Juan Velasco Alvarado of the Velasco administration's economic policies is still debated today. As the Peruvian military government ran deeper into debt, it was forced to devalue the currency and run inflationary policies. This however, was in part due to the 1970s Energy Crisis, which also affected Peru and made it impossible for the Velasco administration to fund some of its most ambitious reforms. In foreign policy, in contrast with his 1970s Latin American contemporaries, which were mostly right-wing military dictatorships, he pursued a partnership with the Soviet bloc, tightening relations with Cuba and Fidel Castro and undertaking major purchases of Soviet military
Juan Velasco Alvarado law that was never enacted. Peruanismo was also characterized by authoritarianism, as the administration grew away from tolerating any level of dissent, periodically jailing, deporting and harassing suspected political opponents and repeatedly closing and censoring broadcast and print news media, finally expropriating all of the newspapers in 1974 and sending the publishers into exile. 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. In its first ten years in power, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA) expropriated 15,000 properties (totaling nine million