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IT’S not unusual for battle lines in the class war to be delineated more clearly in Latin America than elsewhere, and the fault lines have deepened in recent decades. Yet the stark contrast between the competing candidates in Peru’s presidential run-off earlier this month was nonetheless remarkable.
It pitted a rural primary school teacher born to illiterate Andean peasants, with little political experience beyond organising a union and spearheading a successful teachers’ strike, against the very epitome of entrenched privilege, a would-be dynast whose father misruled Peru for a decade and is paying the price with a 25-year prison term.
The votes have all been counted, but more than three weeks after the election no result has been declared. According to the tally, endorsed by a variety of international observers, Pedro Castillo — the teacher — won by a margin of more than 44,000 votes. A close but clear result.
He has not formally been declared the president-elect, though, because his opponent has played the Trump card, alleging electoral fraud and attempting, with the assistance of some of the most expensive legal firms in Lima, to throw out more than 200,000 votes? “The election will be flipped, dear friends,” Keiko Fujimori told her supporters.
Election win isn’t enough for a left turn.
Whether it will be depends on the National Elections Jury, which is examining the fraud claims, and is expected to deliver its verdict within days — or possibly weeks.
Fujimori has twice before narrowly lost run-offs, to Ollanto Humala in 2011 and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2016 — both of whom face pretrial detention relating to bribery charges stemming from the activities of the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht. On neither occasion did she challenge the result.
Unrelated charges of money laundering and corruption led to Fujimori herself confronting pretrial detention, and even as a presidential candidate she required special permission to campaign outside Lima.
Her father, Alberto Fujimori, who ruled Peru for 10 years from 1990, was in 2009 sentenced to 25 years in jail for authorising death squads as well as charges relating to kidnapping, vote-rigging and corruption. His legacy includes the forced sterilisation of 270,000 mostly indigenous women. His daughter’s electoral platform included a vow to set him free.
The key factor in her desperation to win the presidency, however, may well be the fact that if she were to become head of state her own legal woes would be postponed.
Keiko Fujimori is not a particularly popular figure even among mainstream conservatives, most of whom voted for her chiefly to stave off the prospect of a Castillo presidency.
Racism undoubtedly plays a part: the contempt in which the European-descended elites and their peripheries hold indigenous populations is a continent-wide phenomenon reflecting its conquistador past and the settler colonialism that ensued. Before the advent of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, it was all but unknown for Native Americans to rise to positions of power at a national level.
Racism, though, may not be the paramount reason behind the resistance among Peru’s entrenched vested interests to the very idea of a Castillo presidency. For them, a bigger issue is his election platform, which has included talk of nationalisation, higher taxation of lucrative mining interests, and improved funding for health — Peru has endured the world’s highest per capita death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic — and education.
It is fairly common across the world for panic buttons to be pushed as soon as the slightest prospect of wealth redistribution rears its head. The neoliberal model of capitalism, for which Chile was chosen as a laboratory by the US almost half a century ago, thrives on the sacred notion that the rich will keep getting richer — which in turn entails any trickle-down effect being restricted to a minimum.
Castillo hails from Cajamarca, one of Peru’s poorest regions, which is also home to South America’s largest gold mine. It would be odd if his ideas about who should benefit from Peru’s natural resources did not differ substantially from those of the mine owners. In recent weeks, however, he has felt obliged to curb his enthusiasm, to declare: “We are not Chavistas, we are not communists, we are not going to take away property from anyone … we are democratic.”
The trouble, of course, is that nowadays even a mildly social democratic agenda tends to be vilified as communist — and the manifesto of Castillo’s Peru Libre party does indeed refer to Marx, Lenin and Peruvian Communist Party founder José Carlos Mariátegui, although its aims could hardly be construed as revolutionary.
Castillo’s unfortunate social conservatism, meanwhile, won’t cut much ice with those on the right who share his views. There are dark rumours of a military coup, should he be declared president, and he would anyhow face a hostile congress. Change will eventually come to Peru, but probably not this year.
Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2021
