Peru: Poll swings left in first round

Peruvians went to the polls to elect a new president on April 10.

In a first round result reminiscent of the 2006 election, the electorate has sent the previously languishing “left-nationalist” candidate Ollanta Humala (of the Gana Peru alliance) through to the presidential runoff on June 5.

As in 2006, Humala will face a candidate representing elite interests: Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of ex-president and architect of Peru’s neoliberal development model, Alberto Fujimori.

Final figures are yet to be released, but Humala and Fujimori attracted about 30% and 23% of the vote respectively.

In the lead-up to the election, ex-president and neoliberal economist Alejandro Toledo comfortably led all the opinion polls. But his campaign withered in the final two weeks and Toledo scored about 15% of the vote.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, an ex-World Bank economist and senior figure in the Toledo administration (2001-2006), fared better with about 20% of the vote.

The combined vote for the right-wing candidates Fujimori, Kuczynski and Toledo indicates that Humala, who experienced a late surge in support after promising to redistribute some of Peru’s mining income to the poor, has a tough campaign ahead.

In 2006, the centrist/right wing vote converged around Alan Garcia in the runoff. Despite his notoriously corrupt political history, Garcia attracted lavish campaign funding from various capitalist groupings, including the US business lobby, who wanted unrestricted access to Peru’s natural resources.

A huge propaganda campaign led to Garcia winning 53% of the final vote and Humala 47%.

It remains to be seen whether the same scenario will play out in 2011. Will those who voted for Kuczynski and Toledo (who differ little in policies) now line up for the equally pro-free market Fujimori?

Or will Humala, having come close on a previous occasion, make it over the line this time?

This is the question that will now be dominating Peruvian politics for the next few months.

The reason for the similarity between the 2006 and 2011 first round results is that the underlying issues remain much the same.

Peru is a resource-rich country, but after two decades of “integration into the global economy” (read: rampant exploitation by foreign capital), two-thirds of mainly indigenous Peruvians, mainly indigenous, still live in poverty.

The bottom third live in extreme poverty on less than US$3 a day and with no access to basic necessities such as adequate health care or running water.

Compounding the problem of indigenous poverty — a constant factor in Peruvian life since the Spanish conquest in the 16th century — is the spiralling environmental destruction that has accompanied the oil and minerals boom.

In the past, poor Peruvians in the highlands could at least fall back on their ancestral lands for survival — growing maize, potatoes and raising a few animals.

But with the conversion of much of Peru’s magnificent mountain country into a vast, dirty mining park, the future is uncertain for sustainable peasant agriculture.

Life for the indigenous tribal people in the Peruvian Amazon — of which roughly 75% has been conceded to multinational oil companies — is getting more and more tenuous. Fossil fuel death squads are moving in, followed by teams of engineers and drillers.

Ordinary Peruvians, especially those living outside Lima, are aware of what is going on, and are deeply concerned about the despoliation of their country and the noxious corruption that accompanies it.

They know that most of the profits flow outside the country to fill foreign coffers, and that the Lima-centric Peruvian political class skims off the rest as payment for services rendered.

During Garcia’s second term, popular unrest led to the outbreak of protests throughout the country.

Thousands of demonstrators, cynically labelled “left-wing terrorists” by Garcia, have been jailed. Hundreds have been injured or killed in a series of violent clashes with government security forces.

In Lima’s affluent gated communities, there may well be more gleaming luxury vehicles in the car parks of private sporting clubs.

But outside that privileged bubble, the reality of neoliberal development offers a vision of Peru’s future as harsh as the toxic smelter fumes that have changed some highland towns, where kids play wearing respiratory filter masks.

In neoliberal Peru, the “indios” of the coast and sierra and the “chunchos” of the rainforest have been crushed by the ravenous jaws of multinational mining capital just as their ancestors were set upon and brutalised by the savage war dogs brought over by Spanish conquistadors.





This epic injustice has necessitated a huge effort by elite framers of political discourse to prevent popular unrest from spilling over into the electoral cycle.

For the past 20 years, they have been remarkably successful at containing and marginalising dissent.

They have run a carefully stage-managed democracy where the flamboyant mix of competing personalties belies a shared commitment to the axioms of “free trade” and pro-Washington strategic policies.

Clearly, Humala’s strong showing in two consecutive elections indicates that many Peruvians are sick of the neoliberal piracy that is ravaging their country at the expense not only of today’s poor and marginalised but future generations as well.

Whether Humala actually represents a solution is another issue — as many who voted for him already understand.

WikiLeaks cables reveal that Humala has privately assured the US embassy he is more of a “nationalist” than a “leftist”. His soft-left approach in this election campaign, in the style of former Brazilian president Lula, is consistent with that disclosure.

Should he win in June, Humala would come in with a program, at best, to reform the current “free market” system.

The swing to Humala represents a positive development, but there is still a long way to go for Peru’s broad-based social movements seeking a sustainable development revolution.