Opposites Attracting Voters in Peru’s Race

She is a conservative lawmaker vying to become Peru’s first female president.

He is an ex-army officer whose fiery nationalist rhetoric and kinship with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have set off alarms in Washington.

She calls a prospective free trade accord with the United States “a magnificent opportunity”; he is wary and regularly lambastes what he calls greedy transnational firms’ devouring of the national bounty.

She is perceived as the candidate of the capital’s elite; he is the self-styled representative of the country’s disenfranchised, frequently compared to Evo Morales, Bolivia’s new president and a socialist firebrand who has taken up the cause of the Indian underclass.

This nation of 28 million will go to the polls April 9 to elect a new president and national legislature. The current chief executive, Alejandro Toledo, a Bush administration favorite whose five-year term has been dogged by scandal and unfulfilled expectations, is prohibited by law from seeking a consecutive term.

The characteristically rough-and-tumble campaign involving almost two dozen declared presidential contestants has yielded two very different front-runners:

Lourdes Flores, 46, a longtime congresswoman who ran unsuccessfully for president five years ago, is the preferred candidate of the establishment. The center-right lawyer could become South America’s second sitting female president, after Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, a socialist who took office March 11.

Ollanta Humala, who retired from the military after more than two decades in uniform, has wooed the battered urban multitudes and Andean peasants in a country where more than half the population remains mired in poverty despite robust economic growth in recent years. Humala, 42, has never held elective office and is campaigning as a voice of change, an enigmatic outsider pledging to renegotiate multinational contracts, enforce state control of the lucrative mining and gas sectors and eject the “corrupt ones” from power.

U.S. officials, though not commenting publicly on the election, are privately worried that a Humala victory would give Venezuela’s Chavez a major new ally for his blame-Washington-first agenda.

Despite his upper-middle-class upbringing, early education in a Japanese-Peruvian school and cozy postings as a military attache in Paris and Seoul, Humala has consistently played the populist card, portraying himself as a humble soldier fighting for the little man and eager to impose military-style order on Peru’s untidy political culture.

“We need a country where four or five families don’t decide the nation’s destiny,” he told an enthusiastic crowd recently in a working-class area of southern Lima, the capital. “We must impose discipline, we must bring order to the country.”

Although Flores has pledged to maintain the pro-business policies favored by the outgoing Toledo administration, she has adopted an almost socialist line in her speeches in an effort to broaden her base, pledging to reform public healthcare and education, two major preoccupations of Peruvians.

When asked during a recent interview in her campaign SUV whether she was a surrogate for Peru’s small elite, she snapped: “That is not true.

“We have to recognize that economic growth must also incorporate the most marginalized sectors.”

Polls here have shown the two chief candidates alternating in the top spot, though many voters remain undecided. The most recent surveys have found Humala surging into the lead, with about one-third of the prospective vote. Flores, whose support has been slipping, now trails him by about 4 percentage points, according to a recent Apoyo poll.

Most experts agree that no candidate is likely to receive 50% of the vote, which would mean a runoff of the two top vote-getters in May.

Both front-runners have been frequently forced on the defensive.

Humala has faced difficult questions about the dubious records of other candidates on his ticket and widely publicized allegations of human rights abuses while he was an army officer known as “Capitan Carlos” in the Peruvian tropics during the 1990s “dirty war” against leftist guerrillas. Widespread uncertainty about what Humala represents, and his campaign’s image of disarray, have raised doubts among investors and others in a nation where democracy and stability are widely viewed as delicate.

“In a country like Peru, with such fragile and weak institutions, a lack of control is immediately associated with chaos,” said Santiago Pedraglio, a sociologist and independent political analyst.

Critics openly question Humala’s commitment to democracy. He led a failed uprising in the dying days of the regime of ex-President Alberto Fujimori. The candidate’s younger brother, Antauro Humala, a former army major who is a congressional candidate, is in jail facing criminal charges for leading a revolt against the Toledo administration that left four dead. Ollanta Humala has distanced himself from his younger brother and his militant father, Isaac Humala, a lawyer, ex-communist and founder of an ethno-nationalist movement with xenophobic -- some say fascist -- leanings. (An older brother, Ulises Humala, is also running for president, but has little support.)

Peru’s most prestigious writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, a conservative who ran for the presidency in 1990, has warned that Humala’s election would represent a “return to dictatorship [and] authoritarian” government.

U.S. officials are watching closely. Venezuela’s Chavez, also a military man, has publicly extolled Humala and denounced Flores as “the candidate of the oligarchs.”

Despite his nationalist and vaguely leftist agenda, Humala has generally refrained from direct criticism of Washington. Disparaging the United States doesn’t resonate as broadly in Peru as in neighboring Bolivia, which elected Morales in December after he pledged to be a “nightmare” for Washington.

Like Morales, Humala has reached out to producers of coca leaf, the raw ingredient used to make cocaine, promising decriminalization of coca farming and alternatives to the U.S.-backed forced eradication scheme. But Flores too has downplayed obligatory eradication as a tool for campesinos in Peru, the world’s second-largest producer of U.S.-bound cocaine after Colombia.

Humala, however, does not have the coca-producer cachet of Morales, who rose within the ranks of the cocaleros’ principal union before becoming president. Humala is a lifelong soldier, whereas Morales is a longtime community activist and elected representative.

Worn down by a steady stream of allegations, Humala has recast himself as the victim of a smear campaign by an entrenched and venal political bureaucracy. Several people have implicated Humala in human rights cases as the Capitan Carlos allegedly responsible for disappearances and other maltreatment during the 1990s.

He denies the abuse charges, though he acknowledged in a television appearance that he had used the Capitan Carlos nom de guerre while commanding a base in rural Peru during the 1990s. He said others also had employed the pseudonym.

Flores has had her own issues. A policy wonk notably lacking in charisma, she has endeavored to inject energy into her campaign by gamely trudging to shantytowns, isolated villages and provincial outposts where she was an unfamiliar face.

Followers of Humala have relentlessly shadowed Flores, questioning the sincerity of what they term her newfound concern for the downtrodden -- and, at times, even wondering aloud about her status as a single, childless woman in what is still a largely traditional society.

“Where are your children?” hecklers called out at a recent campaign stop in Cuzco, in the Andean heartland, where Humala is running strong.

Poll watchers say Flores’ sex may actually be an advantage, because many voters here consider women less likely to be sullied by Peru’s notoriously crooked political culture.

“We know that Lourdes has a clean political history, isn’t corrupt, and she has plans,” said Cecilia Lanzara, a 43-year-old office worker in Lima.

Backers of Humala counter that he, as a political neophyte, is untainted, whereas Flores is the product of a corrupt system.

“Peru needs a change, and Ollanta will bring something new and clean up the corruption,” said Pedro Martinez, 29, a restaurant owner who attended a rally for the presidential aspirant in the capital.

Still, Humala’s list of allied candidates for Congress and other seats includes many with questionable histories.

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Times staff writer Andres D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires and special correspondent Adriana Leon in Lima contributed to this report.