The objective of the article is to analyze the experience of municipal decentralization developed during the last 40 years in Peru. For this purpose, a brief documentary review is carried out based on content analysis, considering the dimensions: historical, political, economic and administrative of the decentralization experience. From the experience it can be deduced that, in the local spheres, with decentralization, democratization has taken place, expressed in the participation of those who were previously excluded from the local political system, generating important sociopolitical changes, in a first stage. However, the expectations and aspirations generated by the experience have been truncated by political-institutional actions undertaken during the autocratic decade of the nineties, whose logic has been reproduced throughout the last years.