politics | The Peruvian election winner is...

ETA, if you have to read just one article, read this. It gives context: What's next in Humala's Peru?

HUMALA INHERITS a country that is extremely polarized. The vast majority of the population struggles just to survive, sometimes literally. Accoring to Peruvian sociologist Jorge Lora Cam, only 20 percent of the country's gross domestic product comes from wages, and the informal sector has mushroomed. This year, the poverty rate "went down" to 36 percent.

In Lima, over 1 million people lived without running water as of 2008. In the city of Ayacucho, 25 percent of the population faces the same lack.

The signing of bilateral free trade agreements, not only with the U.S. but also with China, has lead to increased sweatshop exploitation in the cities and to an exponential rise in multinational and foreign investment in metal and fuel mining, which in turn displaces peasant and indigenous communities and pollutes the ecosystem, whose land the government now claims the right to sell off.

Those fighting the conglomerates have been at the forefront of struggle in recent years. As the elections took place, the border between Peru and Bolivia was being blocked by indigenous people taking on mining companies. In Cocachacra, Arequipa and the area around these two southern towns, protesters against the Tía María mining project have been shot and killed, but have refused to accept a truce until after the elections take place.

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Left candidate wins election in Peru

The victory of left-populist candidate Ollanta Humala in Peru's election is a "big fucking deal", as Vice President Joe Biden famously whispered to Obama on national TV in another context. With respect to US influence in the hemisphere, this knocks out one of only two allies that Washington could count on, leaving only the rightwing government of Chile. Left governments that are more independent of the United States than Europe is now run Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Peru. And Colombia under President Manuel Santos is now siding with these governments more than with the United States.
This means that regional political and economic integration will proceed more smoothly, although it is still a long-term project. On 5 July, for example, heads of state from the whole hemisphere will meet in Caracas, Venezuela, to proceed with the formation of Celac (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States). This is a regional organisation that includes all countries except the United States and Canada, and which – no matter what anyone says for diplomatic purposes – is intended to displace the Organisation of American States. The new organisation is a response to the abuse of the OAS by the United States (which controls most of the bureaucracy) for anti-democratic purposes, most recently in the cases of Honduras and Haiti.
These institutional changes, including the vastly expanded role of Unasur (Union of South American Nations) are changing the norms and customs of diplomatic relations in the hemisphere. The Obama administration, which has continued the policies of "containment" and "rollback" of its predecessor, has been slow to accept the new reality. As a result, it does not have ambassadors in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador.MORE

Hope in the Andes: What Ollanta Humala’s Victory Means for Peru

Fried pork rinds, fish, potatoes and eggs were sold by street vendors outside polling stations on election day in Lima, Peru. By nightfall, thousands of people gathered in a central plaza waving the white flags of Ollanta Humala’s political party.

Ollanta is an Incan name meaning “the warrior everyone looks to.” Indeed, all eyes were on the leftist president-elect as he greeted the crowd just before midnight with the words, “We won the elections!”

Humala, a former military officer who led a failed military uprising in 2000, lost the elections in 2006 to Alan Garcia. On the June 5th presidential elections this year, he narrowly defeated Kieko Fujimori, the daughter of ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who was jailed in 2007 for corruption and crimes against humanity. If elected, Kieko would have likely worked to release her father from jail, and carry on his administration’s capitalist and repressive policies.

This election puts Humala among a growing number of leftist presidents in Latin America and offers hope to the poorest sectors of Peruvian society.
The poverty rate in Peru is just over 31 percent; in the countryside, two in three people live under the poverty line. In Sunday’s elections, it was the impoverished rural areas that went for Humala over Kieko Fujimori.

"You cannot speak of Peru advancing if so many Peruvians live in poverty,” Humala said in his victory speech, explaining that he would work to make sure that the government functioned “above all for the poorest people in the country.”MORE

June 2 Peru's Presidential Election: A Battle Over Memory and Justice

When Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori arrived at a plaza in the city of Cajamarca for a recent campaign speech, she was met by a barrage of eggs thrown by activists who opposed her candidacy and called her a “murderer and thief.”

The activists were referring to the legacy of her father, Alberto Fujimori, who was Peru’s president from 1990-2000 and jailed in 2007 for a quarter century sentence after being found guilty of corruption and ‘crimes against humanity’.

A mock national vote one week before the upcoming June 5 election showed a tight race, with Fujimori leading her only opponent, left-leaning Ollanta Humala, by a single percentage point. For many voters, the election is not just about politics and economics – it’s a battle over memory and justice.

Despite her support at the polls, many human rights activists in Peru believe the younger Fujimori signals the resurgence of her father’s dictatorial policies, which involved torture, murder, rape, and the disappearance of thousands of Peruvians in the midst of a conflict involving the Shining Path guerrilla movement.

In reference to this conflict, Amnesty International stated “the widespread and systematic nature of human rights violations committed during the government of former head of state Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) in Peru constitute crimes against humanity under international law.”

On top of that, Fujimori’s administration waged a sterilization campaign against poor, indigenous and rural women from 1996 to 2000. As a result, some 200,000 women in rural and marginalized urban communities were sterilized without their consent.

Jonathan Cadenas Grau, a political analyst in Lima, Peru’s capital, said in a phone interview that while Keiko’s father has been legally convicted of crimes against humanity, she doesn’t recognize them as such. “[Despite the fact that] he certainly used terror to govern… She never says ‘crimes’, she says ‘errors’ or ‘mistakes’,” he said. “Now she's always talking about her father, saying he was the best president we ever had.”

And the support of her father’s rule goes much deeper than discourse. After the elder Fujimori removed his wife from the First Lady’s seat, she was replaced with Keiko. Years later, in her election campaign, Fujimori is surrounding herself with her father’s advisers – the same ones who supported his ‘crimes against humanity’.MORE

Ppl, the free market reforms that Fujimori did were not separate from the massacres and other fuckery he got up to. it was part and parcel of it, to make sure his opponents would stfu and stfd while he got on with capitalism. This thing is from The Economist and I'm linking for the info that it provides, but...jsyk k?

Victory for the Andean chameleon: Having reinvented himself as a moderate, Ollanta Humala has an extraordinary opportunity to marry economic growth with social progress

Mr Humala’s transition team, announced this week, mixes leftist academics with centrist former officials from the government of Alejandro Toledo (2001 to 2006), a defeated rival who backed him in the run-off. Pundits called for Mr Humala to put an end to the uncertainty by naming key cabinet appointments quickly. These might include Beatriz Merino, a capable centrist, as prime minister. And Mr Humala is said to want Julio Velarde, who is respected by investors, to stay as Central Bank governor.

Mr Humala’s journey to the centre began when he adopted many of Lula’s campaign tactics and brought in political advisers from Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party. But in the campaign for the first round of the election, on April 10th, he was still proposing a “nationalist” economic policy and pledged to unpick contracts that have brought private investment in mining, gas and infrastructure. Mr Humala topped that poll, but with just 31.7% of the vote. His votes were mainly those of the Peruvians, especially in the southern Andes, who have yet to feel much benefit from an extraordinary economic boom that has seen growth average 5.7% a year over the past decade and poverty fall from 48% in 2005 to 31% in 2010.

Mr Humala’s immense good fortune was that the centrist vote was split between three candidates, and so his opponent in the run-off was Ms Fuijimori. As president from 1990 to 2000, her father, Alberto Fujimori, laid the foundations of the economic boom with free-market reforms but ruled as an elected autocrat. He is serving a 25-year sentence for human-rights abuses and corruption. Many Peruvians who abhor Mr Humala’s politics could not bring themselves to vote for his opponent. Her defeat means that Mr Fujimori will remain in detention and probably quashes his hopes of founding a dynasty.

Whereas Ms Fujimori surrounded herself with her father’s conservative aides, Mr Humala moved closer to the centre. He dropped his original platform and plan to change the constitution. He swore on the Bible to maintain Peru’s economic framework. In the end he probably owed victory to the support of Mr Toledo, who won 16% of the vote in April, and of Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s Nobel laureate for literature.

The main doubt about Mr Humala is that he is not Lula. Brazil’s former leader is a politically astute and pragmatic former trade-unionist, who fought a military regime. As an army officer, Mr Humala led one military rebellion and backed another by his brother, who is a fascist. In many ways he embodies the continuing appeal of authoritarianism in Peru. Part of his appeal to poorer voters was that he promised to be harsh on crime and corruption.MORE

Look, for instance, at what these assholes consider to be bad and good things:

But it also showed that many Peruvians want the government to do more on social policy. Some of Mr Humala’s proposals are sensible enough. He wants to expand a small conditional cash-transfer programme, introduced by Mr Toledo and aimed at helping the poorest Peruvians. He promises to expand child care, and introduce pensions for those who lack them (though unless done carefully this risks undermining efforts to draw more Peruvians out of the vast informal economy). Thanks to the inexplicable neglect of social policy by Alan García, the outgoing president, Mr Humala has the chance to take some easy and popular steps. Trickier will be whether he shows the courage and political intelligence needed to improve the quality of government in Peru, perhaps the country’s biggest weakness.

The most controversial issue will be the treatment of mining and natural-gas investment. Mr Humala wants a windfall tax on mining, but says he will talk to the companies first. Much will depend on the details. He seems to have watered down his previous opposition to the export of natural gas. But he backs a law to give a veto—rather than the right to consultation—to Amerindian communities over mining development on their lands.MORE

I mean to say there! Taxing mining companies!!! Allowing Amerindian nations to have veto power on mining on their own LANDS!!!! What IS this world coming to!!!

The Peruvian election winner is...

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