COLUMN ONE : Outsiders: New Latin Insiders : Past failures discredit many traditional South American politicians. Inexperienced newcomers are benefiting.

If there were a candidate’s handbook on electioneering in Latin America, it would need to include this new rule: Assure the voters that you are particularly well qualified because you lack experience in politics.

In a growing number of countries, and especially those with grave economic and social problems, newcomers and outsiders alike are dishing out embarrassing defeats to traditional politicians and old-line parties.

The clearest examples of the trend have occurred in Peru, South America’s worst case of assembled miseries, including 2,000% annual inflation, social breakdown and guerrilla warfare. But to varying degrees, this disgust with politicians extends to other countries as well, after a decade in which civilian rule took root but failed to deliver the goods.

Neither of the two finalists in Peru’s June 10 presidential election had ever run for public office before. Each insists that he has less political experience than his opponent and therefore is less tainted by the failures of the past.

Front-runner Alberto Fujimori is an agronomist and university academic; his opponent in the two-man race, novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, has come no closer to politics than the fanciful plots of his books. Yet Fujimori and Vargas Llosa ran far ahead of the field in the first-round ballot on April 8 as voters punished politicians and older parties.

Fujimori told The Times in an interview that his case has broad ramifications. “If I win and am successful,” he declared, “this will be contagious for all of Latin America.”

There are other examples:

Ricardo Belmont, a well-known Peruvian talk-show host and a political novice, defeated a cast of regulars last November in the race for mayor of Lima, home to one-third of the country’s 22 million people. Independents also won municipal races in a number of small towns.

In neighboring Brazil, many analysts believe television host Silvio Santos would have won the presidency had he succeeded in a last-minute attempt to enter the race.

Fernando Collor de Mello, the eventual winner in Brazil last December, was a young and little-known provincial leader who ran on a platform blaming the country’s politicians and civil servants for a national decline.

In Bolivia and Argentina, some candidates also have prospered by opposing the old-line politicians and their legacy of failure and corruption.

In the past, the extreme economic and social turmoil in several Latin American countries likely would have prompted a military coup. Yet this time around, the people are not turning to the generals for solutions, having seen them fail as well. Instead, citizens are responding within the political system--but flocking to candidates who promise a clean break with the old ways.

As dictatorships gave way to democratic rule during the 1980s in much of South America, the old political elites usually re-emerged, just as they had after previous stints of military rule. But the civilian politicians often fared poorly in offering even a modicum of social and economic well-being. Now, they are being chastised--but at the ballot box.

A major reason, many analysts say, is that politicians have failed to understand and react to the changes in their societies in recent decades.

“Among the poor of Peru, especially the urban poor, there is a kind of disaffection (for), and therefore punishment of, the traditional parties in which the people put their faith during these 10 years of democracy,” said Carlos Franco, a prominent sociologist in Lima.

Franco noted that apart from the presidential contest and the Lima mayoral race, many independent candidates have won regional and local races, especially in marginal urban areas where grass-roots community groups have been formed but have not found a voice in older political parties.

“The social makeup has changed so dramatically in the last 40 years, reflected by the millions of new urban citizens from the highlands and informal ambulantes (street vendors). This immense mass has been in a process of maturing social and political awareness, and now it wants its own representatives,” Franco said.

“This is not the definitive collapse of political parties,” he added. “But the people are demanding that the parties recognize the changes and respond to them.”

The rejection of traditional parties is by no means universal, however; it appears to depend on the country’s overall health. In Chile, which returned to civilian rule last March after 16 years under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, all the old parties resurfaced. But Chile has a vibrant economy.

Peru, however, is mired in annual inflation of more than 2,000% as well as a bloody guerrilla war. Much of its population is excluded entirely from the economic system and forced to live in the “black,” or parallel, economy.

“There is a sense that the political parties had a monopoly on the options and didn’t give a chance to those outside their ranks,” said Federico Velarde, a longtime political operative who helped manage the ill-fated presidential campaign of leftist Alfonso Barrantes. The veteran Barrantes campaigned on his past achievements as mayor of Lima in the mid-1980s.

In contrast, said Velarde, “Fujimori has no past; he is a man without a past. So he offered only a future.”

Vargas Llosa, while seen as independent personally, heads a coalition including two older parties of the moderate right: Popular Action, led by two-time former President Fernando Belaunde Terry, and the Popular Christian Party of conservative former Christian Democratic leader Luis Bedoya Reyes.

It is widely agreed that the alliance with those faces of the past, particularly that of Belaunde, hurt the writer, who had hoped for a first-round victory. As Velarde said, “Vargas Llosa sought to portray himself as a man of the future--but with Belaunde as his godfather?”

Said Evaristo Oxa, 32, an unemployed man in the Lima squatter settlement of Huaycan who turned out for a recent Fujimori rally: “Even the most ignorant people here know that the people around Vargas Llosa have tricked and abused us poor people. The Chinito is going to win big here.”

“Many times the politicians promise too much,” argues businessman Julian Bustamante, one of Fujimori’s key supporters and a senator-elect in his first run for office. “And the example of their lives doesn’t coincide with their words.”

Military coups had disrupted the development of mature political institutions, he said, but Fujimori’s new movement, Cambio 90 (Change 90), “offers a new option that can stop the crisis--but in democracy.”

Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos, head of the Apoyo polling firm, said the first-round result revealed “a failure of the political class, but mixed with other factors--especially the incapacity of the state, for both practical and ideological reasons, to convert itself into a mechanism for social action.”

Economist Guido Pennano said he blames the older parties in Peru for failing to renew themselves and to build internal democratic structures. Only the leftist parties have any real grass-roots structures, and at the top levels they too are run by fiat.

“We are fed up with the same old faces,” Pennano said. “In the United States, who could imagine a Mondale or a Dukakis returning to run again? We are arriving at the collapse of the old parties, and we need to build new ones that truly represent the people, and not just the same few interest groups.”

Non-politicians no longer are so reliant on party structures. These days, they can effectively reach the people directly through the media, especially television.

Fujimori himself once hosted a political talk show that was widely seen in the nation’s interior, where his support was strong. And Carlos Palenque, a major newcomer in Bolivian politics, emerged thanks to a similar show, like Lima’s Belmont.

Palenque, the charismatic 45-year-old owner of Channel 4 in La Paz and host of a show called “Open Tribunal of the People,” formed a party called Conscience of the Fatherland and finished fourth in last year’s presidential race out of a field of 10.

Then, campaigning for growth and better living conditions for the poor, he won the most votes in the La Paz mayoral race. But other parties banded together to actually put their man in office.

In the national election, Palenque’s party won two Senate seats and nine House seats, one of which went to Remedios Loza, Palenque’s co-host and the first chola, or Indian woman, ever elected to the Congress. She wears the traditional Bolivian bowler hat and translates for callers who only speak the Indian language, Aymara.

In inflation-plagued Brazil, meanwhile, Collor came from nowhere politically, in part because of his exposure on Brazil’s huge O Globo TV network. Brazil’s political parties are weak, making it easier for outsiders to compete. Indeed, polls indicated that Santos, who owns the nation’s second-largest network, could have rivaled Collor if he had been able to run.

In Argentina, the Justicialist (Peronist) Party and its chief rival, the Radical Civic Union, still dominate politics, embracing an array of convictions. But a recent survey by the respected pollster Hugo I. Kolsky revealed widespread dissatisfaction with Argentine politicians; 62% said they did not feel represented by their leaders, while only 29% said they did.

Major complaints included such refrains as “They don’t concern themselves with my or the public’s interests” and “They don’t fulfill their promises.”

In the poor interior province of Tucuman, often considered a political trend-setter, retired army Gen. Antonio Bussi formed a new party, Republican Force, that dominated the traditional parties in provincial elections last year. Bussi, who served as military governor during the last dictatorship, wants to be elected governor in 1991 and openly proclaims his interest in the presidency in 1995.

Pollster Manuel Mora y Araujo, who runs Argentina’s major opinion firm, said the changes in Latin America mirror those elsewhere. “The world changes faster than its leaders,” Mora y Araujo said. “When the traditional leaders don’t lead the changes, the people seek others--those who anticipate the tendencies, not just those who swim with the current.”

The influential Peruvian weekly magazine Caretas appeared to sum up the changes: “The profound lesson of the Fujimori phenomenon is that our entire politics must be reformed because the weariness of the population with the politicians is visceral.”