoso, and to encourage the armed forces to break all the rules in the campaigns to crush them, has come from the current President, Alberto Fujimori, a man who arrived in power in 1990 almost by accident. While radical sections of the population were playing at guerrillas, other more conservative groups spent the 1980s trying to think of ways of reforming the existing discredited political system without violence.
One conservative group came up with the idea of fielding the well known novelist, Mario Varga Llosa, as the presidential candidate. Internationally famous, with out party affiliation, he would come to the job with clean hands and without prejudices.
In the event, Mr Vargas Llosa fell too far into the right wing camp and, desperate to keep him out, the rest of the country united - behind Mr Fujimori, a completely unknown professor of agrarian economics, a man of Japanese extraction.
Latin America, people often forget, is - like the United States - a continent of immigrants. It is not just occupied by Indians and Spaniards. In the 19th century, the continent began to fill up with Italians and Germans, Scandinavians and English, Turks and Croatians and Japanese. In recent years, the president of Guatemala has been Norwegian, the president of Chile has been Swiss, the president of Argentina has been Syrian. But no immigrant president has exploited the links with his forefathers' homeland quite so extensively as Alberto Fujimori.
When he came unexpectedly to power, Mr Fujimori was a political orphan. He had no internal powerbase outside the ramshackle coalition that had elected him to keep out Mr Vargas Llosa. He had no foreign friends. After years of guerrilla violence and government corruption, Peru was regarded by the international community as a basket case. So Mr Fujimori turned to the Japanese for help.
It proved to be an opportune moment. The Japanese at the start of the 1990s were beginning to sense that they were a global economic power, yet they had little political strength or influence. They were on a learning curve. They were campaigning to be members of the UN Security Council. They were anxious to extend their global role, Maybe they would have preferred a friendly president in Brazil, where the Japanese population numbers more than a million. But an isolated president in Peru would also serve their purposes well.
So, Japan became Mr Fujimori's great trump card, providing him with the investment the country desperately needed, a channel of easy communication, and a way of dealing with bilateral relations quite unlike that of the United States - Peru's previous foreign godfather. Peru was not in Japan's backyard, and the Japanese had no sense of racial condescension.
Mr Fujimori, of course, is no paragon of virtue. He has unleashed the army in an unparalleled war of repression, and has embarked, with Japanese help and assistance, on the same neo conservative course as the rest of Latin America. It is a dangerous and expensive experiment - the latest in a long line of experiments to which Peru has been subjected.
The immediate result, as everywhere else, is the closing down of the old internal economy, the factories and industries that had been painstakingly built up over the years, providing skills and employment to hundreds of thousands of Peruvians. At the same time as the numbers of workless increase, the already rich and prosperous have never had it so good. The endless shopping malls and arcades of suburban Lima are a monument to their mindless consumerism.
In these circumstances the small publicity seeking exploits of the Tupac Amaru guerrillas can have little hope of overturning the huge power of the state. They act rather as the tiny prick of conscience to a society that is sometimes prone to forget how the great bulk of the population lives.