ABSTRACT
In May, 1973, equality between white-collar workers and manual laborers was decreed, along with a retirement system establishing fifty-five as the minimum retirement age for women and sixty for men. In an effort to gain support from the workers, the government issued the Law of Social Property in July, 1974, which according to Velasco Alvarado was "the most decisive move of the revolution" and which would require "readjustments in the state apparatus." The purpose of the law was to put into practice the premise formulated by members of the military in order to justify, theoretically, the coup: the building of a "democracy of social participation. Francisco Morales Bermudez had been part of the team that prepared the 1968 coup, and between 1969 and 1973 was minister of finance. Sociologist Castro Contreras was a professor at Peru's Center for High Military Studies, where the 1968 coup was conceived and where the revolution's ideas originated.
