Marxist-Leninist President for Peru
It is not easy to choose between the plague and cholera. In the final head-to-head to elect a president, Peru's 25 million voters had to choose between a candidate under investigation for alleged money laundering, and another who claims to be a taxpayer for Peru Libre. The latter's leader, Vladimir Cerrón, is an outspoken advocate of a neo-communist regime in the country. In all its electoral rallies and proclamations, Perú Libre has boasted of being Marxist-Leninist, adding to it the indigenous component of Mariateguismo, a reference to José Carlos Mariategui, founder in 1928 of the Peruvian Socialist Party, which was converted into the Communist Party after his death.
After a heart-stopping election, just a handful of votes finally decided that Pedro Castillo would be the new president of Peru, closing the gap on Keiko Sofia Fujimori, representative of the neoliberalism embodied by her party, Fuerza Popular. This is the third consecutive electoral defeat for the woman who thought she would be the first woman to occupy Peru's highest office.
The haste of the result demonstrates the very serious polarisation that divides the country. Previously, and aware of this enormous fracture, the candidates had promised to govern for the population as a whole, which they also invited to join in this supposed reconciliation. This is going to be a very difficult task because Pedro Castillo, the rural teacher and trade unionist, even if he is going down on the claims of his mentor, Vladimir Cerrón, promises "another model different from that of the free market economy". This was understood by the Peruvian stock markets, which collapsed, while the business and financial media spread fears of a wave of expropriations.
The eldest daughter of the imprisoned ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori has not had enough support from the economic and intellectual elites - Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa is the most obvious case in point - nor from the millions of anti-Fujimori supporters who have voted for her by holding their noses. Both claimed to want to avoid at all costs the establishment of another Castro-Chavista regime, which would end up aligning itself with the axis currently formed by Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.
The disastrous management of the coronavirus pandemic has made Peru the worst hit country in relation to its population of 33 million people: 180,000 dead; two million more unemployed; and three million Peruvians thrown into the hell of poverty. There is little doubt that the families of all of them voted for the trade unionist and rural teacher Pedro Castillo, the "cholito brother" (Evo Morales) who has emerged as the undisputed peasant leader of those two thirds of the Andean and Amazonian country that are increasingly distant from the urbanised and economically more powerful Peru of Lima, Chiclayo, Pisco, Ica, Chimbote, Piura, Sullana, Tacna and Trujillo.
The fact that five of the country's last presidents have had problems with the courts, and that Keiko Fujimori herself has been indicted, are factors that have undeniably contributed to Peruvians' weariness with their political class, and their decision, albeit by such a narrow majority, to pin their hopes on a change that, with Pedro Castillo at the helm, could be absolutely radical.
With the current institutional framework, the strong division in Parliament also makes it very difficult for President Castillo to pass the laws that would completely turn the country's economic model around. But, as his opponents argue, there are already numerous examples that demonstrate the propensity of Marxist-Leninists to totalitarianism when they come to power.
Peru desperately needs - like practically all of Latin America, moreover - the return of traditional foreign investment, which requires a framework of stability that, for one reason or another, is conspicuous by its absence. The disinvestments of quite a few Spanish companies in the continent are the best, or rather the worst, example of this. Investments that, on the other hand, are coming to Latin America from Russia and especially China, and which, despite the Euro-Latin American treaties, are substantially modifying the knots and ties that used to unite the two sides of the Atlantic.
If the foreseeable challenges and recounts confirm Pedro Castillo's definitive victory, the left will have taken a new step in its offensive to expand throughout Latin America. It will also be the occasion to disprove or confirm, if necessary, the experience that neo-communists and left-wing populists, once in power, cling to it forever, blinding by hook or by crook any possibility of alternation.