The protagonist of our story, Lt. Colonel Ollanta Humala, was born in 1963 in Ayachuco, a city lodged in the Andes symbolically halfway between Peru's capital, Lima, with its affluent upper class and its teeming slums, and the old capital of the Incan Empire, Cusco. Like Evo Morales, who ran a successful campaign to become head of state in neighboring Bolivia, Humala is a politician who rose out of nowhere to rally the impoverished indigenous masses of his country. Most Latin American countries have relatively homogeneous, Spanish-speaking mestizo populations. But in the more indigenous countries, like Guatemala, Bolivia and Peru, politics is a battle between the Spanish-speaking and the indigenous society, an unresolved conflict that has been going on since the first conquistador debarked in the Americas.
Humala first entered history in 2000, when he led a failed military uprising in the Andes against the corrupt, authoritarian neo-liberal government of Japanese-Peruvian businessman Alberto Fujimori, currently rotting in a Chilean jail. The uprising failed and Humala was arrested but later amnestied by his nation's parliament once the political situation had changed.
Humala, like the governing lieutenant colonel in nearby Venezuela (Hugo Chávez), combines revolutionary socio-economic rhetoric with militant nationalism. He promises, among other things, to throw out foreign companies from Peru and nationalize the country's mines, an industry that has long been a bastion of de facto slavery. Chávez, who has drawn international attention for his outspoken assaults on U.S. authority in the region (nicknaming the inhabitant of the White House alternatively "Hitler Danger Bush," "Señor Danger" and "the greatest terrorist in the world"), has strongly endorsed Humala's campaign.
In the first round of the election, the insurgent colonel faced down two opponents, both of whom were seasoned politicians who had already staked out their electorates: Lourdes Flores, a conservative Catholic close to Peru's upper class, and Alan Garcia, a social democrat in the style of President Lula in neighboring Brazil who had become Peru's youngest president 20 years ago only to have his administration overwhelmed by internal guerrilla violence and disastrous hyperinflation. Early exit polls from more developed parts of the country predicted a tight run-off between Humala and Flores, but when the votes from the eastern mountain regions started to come in, Humala's lead expanded (31 percent), and Garcia narrowly edged out Flores (24 percent to 23 percent) to face Humala in the runoff .
Flores' defeat shows it's not enough to be a woman to inspire the impoverished Latin American masses desperate for change, as Michelle Bachelet had successfully done when she was recently elected in neighboring Chile. One must also stand for change, and Flores' close ties to the Peruvian business community undermined this, despite her efforts to expand her electorate by swapping her conservative attire for a shirt and blue jeans and paying visits to the slums of Lima. Under the recent string of neoliberal governments, Peru has achieved a remarkable rate of economic growth (6.7 percent), but this has remained isolated in the most developed sections of the country and has not changed the desperate situation of the majority of Peru's population who live beneath the poverty line.
Flores' voters are more likely to stay at home than to choose between the disastrous record of Garcia and the revolutionary specter of Humala, who in their eyes is "Señor Danger." This means the second round of Peru's election is going to be a direct face-off between two phenomena that have been recently sweeping Latin America: the nationalist-indigenous radical left that has taken power in Venezuela and Bolivia, and the centre-left style of government that has taken power in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and, though not officially until later this year, in Mexico.
The Peruvian election has got everything backwards, as it proceeds from the general election, in which the left overwhelmingly defeated the right, to the primary between two leftist candidates. Humala's campaign poses a bold thesis. In Peru, "independence has come, but... the unknown men and women of color, their sons and daughters with their empty stomachs, the youth and students with no prospects for the future, the workers with no end to their work-week, the quechuas, the aymaras, the ashkanikas ... the invisible, the Peruvians, are still waiting for their independence. Refounding our Republic is a historical necessity." Ex-President Garcia is going to have a hard time stopping this political steamroller.
If the experience of Chavez in neighboring Venezuela is a valid precedent, a United States that has seen its "big stick" in Latin America evaporate as democracy has swept the region is about to see its hemispheric hegemony rolled back a little further. The previous Peruvian government was close to the White House, and North American taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to eradicate the coca crop Humala promises to legalize.
And if the experience of the neighboring Venezuelan revolution is a valid precedent, the middle and upper classes of Peru are about to get a dose of the same type of exclusion and "invisibility" that the rest of their nation has suffered for generations. Revolutions are rarely kind to those who oppose them, and as another American leader once remarked, sometimes "you're either with us or you're against us."
Michal Zapendowski '07 is with them, even though his gringo ass has a laptop.
