Left turn

Ollanta Humala is elected President as the pink tide spreads in Latin America, a region that is increasingly hostile to U.S. hegemony.

THE victory of Ollanta Humala in the presidential election held in the first week of June has signalled the advance of the pink tide to the shores of Peru. Humala, a left-wing nationalist and a former army officer, defeated Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the imprisoned former President Alfredo Fujimori, by a narrow margin. Humala, the candidate of the Gana Peru electoral bloc, received 51.4 per cent of the vote.

For Humala, it was the case of being second-time lucky. He narrowly lost the presidency five years ago to Alan Garcia. Garcia, a former leftist, made a dramatic comeback in 2006 after a lacklustre presidency in the late 1980s. In that election, Humala openly flaunted his proximity to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He wore a red shirt throughout the electoral campaign to highlight his radicalism. Like Chavez, Humala had led an unsuccessful coup, against President Fujimori in 2000. (Chavez led a failed coup in 1992 and went on to win the presidency in 1998.) Humala's advisers had come to the conclusion that his identification with Chavez had cost him dearly in the 2006 election.

For the June presidential, Humala replaced his red shirts with staid business suits. He distanced himself from Chavez and instead chose another moderate leftist, the former President of Brazil, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, as his new role model. Humala curtailed his radical rhetoric to present himself as a candidate who would play by the rules of established Peruvian politics. He pledged that he would not amend the constitution to extend term limits, as was the case in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador. Humala has made it clear that his model of governance will be the one successfully implemented by Lula in Brazil. However, the right-wing's campaign pitch was that if Humala was elected, he would be a proxy of the Venezuelan leader.

In 2006, the George Bush administration, already rattled by the string of victories by left-wing candidates across Latin America, used its considerable influence to prevent Humala from being elected. Cables released by WikiLeaks have revealed Washington's deep suspicions about Humala in the run-up to the 2006 election. United States officials alleged that Chavez was trying to export his Bolivarian revolution to Peru through the auspices of Humala. For the 2011 election, Washington's preferred candidate was Keiko Fujimori. She herself openly displayed her preference for the U.S. while Humala chose to be identified with Brazil, the economic and political powerhouse of the region. The Obama administration feared that a Humala victory would give Brazilian companies an edge in Peru's lucrative minerals sector. The rivalry between the U.S. and Brazil for influence in the region is now in the open.

With the pink tide having reached Peru for the first time in recent history, Washington will have to deal with yet another leftist President in a region that has become increasingly hostile to American hegemony. Regional groupings such as the UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) and ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) have helped regional integration. The U.S. has not been invited to join either of the two groupings. Only Chile and Colombia have pro-American right-wing governments. To Washington's chagrin, even the Colombian government, under the newly elected President Manuel Santos, is veering towards the left-wing governments in the region.

On July 5, there will be meeting in Caracas to firm up the creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This new grouping will include all countries in the Americas except the U.S. and its close ally, Canada. The aim of the leaders of the region is to sideline the Organisation of American States (OAS), which has been commandeered on many occasions by the U.S. to further its anti-democratic goals in the hemisphere.

Humala has been critical of the generous concessions being given to multinational corporations for the extraction of the country's bountiful natural resources. The government of Alan Garcia had shown little concern for the rights of the indigenous communities on whose land the mining, drilling and logging activities of the foreign companies were going on. Humala has said that he will make the multinationals pay much more for their exploitation of the country's resources.

In the first round of the election held in early May, Humala enjoyed a comfortable lead, followed by Keiko Fujimori. The three candidates who lost out in the primaries were Alejandro Toledo, a former President; Pedro Pablo Kucynski, a former Finance Minister; and Luis Castaneda, a former Mayor of Lima. These three shared the same neoliberal ideology and in the process split the right-wing vote, helping Keiko Fujimori to emerge as the standard-bearer of the right in the final round. The influential right-wing media, aided by the business elites, supported her.

According to commentators in the region, there was also a racial element that influenced the voting process. Humala had supporters among the dispossessed and the marginalised as he himself has indigenous roots and is referred to as el Indio Humala in the country's elite-owned media. Lighter-skinned Peruvians and the majority of the white middle-class residents of Lima, who have gained a lot from the economic boom of the last decade, voted overwhelmingly for Keiko Fujimori.

Many Peruvians still consider former President Fujimori as the man who revived the country's economy and saved it from anarchy. The former President is currently serving a 25-year prison term in Peru. He was found guilty of ordering the gunning down, by a death squad, of civilians during a brutal campaign against the left-wing Shining Path and Tupac Amaro guerillas. Many of the disgraced President's close aides joined his daughter as advisers when she made her bid for the presidency. Keiko Fujimori promised to adopt the tough style of governance that had characterised the Fujimori era in the 1990s.

If we defeated terrorism in the 1990s, of course we can defeat common crime now, with a heavy hand, was one of her quotes. Peru, in recent years, has attracted narco-traffickers in a big way. Militant groups such as the Shining Path have started to reorganise and stage attacks on the security forces. Keiko Fujimori had invited former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a right-wing Republican, to campaign with her. Giuliani is credited with having made New York City a relatively crime-free metropolis.

11th hour support

What helped tilt the electoral scales in Humala's favour was the 11th hour support he received from some right-wing intellectuals and politicians, including Toledo. Toledo had received 16 per cent of the votes in the first round. In the second round, Mario Vargas Llosa, a Nobel laureate and a former politician, appealed to the people to vote for Humala. Before the campaign entered the run-off stage, Llosa was critical of both front-runners, describing the choice between Keiko Fujimori and Humala as one between AIDS and terminal cancer. Llosa had lost to Alberto Fujimori in the 1990 presidential election. Over 100 Peruvian intellectuals signed a letter against the resurrection of Fujimorismo, stating that the biggest triumph of Peruvian democracy was the rejection of this dictator.

Humala did not depart from his campaign script after his election. He was quick to reassure the multinationals that have invested heavily in the country's mining sector. He even said that the U.S. would continue to be a strategic partner. Humala embarked on a five-nation Latin American tour. Noticeably excluded from his itinerary were Venezuela and Bolivia, whose leaders are the most vehement critics of American policy in the region. Humala's first port of call was Brasilia, where he met with the current President, Dilma Roussef, and his current mentor, the charismatic Lula.

Peru, despite being one of the major metal exporters in the world and also one of the fastest-growing economies, still has one-third of its population mired in poverty. Eight per cent of the population lives in abject poverty. Humala has promised to give a greater share of Peru's mineral wealth to the poor and a guaranteed pension to people over 65. The other measures on anvil include the introduction of windfall profit tax on the mining industry to finance increases in public sector salaries and expansion of health care facilities in rural areas.

It is not possible to say that the country is progressing when 12 million people are living in miserable conditions without electricity or running water, Humala said after his election.

The financial markets were jittery with the stock market plunging by 12.5 per cent on the day the results were announced. But the markets have since bounced back.

Humala has once again received a certificate of endorsement from Mario Llosa. Humala's victory, contrary to what his adversaries say, does not put economic development in danger. I believe he has given enough proof, above all in the second round, that he will respect political democracy, the market economy and private property, Mario Llosa said from his residence in Spain.

As Humala himself has acknowledged on several occasions, the market economy has left a significant section of Peruvians marginalised. In his neighbourhood, it was state intervention that rescued millions of people from poverty. Humala's core support bases expect radical measures to rescue them from the dire situation. Humala has already said that he proposes to give Amerindian communities the right to veto mining developments on their lands. Interesting times are ahead for Peru.