Supporters of Pedro Castillo demonstrate this Saturday near a protest by followers of Keiko Fujimori, in the center of Lima. Stringer / EFE
Fujimorism has asked the Peruvian electoral court to annul the polling stations in rural towns where the Fuerza Popular party did not obtain any vote in the presidential elections held on June 6. "It is statistically impossible," said his spokesman Miguel Torres. Since Friday, indigenous leaders and organizations have warned that they will continue to arrive in Lima and will fight to monitor respect for their ballots in favor of rural teacher Pedro Castillo, considering that the nullity petitions are a form of racism and discrimination.
On Sunday night, while Castillo's followers held a rally for the sixth consecutive day in front of the National Elections Jury, a former congressman related to Fujimori raised on television that if the court did not finish reviewing the hundreds of requests for annulment of Fujimorism until On July 28 - the date on which the change of command will take place - the president of Congress should assume power and call new elections.
The proposal has been rejected by the experts, as it does not fit into the only two grounds for annulling the elections, and has set off alarms that Fujimori continue to delay the announcement of the results with legal tricks.
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“We have come because we want the truth, we already want the national result of the elections.
We are the peasant rounds of Puña, where Professor Pedro Castillo is from.
We have come from a long distance with our own ticket and our own resources to defend our vote, ”Velia Elizabeth Guerrero said in Lima on Sunday night.
The leftist candidate from Peru Libre obtained - with 99.93% of the vote - an advantage of 49,420 votes over the conservative Keiko Fujimori. Some of the polling stations where Fujimori did not get any support are in the Amazon region, where citizens of the indigenous and Wampí peoples live. In a statement, the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampís Nation has "categorically" rejected the Popular Force's request to annul its votes. “The voting tables were legally and effectively installed in the communities of the Wampís Nation, in which we Wampís cast freely and voluntarily, and without any type of coercion, our vote in exercise of the right to political participation at the polls. , which is recognized in the national and international legal framework ”,holds the document released on Saturday.
In a conference held by peasant and indigenous leaders in Lima, connected by internet with Aymara from the Altiplano and apus (indigenous chiefs) from the Amazon, they declared themselves under permanent surveillance to enforce their votes and their communities and organizations if necessary. “This is a crude game of Fuerza Popular, it confuses the Peruvian population. With these statements by the Fujimori advisers, with a racist content, they say that the mountainous area has filled out the minutes at will. They continue to treat us as second-rate people in the 21st century. We are tired of that: we have seen throughout this campaign a disregard for indigenous peoples. If the rural vote is not respected, we will advance to a measure of struggle, for the moment we will wait for the result of the annulments ”, said Víctor Maita,President of the National Agrarian Confederation and rancher and farmer in his native Cusco.
In a television interview on Sunday, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, renewed his support for the daughter of the autocrat Alberto Fujimori, as he did during the election campaign. “We are supporting Mrs. Fujimori because we don't want the catastrophe that could happen if Mr. Castillo wins the election, that is obvious to the vast majority of Peruvians, especially Peruvians in the cities, who are more informed than the rest, ”he said.
Historian José Ragas considers that the disqualification of Castillo's voters reveals the anxiety of Lima's elites for fear of losing political control. “This anxiety manifests itself in various forms, from legal claims of lawyers to protesters wearing neo-fascist symbols. All to seek to annul the vote of regions that have massively supported Peru Libre, in this case, the mountains ”. "It is not a new phenomenon. It is part of a tension at the beginning of the Republic, when the demographic weight of the Andean population decided who the president was. To annul this, in 1896 they established direct suffrage and eliminated the vote of the population that could not read or write. The result was to reduce the universe of voters to adult men, urban, literate and culturally white ”,explains the professor attached to the Institute of History of the Catholic University of Chile.
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