Foreign Press Coverage of the Peruvian Election

Peru’s Constant Cry for Change. Reform Rhetoric Wins Votes, But Can Presidential Candidates Deliver?
By Marcela Sanchez
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, March 31, 2006; 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON — If there is one constant in Peruvian presidential politics, it is change. For more than 20 years Peruvians have demanded it at the polls — and come April 9 they may get it once again.
As the election approaches, another outsider is leading the polls. Ollanta Humala, a nationalist former army officer, has emerged as a champion of change, a strategy also used by those who came before him.
Five years ago, Alejandro Toledo was the candidate of change. A conservative, pro-market economist and political novice, Toledo led the effort to oust the corrupt and autocratic regime of Alberto Fujimori. In 2001, he became Peru’s first democratically elected president of Indian descent and, at the time of his inauguration, enjoyed a 59 percent popularity rating.
In 1990, it was Fujimori who was the typical outsider and man of change. A shy college professor, Fujimori was a political unknown who barely figured in public opinion polls just three months before his victory. In 1985, the fresh face was that of the charismatic Alan Garcia. Elected president at the age of 36, Garcia was widely seen as having a mandate to follow a left-of-center, pro-poor and anti-imperialist model.
These reform-minded candidates couldn’t have been more diverse personally and ideologically. Yet, once in office, all three failed to meet the expectations of the population. Garcia’s presidency was marked by four-digit hyperinflation, poverty growth and social unrest. As president, Fujimori became a strongman, starting with the dissolution of congress and the judiciary in 1992, only to see his rule end in corruption eight years later when his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, was discovered bribing politicians and media owners.
Personal scandals and political cronyism turned Toledo from an outsider into a member of the discredited political establishment, sinking his popularity to below 20 percent for most of his presidency.
Despite establishing macroeconomic stability and an average growth rate above 4.7 percent yearly (among the highest in Latin America), Toledo failed to carry out a necessary reform agenda that, as Michael Shifter of Washington’s Inter-American Dialogue puts it, would have made Peru’s “political mood less angry, less frustrated.”
With all this change and widespread dissatisfaction, it should come as no surprise that Peruvians have very little regard for democracy.
According to a United Nations Development Program survey released last week, only 18 percent of the more than 11,000 urban and rural Peruvians interviewed said they lived in a democracy. Thirteen percent said they would never live in one, and nearly the same amount considered an authoritarian government preferable. Two out of three blamed politicians for ruining democracy and more than three out of five said they did not care about democracy or knew how to define it.
Humala has come onto the political scene promising to increase the role of government to help the poor and to undo Toledo’s economic reforms by opposing free trade, privatization and other neoliberal policies. A former army lieutenant colonel who has never held public office, Humala rose to prominence as leader of a short-lived military rebellion against Fujimori in 2000.
To his critics, Humala represents a jump into the abyss economically, and a potential Fujimori or even a dictator. Worse yet, Mario Vargas Llosa, internationally renowned Peruvian writer and former presidential candidate, has warned that the ascendancy of Humala and his ethnic ideology of etnocacerismo (a nationalistic movement that draws on Incan roots and an admiration for a 19th-century Peruvian president who resisted Chilean occupation) will mark the emergence of a new state-supported racism of indigenous people versus whites.
Humala is a wild card, no doubt, in a race that has drawn more than a dozen candidates, including Garcia. But just five years ago, it was Toledo who was accused of racism and exacerbating ethnic tensions by playing the race card in a country where more than 80 percent of the people are Indian or of mixed race. Toledo dubbed himself Pachacutec after the greatest Inca emperor, and traveled to the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu a day after his inauguration to be blessed in a traditional ceremony. It didn’t take long, however, for Toledo to be “dethroned”
and turned into another unpopular and ineffective politician.
Humala is most disconcerting for what he isn’t — stabilizing and realistic. Throwing race into the mix of promises to renege on free trade, stop coca eradication and rethink foreign investment, Humala shows exactly who he is — a rebellious leftist warrior with little appreciation for tolerance. In all likelihood, if elected, Humala would be an ill-prepared president who could leave Peruvians, five years later, to seek still more change.
Ollanta Humala: Rebel with a radical cause
By Hal Weitzman in Lima
Published: April 3 2006 03:00
Ollanta Humala recently made a dramatic exit from a rally in Comas, a poor neighbourhood in northern Lima. The front-runner in the race to be Peru’s next president stood legs astride on the roof of his campaign car and waved to an ecstatic crowd, his feet held down by four aides as the vehicle sped off.
A few months ago, Mr Humala, 42, a former army officer and radical nationalist, was generally considered too extreme to become president and was registering single-digit support in the polls.
Now his march towards power seems all but unstoppable. He may not win the more than 50 per cent necessary to claim victory in the first round of elections on Sunday but the smart money is on his triumphing in the second round run-off.
Foreign investors and financial markets are jittery about the prospect. Mr Humala proposes nationalising “strategic sectors”, a windfall tax on foreign mining companies, a veto on a trade agreement with Washington and an end to US-sponsored eradication of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
Mr Humala was raised by revolutionary nationalist parents in a middle-class Lima suburb and emerged as a national figure in 2000 when, as a lieutenant-colonel, he led an uprising against Alberto Fujimori, the former president, and Vladimiro Montesinos, the Machiavellian figure who ran the intelligence services. At the time, he was heralded by La Republica newspaper as brave and decisive.
The coup failed but it changed Mr Humala’s life. “My campaign for the presidency began then,” he told the Financial Times last week. “Until then, my family had a political discourse but I didn’t.”
When Mr Fujimori fled the country a year later, Mr Humala was pardoned and sent to Paris as a military attaché. He attended classes at the Sorbonne, having been a French-speaking alumnus of Lima’s Franco-Peruvian College. He became enamoured of France and cites Charles de Gaulle as a hero.
The car-top electioneering highlights Mr Humala’s sense of the theatrical, also illustrated by his increasing preference for entering towns along the campaign trail on a horse and departing the stage on the shoulders of burly security guards, presenting images of action and derring-do.
He is helped by the fact that he is more handsome and much trimmer than his two nearest rivals, the pro-free market Lourdes Flores and Alan García, the former president.
But Mr Humala has not shown great energy. Compared with that of Ms Flores, his campaign schedule has been lethargic. He has forgone politicking on recent weekends, preferring to relax at the beach. On a campaign trip to southern Peru last week, he cancelled a walkabout and spent the afternoon in his hotel. The next morning, he slept in for an hour while local aides and media waited.
If his campaign has been as much about fatigue as fatigues, it may be because he has spent a lot of time fending off friendly fire. Isaac, his father, has called for the release of incarcerated leaders of Shining Path, the vicious Maoist guerrilla group. Elena, his mother, said gays should be shot. The next day Mr Humala ordered them both to be quiet until after April 9.
Ulises, his older brother, is running against him for the presidency while Antauro, his younger brother – in prison for leading a failed rebellion in 2005 – said all broadcasting companies should be nationalised. Mr Humala called him “crazy”. Recently, Daniel Abugattas, his spokesman, called Eliane Karp, Peru’s first lady, a “daughter of a bitch”. He was promptly sacked.
Mr Humala has also been accused of human rights abuses, anti-Semitism and financial links with Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader. He has faced a concerted media campaign against him and his party has been plagued by infighting.
But none of this has prevented the inexorable rise of “the Teflon candidate”. The main reason has been his ability to tap into widespread resentment towards the political and economic elite.
If Mr Humala’s family has been an irritant, his wife Nadine, a constant companion on the stump, may be his greatest asset. Unlike Ms Karp, who is almost as widely hated as Alejandro Toledo, the president, Nadine plays an important role behind the scenes and has the potential to become a Peruvian Evita.