As people head to the polls tomorrow, they seek to elect the 'lesser of two evils', writes TOM HENNIGANin Lima
THE PAST will weigh heavily on Peru’s voters when they head to the polls tomorrow to elect a new president.
They must choose between the daughter of the country’s former dictator – serving 25 years for crimes committed when in power – and an ex-military officer who tried to overthrow him in a failed coup in 2000 and who has previously expressed admiration for Venezuela’s controversial leader Hugo Chávez.
For most of the long and bitter campaign, it has been former soldier turned nationalist firebrand Ollanta Humala that has played the role of bogeyman.
A majority of the country’s media has worked itself up into a frenzy warning that the former military officer is an autocrat-in-waiting preparing to snuff out the country’s democracy. His role in his brother’s failed coup attempt in 2005 has been endlessly picked over on talk radio. The business elite warns his economic plans will see a decade of record growth come to a crashing halt if he wins. Earlier this week the stock-market tumbled 5 per cent on rumours a poll would show him holding a narrow lead ahead of tomorrow’s vote.
Many are convinced of the danger. Polls show 40 per cent say they would never support him. “He is hungry for power and will say anything to get it. But once president he wants to be another Chávez,” says Cesar Cordoba, a security guard in the capital Lima, referring to Venezuela’s long-serving president Hugo Chávez.
But many Peruvians previously suspicious of his democratic credentials are now rallying to Mr Humala, seeing him as the only way to stop a return of the Fujimori circle to power after the main centrists candidates were surprisingly eliminated in a first round on April 10th.
Most prominent among the intellectuals to come out and back Mr Humala is the country’s Nobel-prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Before the first round he likened having to choose between Keiko Fujimori and Mr Humala as akin to deciding “between terminal cancer and Aids”. But now with the centrists eliminated he is backing Mr Humala as the “lesser of two evils”.
Mr Humala sought to ease the fears of anti-Fujimoristas nervous about backing him by last month publicly pledging on a Bible to only serve one term and not to seek a constitutional amendment to allow for a second five-year stint in power.
Since then a majority of the country’s intelligentsia and artistic community have called for a “No to Fujimori” vote in order to prevent a return of “the worst dictatorship in our country’s history” in the words of Mr Vargas Llosa.
Ms Fujimori has sought to put some distance between herself and her father during the campaign, but not too much – he remains popular with many voters for defeating the brutal Shining Path insurgency and ending hyperinflation during his decade in power between 1990 and 2000.
She has backed away from a previous pledge to release him if elected but her closest advisers are drawn from his inner circle from the 1990s and few doubt he will be freed if she wins – despite four separate convictions for among other crimes operating death squads and massive corruption that, according to Transparency International, totalled $600 million.
Despite Ms Fujimori’s troubled legacy and Mr Humala’s pledge to redistribute more of the wealth from Peru’s boom to the third of the population still stuck in poverty – most of them of indigenous descent – the country’s white elite has lined up behind Fujimori.
It is its control of the country’s media that has allowed for the fiercely partisan propaganda campaign against Mr Humala. Tabloids report his pledge to negotiate with peasant farmers a reduction in coca production as a pact with drug cartels. His plea for social movements to be on the lookout for fraud tomorrow was denounced as a call for an insurrection should he lose. Renewed allegations that her father’s administration forcibly sterilised up to 300,000 women are glossed over.
The country’s conservative Catholic Church hierarchy has also weighed in, with Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani using a homily to criticise Mr Humala. “Peru’s elite is a sector that is not opposed to radical change. It is opposed to any change,” says Ernesto de la Jara Basombrío, director general of local civil rights group the Institute of Legal Defence.
Like many other organisations that make up Peru’s civic society the institute has broken with long-standing policy of not endorsing candidates in elections and has joined the “No to Fujimori” campaign.
Also doing so is the country’s main human rights umbrella organisation, the National Human Rights Coordinator.
The body is still calling for the full clarification of Mr Humala’s role in the war against the Shining Path insurgency. Witnesses said he was the terrifying “Captain Carlos” who disappeared several people when in charge of a remote military base. Courts later dismissed the case but are now investigating if bribes were paid to get witnesses to change their testimony. “It was a very difficult decision we had to take [to join the ‘No to Fujimori’ campaign],” says coordinator executive Miguel Jugo Viera.“But in the end it is like having the choice between two films. One you do not know what it will be. But the other we’ve seen before and it is terror.”