Leftist Poised to Capture Peru Election

[Ryan Ruck]

Leftist Poised to Capture Peru Election

When Alan Garcia's presidency ended 16 years ago, Peru was in shambles, with 3,000 percent inflation, guerrilla violence and rampant corruption. Now he's poised to return as president.

One force driving this remarkable comeback is his exchange of insults with Hugo Chavez, which is playing well with voters fearful of the Venezuelan president's left-wing radicalism and alliance with Cuba's Fidel Castro.

It's a striking rearrangement of the political landscape. During his first presidency, Garcia might have passed for a proto-Chavez, railing against imperialists, proclaiming a new socialist deal for the poor and balking at paying off Peru's huge foreign debt.

Now it's retired army Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, Garcia's opponent in the June 4 presidential runoff, who is identified with Chavez, while Garcia has acknowledged past mistakes and claims he has been reborn as a moderate leftist - pragmatic, market-friendly and not hostile to Washington.

It's not the first example of how Latin America's recent leftward surge is being dampened by a fear that Chavez, with his anti-American rhetoric and friendship with Castro, is taking things too far.

Just as in Mexico's presidential race, where a conservative used the Chavez factor to capture the lead over a left-wing former favorite, so in Peru, the Venezuelan has inadvertently hurt a leftist candidate by warmly endorsing him.

Humala won the first round of the election, with Garcia barely edging past a conservative rival to make the runoff. But a May 3-5 survey of 2,000 voters by Apoyo, Peru's leading polling firm, put Garcia ahead 57-43 with a margin of error of two percentage points.

A May 8 sounding by Datum Internacional showed the same result after surveying 1,127 people. Its margin of error was three percentage points.

Garcia portrays himself as Peru's best defense against what Venezuelans call "Chavismo," and has put Humala on the defensive by depicting him as Chavez's ideological subordinate, alongside Bolivia's new socialist president, Evo Morales.

Elected as one of Latin America's youngest presidents at the age of 35, Garcia turned Peru into an international pariah by draining the nation's reserves for populist spending, defiantly declaring a near moratorium on foreign debt payments _ and encouraging other developing nations to do the same.

He lived in exile for nearly nine years until corruption charges against him expired, returned to Peru in January 2001 and just five months later narrowly lost a runoff vote to Alejandro Toledo, whose term ends July 28.

An artful rhetorician, Garcia has directed his barbs at Chavez and his oil power, and provoked an exchange of insults that included such outbursts as Chavez calling Garcia "Corrupt, shameless, a thief," and Garcia retorting: "He must have drunk a lot of Venezuelan rum."

Both nations recalled their ambassadors.

When Humala tried to defend Chavez, "Alan benefited greatly because Humala was left looking like a pawn _ Chavez's pawn," said Fernando Rospigliosi, a former Peruvian interior minister and staunch Garcia critic.

Rospigliosi still considers Garcia a "snake charmer" hypnotizing an "amnesiac Peruvian electorate," but also expresses grudging admiration: "As a politician, he is extraordinary."

At 56, Garcia can still seduce the masses with dazzling oratory, promising secure jobs and better living conditions and education for Peruvians desperately seeking change.

Unemployment runs high, but if he wins, Garcia will at least inherit a far healthier economy than the one he left behind in 1990. Growth was 6.67 percent last year on the back of booming exports, the fiscal deficit is well under control, foreign reserves are solid and inflation remains tame.

Meanwhile, Peruvians see Chavez's fingerprints all over neighboring Bolivia's nationalization of its gas and oil industries, and are reminded of Peru's own widespread expropriations during the 1968-75 military dictatorship of Gen. Juan Velasco - a man Humala has extolled for leading "perhaps the last nationalist patriotic government" in Peru.

Francisco Sanchez, a mechanical engineer, said he'll vote for Garcia as "the lesser of two evils." Sanchez, 42, voted in the first round for Lourdes Flores, the conservative, pro-business ex-congresswoman who came third.

"I'm going to choose Alan Garcia because at least I know how bad he is," said Sanchez. "It seems to me Ollanta Humala has very extremist tendencies."

[Ryan Ruck]

Good news in Columbia and Peru!

Garcia Regains Peru Presidency In Runoff

Former President Alan Garcia staged a remarkable political comeback in Peru's runoff election, beating a retired army lieutenant to regain control of the country 16 years after his first term ended in economic ruin and rebel violence.

Garcia's victory Sunday was a blow to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who had endorsed Ollanta Humala, a political upstart many Peruvians saw as dangerous to democracy.

"I want our party this time to demonstrate to the Peruvian people, who have called it to the highest responsibilities, that it will not convert the state into booty," said Garcia, referring to the widespread corruption that marked his first term from 1985-90, when tens of thousands of party members landed state jobs.

Garcia said voters had sent an overwhelming message to Chavez that they rejected the "strategy of expansion of a militaristic, retrograde model that he has tried to impose in South America."

Chavez extended his regional influence last year with the election of a loyal ally, Evo Morales, as Bolivia's president. Like Morales, Humala had pledged to punish a corrupt political establishment and redistribute wealth to his country's poor Indian and mestizo majority.

Garcia, 57, held an insurmountable lead of 55.5 percent against 44.5 percent for Humala with 77.3 percent of the vote counted, said the head of the electoral agency, Magdalena Chu.

The margin was expected to shrink, however, as Humala's support is strongest in rural areas where vote reporting is slower. Unofficial partial ballot counts by two respected polling companies and a citizen's watchdog group all gave Garcia more than 52 percent of the vote.

Humala, 43, who burst onto the political scene in 2000 while leading a small-scale military rebellion against then-president Alberto Fujimori's foundering corruption-riddled regime, appeared to accept defeat Sunday night. He said his fledging nationalist movement, formed in December, recognized the partial results and "saluted" Garcia and his party.

But his spokeswoman, Cynthia Montes, insisted that he had not acknowledged Garcia's victory and was waiting for final official results.

Humala won a first round of voting on April 9 among 20 candidates. Garcia qualified with a razor-thin victory over the third-place candidate.

Garcia left office in disgrace in 1990 with Peru nearly bankrupt and battered by the devastating Shining Path insurgency. He fled into exile two years later when Fujimori tried to arrest him, returning in 2001 after the Supreme Court ruled that the statute of limitations on corruption charges against him had expired.

Garcia then made a spectacular run for the presidency in Peru's previous election, winning a spot in the runoff and narrowly losing to current President Alejandro Toledo, who is barred legally from seeking a consecutive term.

Seething ethnic and class resentments deeply divide this Andean nation, and Garcia acknowledged that one of his main challenges will be to rid the political class of corruption.

Garcia won majorities in the capital, Lima, where a third of Peru's 16 million voters live, and along the more developed northern coast.

But he lost badly in almost all of Peru's southern and central highland states and in the country's jungle interior — populated by poor Quechua-speaking Indians and mixed-race mestizos, long neglected by the nation's political elite.

Many Peruvians feel they have not benefited from economic growth that averaged 5.5 percent over the past four years, when the poverty rate dropped just two percentage points to 52 percent.

"The results highlight that Peru is a remarkably torn country, along social, ethnic and regional lines," said Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, D.C. "Garcia's task is formidable. Nearly half the country that voted against him did so with anger, and over half of those who voted for him did so grudgingly."

In Humala's comments Sunday night, he did not sound like a losing candidate. He pledged to continue his push for state control of oil and gas resources, punish a corrupt the political establishment and redistribute wealth to Peru's poor Indian and mestizo majority.

"Tomorrow we begin the great national transformation of Peru, the recuperation of our dignity tied to the rescue of our natural resources to put the economy at the service of the people," Humala told reporters in nationally televised remarks.

Humala's party won the largest voting bloc in Peru's 120-member Congress in April 9 elections. It has 45 seats compared with 36 for Garcia's party.

He already has his eye on regional and municipal elections in November that "will complement the power map of Peru," said Fernando Tuesta, director of the polling unit for Lima's Catholic University and the former chief of Peru's national vote-counting office.

Chavez was sharply criticized in Peru for meddling in the presidential campaign, prompting a diplomatic spat in which both countries have withdrawn their ambassadors.

Garcia adroitly turned the race into a referendum on Chavez, depicting Humala as an aspiring despot who would fall into lockstep with the Venezuelan's populist economics and Cuba-friendly anti-Americanism. Chavez in turn called Garcia "a genuine thief, a demagogue, a liar."