Franklin Briceño
06/05/2021 16:01
Clarín.com
World
Updated 06/06/2021 8:26 AM
Burdened by an unstoppable coronavirus pandemic,
Peru
elects its next president this Sunday between two candidates who represent the extremes, which anticipates that, no matter who wins, the country will enter
a new moment of political turbulence.
According to several polls,
left-wing professor
Pedro Castillo
and right-wing former legislator Keiko Fujimori are practically tied for the second round of one of
the most contested elections
in recent times.
The last known poll - whose publication is prohibited within Peru by the electoral law - confirms
the end of heart attack
that these elections will have.
According to the study of voting intention of the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP), Fujimori receives 40.9% of preferences, and Castillo 40.8%, which reveals a minimum favoritism towards the candidate of Fuerza Popular, who until now ran a few steps behind his rival.
In any case, the data falls fully within the study's margin of error, so the situation would be
a technical tie
.
Although the question is what will happen to those who say they will vote blank, or to the undecided.
The fight will take place just days after authorities admitted that deaths from Covid-19 are almost three times more than they thought, and said they would add up to more than 184,000, one of the highest fatalities in Latin America, just below that Brazil and Mexico.
"Either of them is going to have a very difficult time," predicts political scientist Gustavo Pastor, a professor at the Universidad del Pacífico.
The country faces, he added,
a "very strong polarization between the extreme left and the extreme right, as a
result of the serious health, economic, social and political crisis."
It is the first time Castillo, 51, has disputed a ballot, while Fujimori, 46, is on his third try.
Keiko Fujimori seeks the presidency of Peru for the third time.
Photo: REUTERS
The challenges
If Castillo succeeds, he will face a business elite that looks at him with distrust
and a Congress where he will not have a majority to approve his initiatives.
Fujimori will be able to form coalitions in the Legislative, but will have to face the opposition in the street.
"Both are going to have serious problems fulfilling their electoral promises," said political scientist Pastor.
If the teacher loses, he announced that he will return to school in his remote native village in the Andes to teach classes for his elementary school students, whose poverty fueled his desire to be president.
Between the presidency and the jail
Fujimori, for his part, is at stake for freedom
.
If she is defeated, she will go to court to defend herself against a prosecution that calls for 30 years in prison.
She is accused of leading a criminal group that laundered millions of dollars received in suitcases from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, as well as from the most powerful businessmen in Peru to support her in her presidential campaigns in 2011 and 2016, something she denies.
If you win, your victory is double
because your process will be frozen for five years.
The candidate has received constant signs of rejection in recent years.
"She is the daughter of a corrupt man who supports everything bad that her father did," said Mirian Ortiz, a housewife who at the beginning of the week participated in a march with thousands against him through the streets of Lima.
Alberto Fujimori, Keiko's father, was president between 1990-2000.
He is serving 25 years in prison for three corruption sentences and another for being the mastermind in the murder of 25 Peruvians, including a child, shot by a clandestine group of soldiers financed by his administration.
Pedro Castillo, this Thursday, at a campaign closing ceremony, in Lima.
Photo: Xinhua
The former president is also accused in two other trials.
In the first for being the mastermind of the murder of six other peasants executed by the same military group and in the second for his responsibility in the death of five women and in the serious injuries of 1,301 sterilized against their will.
Keiko Fujimori promised to pardon her father
if he becomes president.
All former Peruvian presidents of the last 35 years have been investigated for corruption and linked to alleged Odebrecht bribes.
Among the most shocking cases, one of them, Alan García, committed suicide shortly before being captured and another, Alejandro Toledo, is detained in the United States awaiting extradition.
Pandemic and poverty
Castillo and Keiko Fujimori are populists.
Both offer to alleviate the catastrophe caused by the new coronavirus that, in addition to the deaths caused, in 14 months has affected people so much that
poverty
now
affects almost 10 million people, 30.1% of the population
.
The pandemic uncovered the weaknesses of an economic system praised by the rich, but which 86% of the population seeks to modify, according to a May survey by the firm Ipsos.
Hundreds of thousands of people find it difficult to feed their families every day, which is why old survival strategies, such as community pots, have returned to everyday life.
Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Castillo face off in a close second round.
/ AFP
Fujimori promises to grant several bonuses, including one that gives a one-time $ 2,500 to each family with at least one Covid-19 victim.
It also ensures that it will distribute 40% of a tax for the extraction of minerals, oil or gas to families who live near those areas.
Fujimori's candidacy received the support of the Peruvian Nobel Prize Winner for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, almost all of the rich, the most important media, social media influencers and even several players from the Peruvian soccer team.
The writer, who lost a ballot to Alberto Fujimori 31 years ago, stopped criticizing her.
In 2016 he called her "daughter of the dictator convicted of criminal and thief." Now, he considers her a representative of "freedom and progress" and affirms that Castillo is, of "dictatorship and backwardness."
Castillo's Promises
At the other extreme, the leftist promises to renegotiate contracts with multinationals that extract minerals, gas and oil in search of more state revenue, he also assures that he will collect debts from the treasury of powerful business groups totaling more than 2.4 billion dollars.
But his substantive proposal, repeated in remote towns and poor areas of Lima,
seeks to convene an assembly to rewrite a new Constitution
that recovers the business role of the state and gives privileged importance to the rights of health, education and housing.
Followers of Pedro Castillo, this Thursday at the end of the campaign, in Lima.
Photo: REUTERS
Castillo receives the support of former Bolivian presidents Evo Morales and Uruguay José Mujica, who in a conversation via Facebook told Castillo on Thursday: "Do not fall into authoritarianism, bet on the heart of your people and when you make a mistake have the honesty to tell him 'I was wrong'. ''
His proposals make the business elite uncomfortable.
"What it will do is that the investment decisions of foreign capital will go to other countries," Peruvian Roque Benavides, a shareholder of Yanacocha, the largest gold mine in South America, told the local TV station UCI. Castillo's home region called Cajamarca, which is also one of the poorest areas of Peru.
Accusations and violence
Fujimori accuses Castillo of being a communist.
Cities are flooded with panels and phrases like "protect your job and freedom, no communism."
The historian Natalia Sobrevilla, a Peruvian professor at the University of Kent, recalled in the podcast "Jugo de caigua" that in the presidential elections of 1851, the newspaper "El Correo de Lima" published the headline "Communism invades us, comes from Colombia and Ecuador and soon they will not want us to have slaves in Peru. '' Slavery was abolished in Peru in 1854.
The candidate also affirms that Castillo wants to turn the country into a version of Venezuela.
Venezuelan opposition Leopoldo López arrived in Lima last week to support Fujimori
and told the AP from a luxury hotel that "what can come to Peru, if Castillo wins, is tremendous."
In her almost empty restaurant, Juana Casa, 60, said that if Castillo comes to power "the dollar will go through the roof."
"He is not a prepared man, on the other hand Keiko (Fujimori) already knows how politics is handled, she is a girl who studied in the United States," he said.
The shadow of the Shining Path
Fujimori and his allies suggest, without proof, that Castillo has ties to members of the Shining Path terrorist group that bathed Peru in blood between 1980 and 2000.
A massacre of 16 people a week ago in a cocaine-producing valley attributed by authorities to an armed group linked to Sendero, fanned the old ghosts of the 20th century.
The Peruvian political scientist Gonzalo Banda said on the internet program "Islas de Wednesday" that "the anti-communist rhetoric in the campaign is doomed to failure because something obvious is forgotten, the identity, ethnic, sentimental element" that Castillo achieved with a large part of the excluded.
After the last debate, Fujimori met in a colonial mansion with a dozen politicians and businessmen before whom he promised, if he becomes president, to respect democracy and freedoms.
"I ask you and all Peruvians for an opportunity to vindicate myself with the language of the facts," said Fujimori, with a heartfelt voice, almost on the verge of tears and reading a paper.
Hours later and to the southeast, in an area of the Andes where 240 years ago the indigenous leader Túpac Amaru II extended his colonial rebellion against the king of Spain, thousands waited for
Castillo who appeared holding a pencil, symbol of his party
, of the size of a baseball bat.
He spread his arms looking at the sun, sang the national anthem of Peru and promised the attendees "to put an end to these old corrupt politicians who the first thing they have done is think about their pockets."
Source: The Associated Press
CB
Look also
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A Peru divided between the right and the radical left prepares to elect a president