2. Deeply Rooted Grievance, Varying Meaning: The Institution of the Mining Canon

In Peru’s contemporary political economy of development, a central rule of the game is canon minero, a law that requires national government to give back 50% of mining’s income taxes to the producing regions. Three analytical dimensions help us to tell the story of canon: legacy, contingency, and agency. By legacy, we mean the long-nurtured institutional regime in which canon minero’s short history unfolds, defined by the decentralization grievance and state weakness. Secondly, by contingency, we refer to the historical events exogenous to the canon political process that contribute to the creation of “political opportunity” for changing rules: from the shaping processes of Velasco and Fujimori to a series of international economic crises and natural disasters. Thirdly, in our reading of the canon’s history, while as legacy and contingency set the context, agency has to be considered for a complete analysis. Within the structural features of Peru’s politics of decentralization, at particular historical contingencies, institutional entrepreneurs proposed a wide array of meanings to the label canon, which began as a legal term for an obscure tax and became the banner-word for regionalism.