CUSCO, Peru – One is a controversial ex-military man who wears red T-shirts that say “I Love Peru,” speaks proudly of Peru’s indigenous roots and promises to bring his country into the Latin American leftward curve along with Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.
The other is a center leftist from the Peruvian middle class who was president during some of Peru’s most turbulent economic years and wants to be given a second chance.
After the Peruvian presidential elections of April 9 failed to produce a clear winner, Ollanta Humala, of the Peruvian Nationalist Party, and Alan Garcia, of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, have plunged into a fierce second round, which will end with one of them winning the presidency on June 4.
But Indian activists and intellectuals in Peru, like many other Peruvians, are not convinced that either one of the candidates will make a huge difference in their situation.
“It’s like having to choose between cancer and AIDS,” said Ferdinand Porcel Luna, professor of Quechua at the Universidad de San Antonio de Abad in Cusco, echoing a bleak joke now circulating among Peruvian citizens who have had their hopes raised and dashed by outsiders Alberto Fujimori and President Alejandro Toledo in the last two elections, and have grown skeptical of election promises.
Humala, like Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, has promised to move Peru out of America’s back yard and give the country more regional integration with the rest of Latin America. He’s against the Free Trade Agreement with the United States recently signed by Toledo, which he believes would put Peru’s numerous small farmers and artisans at risk of being crushed by a flood of American imports. He supports the industrialization of the coca leaf, and wants to rewrite the constitution to give the poor and indigenous more power.
He has been accused of having a dangerous authoritarian streak, causing fear among some members of the Peruvian upper and middle classes, as well as the U.S. government, who see him as another potential Chavez.
He has an uneasy relationship with the media, which have printed stories about alleged torture and other human rights violations he was involved in during the Peruvian war on terror in the 1990s, and which have printed controversial statements from his politically powerful family members, like a statement his mother recently made that all homosexuals should be shot.
He was raised by his father, Isaac Humala, creator of the ethnocacerista movement, to be proud of his Quechua heritage, and who led an armed rebellion against the corruption of the Fujimori government. But leaders of Indian and campesino movements are giving him mixed reviews.
“He’s a caudillo, a ’70s-style military man,” said Antolin Huascar, president of the Confederacion Nacional Agraria.
“He’s not Morales,” said Roberto Mamani Miranda, secretary general of the Confederacion de Campesinos de Cusco. “He’s another politician, not someone who comes from the people.”
Miranda said the Peruvian campesino movements themselves are partially at fault for not being able to unite the way MAS, or Movement Towards Socialism, was able to unite around Morales.
“We are too divided; everyone is out for themselves. This election for us is about getting local candidates into office. Eventually we hope to have someone like Evo, someone who is actually one of us.”
Miguel Palacin Quispe, an organizer of COPPIP, or the Permanent Organization of Indigenous Peoples, has written in La Republica, “A lot of people talk about ‘ethnicity’ in these elections, but nobody has asked us, the organized Indian movements, about this.”
This feeling is even deeper among the peoples of the Amazon, who are only a million of the estimated 9 million to 15 million indigenous people in Peru’s population of 25 million.
“We’re not supporting either candidate,” said Alberto Pizango Chota, of AIDESEP, “because neither one reflects the aspirations of indigenous peoples in Peru.” These aspirations, says Pisangochota include “the right to live in nature, the right of humanity to breathe fresh air” and autonomy for indigenous people in Peru’s coastal, mountain and Amazon regions.
Those who do support Ollanta say he represents a “change” that Peru desperately needs, and believes he will provide more inclusion and economic possibilities for Peru’s indigenous people, 77 percent of whom live in poverty and only one of whom has been voted into Congress, the Aymara Paulina Arpasi.
“[Ollanta has] been like Morales in the way he has told the truth about corruption and about the contracts with multinational corporations that need to be revised,” said Tomas Huanca Condori, one of the early organizers of CISA, or the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of South America.
One of the advantages that Ollanta has over Garcia is that he is an unknown. Garcia was president during Peru’s shaky economic period from 1985 to 1990, and Peruvians remember long lines and running out of money, food and gas during that time, though some give him credit for creating an agrarian bank that helped small indigenous farmers.
Hugo Tacuri, an organizer for a Peruvian indigenous people’s conference that was held in March, said he supports Ollanta because of his nationalism but that “the change for Indian people won’t come from either of the candidates, it will come from us.”
“There is a moral crisis in this country,” added Pablo Licita Ladera, of the CONNACIP. “What we need is to retrieve our own cosmo-vision, consisting of Andean spiritual and agricultural traditions, and reconstituting the ‘spine’ of the Andes.
“If the winner of these elections doesn’t begin to listen to indigenous people,” he said, “We are going to create a spiral of activism, much stronger, which will be felt with much more force and will break with all the old paradigms.”
