Viva Peru! Lawmaker wants 'servile' anthem changed

Feb. 19, 2002

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - Instead of glorying in the nation's greatness, a verse in Peru's national anthem depicts its citizens as "servile" and should be scrapped, a lawmaker from the ruling Peru Posible party said on Tuesday. 

The hymn, sung on all official and military occasions and in schools up and down the country, ending with the rousing exclamation "Viva Peru!" (Long Live Peru!), was composed in 1821 when the Andean nation declared independence from Spain. 

But legislator Edgar Vasquez said a rogue first verse with the words "long oppressed, Peruvians dragged a painful chain, condemned to cruel servitude," had somehow slipped in in 1913. 

"Historians say it apparently came from chants of blacks and slaves from that era who sang the hymn to suit them," he said. Peru had fewer slaves than other Latin American countries but Africans and Asians worked in mines and fields in the late 19th century, often in conditions resembling servitude. 

"It depicts us as a servile people who never did anything against colonialism," Vasquez added. Peru was an important center of Spain's Latin American empire for three centuries. 

Vasquez has submitted a bill to the culture and heritage commission of Congress which would strike out the verse and reinstate the original, which says: "Now the sacred cry of the free has silenced the din of chains which we heard for three centuries of horror and the world heard in astonishment." 

If passed by the commission, the changes to the hymn -- whose chorus is "We are free, let us always be," -- would go to the full Congress for approval. 

"With this change, we want to honor Peruvians who rose up against the Spanish invader," Vasquez said. 

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