Peruvian Preliminary Elections, April 2011

article from April 11, 2011

By Jamie Douglas

It was described by Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa as a “tournament of clowns with an absence of an ideological debate.”

Now that this past Sunday’s (April 10, 2011) election results are starting to firm up, showing that Ollanta Humala, a nationalist former military officer who led a thwarted army revolt in 2000, is in the lead over Keiko Fujimori by 23% to 33%, forcing a runoff between the two, Mario Vargas Llosa has declared that the nation’s choice has been narrowed down to choosing between AIDS and terminal cancer.

Keiko Fujimori may best be remembered as Peru’s former first lady, who at age 19 took on the position when her father, then-President Alberto Fujimori, divorced her mother. Fiercely loyal to her father, who is in prison for crimes ranging from theft to embezzlement to murder, she promised to give him an immediate pardon when elected. But she is some ten points behind Ollanta Humala, a deficit she is unlikely to make up before the June runoff elections.

Humala, aware of the huge social inequities that exist in Peru, has promised to make more of the nation’s natural gas available for domestic consumption as well as to work toward a more equitable distribution of the wealth created by Peru’s incredible mineral riches.

The poverty in this Andes nation is staggering. Outside of the capital and the surrounding greater Lima area, the standard of living is about equal to that of Haiti, with a lack of basic infrastructure such as water, electricity, medical care, education and even very basic sanitary facilities. The indigenous population has been exploited and ignored by the white rulers from Lima since the 15th century.

As if the above description was not bad enough, Peru’s area of Amazonia harbors several hundred thousand “Indians” and mestizos as well a sizeable population of whites in the city of Iquitos, and most of the indigenous people are not properly notified of national elections. Voter fraud is widespread by means of vote buying, voter intimidation and the old ballot box stuffing trick.

In the city of Lima, where about one third of the population lives, the voter turnout was pretty strong, and several of the old warhorses were badly defeated, as the population is wanting a radical change. In all likelihood, that is what they are going to get in the runoff election.

Now, of course, begins the big intervention from all the foreign interests hungry for the country’s copper deposits. Already, speculators have driven the price of the ore up. The COMEX price for May delivery of copper surged 8.50 US cents, or 1.9%, to settle at US$4.5015 per pound.

For the week, prices were up about 5.7% – the largest weekly gain since the first week of December 2010. There is constant unrest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which makes Peruvian copper the most appetizing of them all. It is a given that the giant mining companies of Australia, Canada and the USA, as well as China, will try to influence the final outcome of the election by threatening their workers with job loss and reduced wages (as if they could go any lower), and certainly the USA and their CIA will meddle in the internal affairs of this sovereign nation because, after all, that is their justification for existence as well as their birthright.

As of Monday night 23:00 AST (GMT-3), the vote results are as follows:

With 75% of the vote counted, Ollanta Humala now has 29% of the vote, followed by Keiko Fujimori with 23%, Pedro Pablo Kuczniski with 21% and former President Alejandro Toledo with a little over 15%. These results are not final, as there are still 25% of the votes from outlying areas to be counted or miscounted or lost in transit.

Also bear in mind that in 2006, Humala prevailed in the first round of the presidential election, only to lose a runoff to current President Alan Garcia, a scenario that has a possibility of repeating itself.

Stay tuned for the runoff elections in June.

Jamie Douglas

Patagonia, Argentina

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