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15/04/2011 | Peru's Ghost Election

Frida Ghitis

When Peruvians went to the polls on April 10 to choose a new president, they faced an uncommon variety of choices. The fractured vote left no one with the required majority, producing another extraordinary field for the second-round voting on June 5.

 

The top two vote-getters bring minimal experience and maximum polemic. In the not-very-kind words of Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's Nobel Prize- winning author, it's like "choosing between AIDS and cancer."

Peruvians hope their Nobel laureate was using hyperbole in his choice of metaphors, but though they might disagree over the reasons why, most are indeed deeply concerned about who their next president will be. The two candidates facing off in the second round are Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori, two sharply different and enormously controversial personalities. But while both raise misgivings among observers and voters, the real source of the concerns lies less in the candidates themselves than in the names that will appear alongside theirs, in invisible ink, on the ballot. Behind each candidate looms another larger-than-life persona, and while the ballot may list Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori as the two choices, the campaign is really about those ghost candidates.

In the case of Humala, a leftist leader of a failed military coup, it is the distinct outline of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that many voters will see.  Meanwhile, the 35-year-old Fujimori is overshadowed by the image and legacy of her father, the now-imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori.

The slate of candidates in the first round of voting did include politicians and technocrats who were well-known quantities to Peruvians. There was Alejandro Toledo, a former president with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a respected academic and former finance minister with degrees from Oxford and Princeton. In the end, the votes were closely divided. Humala garnered just 31 percent, Fujimori 23 percent, Kuczynski 19 percent and Toledo 15 percent.

In a country with one of the world's fastest-growing economies, but also an intractably high poverty rate and a history of political violence, voters had their pick from among all points on the ideological spectrum. They not only chose the two furthest to the left and the right, but also the two most directly influenced by men with undemocratic tendencies.

While both candidates now try to portray themselves as centrist on the economy and free of the outside influences that voters fear may control them, they represent sharply different views about the best course ahead.

Humala promises to focus on income redistribution and said he would rewrite the country's constitution, as Chávez and his Latin American emulators have done. He claims to have moderated his positions and tries to distance himself from Chávez. Still, his rivals maintain the claims are nothing but electoral calculation, raising the specter that he would bring Venezuelan-style changes. 

Humala ran in 2006, when he also finished first in the first round, only to lose in the runoff. During both campaigns, he denied links to Chávez, who is profoundly disliked by most Peruvians.

On the right, the young Fujimori, whose father still enjoys a devoted following, said she would continue current economic policies but also bolstered her campaign with populist planks, including a tax hike for the rich. Her campaign, however, was centered on a subdued version of her convicted father's ideology.

The two candidates both grew up in families with forceful political ideologies that deeply affected their upbringing. Humala's father, Isaac, was a leftist activist and founder of the Ethnocacerista Movement, which seeks to re-establish the supremacy of the "copper-skinned" Peruvians. Interestingly, when Vargas Llosa was a university student, Isaac Humala was his instructor in Marxism-Leninism. The writer later turned Humala into a character in one of his novels. 

Humala has long expressed admiration for Venezuela's Chávez, but ever since he decided to seek the presidency by democratic means, he has tried to run away from his political mentor's shadow. In 2006, a disenchanted supporter accused him of receiving millions of dollars in cash from Chávez. Humala denied the accusation. He went on to lose the election to yet another disgraced former president, Alan Garcia. Politics in Peru is never dull.

This time around, Humala has again tried to distance himself from Chávez. When Chávez declared that Humala is "a good soldier," Humala publicly asked him not to meddle in Peruvian politics. 

Chávez remains unpopular in Peru despite the country's enormous economic disparities, which conceivably could make it ripe for the Venezuelan leader's brand of leftist populism. While the economy has been growing at the fastest rate in Latin America and one of the fastest in the world, most Peruvians still live in poverty. 

Humala now claims his model is Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist leader who helped the poor without alienating foreign investors or the business community. That's in sharp contrast to Chávez, who has taken on the private sector, nationalized hundreds of companies and undermined both market mechanisms and democratic norms.

Just as Humala is trying to escape a large shadow with limited success, his rival is trying to escape hers, but even less effectively.

Keiko Fujimori grew up in the halls of power. Her father, the child of Japanese immigrants, rose seemingly out of nowhere in 1990 to capture the presidency. The agricultural engineer and university rector surprised everyone by defeating none other than Vargas Llosa to become Peru's new president. At the time, the country was caught in a maelstrom of hyperinflation and political violence. The Maoist Shining Path guerrillas were terrorizing the countryside, and the government seemed helpless. Fujimori dissolved congress and gave free rein to the army and intelligence services. When Keiko was 19, Fujimori divorced his wife and named Keiko first lady of Peru, forcing her into a busy public role.

Later, when the excesses of her father's authoritarian government came to light and he was arrested, her political career moved in tandem with the legal case against him, as she sought to mobilize his supporters and gain his freedom. The elder Fujimori was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison on human rights violations and embezzlement. Keiko subsequently launched a political party and ran for congress, in a move whose primary purpose seemed to be winning her father's freedom. It was a goal shared by the roughly one-fifth of the Peruvian population that still admires the elder Fujimori.  Keiko became a member of congress after winning election with the largest number of votes in the country's history. 

Like her father before her, she has focused relentlessly on law and order. The murder rate in Peru has doubled since the last election, making a security-focused campaign appealing to voters.

Fujimori has rejected charges that her father has piloted her presidential campaign from inside his prison cell. To her followers, the notion is not troubling. To others, however, Fujimori's name is synonymous with human rights violations and a security apparatus run amok.

There seems little doubt that if she became president her father would, in fact, receive a presidential pardon. Keiko Fujimori has admitted that there were "mistakes and excesses" during her father's presidency. Nevertheless, years earlier she declared, "If I am president, I won't hesitate to grant amnesty to any person that I believe is innocent."

If she is elected and she frees her father, Alberto Fujimori would have his hands back on the rudder, or at least very close to it. 

Whoever wins on June 5, Peru's next president will be an admirer of one of the two living ghosts that haunt this election, each a political leader who has undermined democracy and shown strong authoritarian tendencies.

Most Peruvians are worried, even if not everyone agrees with the assessment that the choice is between two deadly alternatives. The election will come down to which specter Peruvians fear most, the ghost of Hugo Chávez or the ghost of Alberto Fujimori.

**Frida Ghitis is an independent commentator on world affairs and a World Politics Review contributing editor. Her weekly column, World Citizen, appears every Thursday.

World Politics Review (Estados Unidos)

 


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