Peru’s Peasants Are Key Constituency in Presidential Election

The remarkable journey of candidate Alejandro Toledo to today’s high-stakes presidential election has taken him from the bleak Andean highlands to Stanford and back again.

Toledo proudly calls himself a cholo--a Peruvian of indigenous descent. He comes from a peasant family of 16 children and, like so many industrious Peruvians from the provinces, migrated to a coastal city and worked as a street vendor. Along with his credentials as a former Harvard professor and World Bank economist, his ethnicity and humble background drive his underdog challenge to President Alberto Fujimori.

Among more than half a dozen presidential challengers, only the 54-year-old Toledo tells a personal story as dramatic as that of Fujimori, the former university dean of Japanese origin who came out of nowhere in 1990 to win the presidency and dominate Peru for a decade. Only Toledo is competing with the president among the downtrodden indigenous people of the rural interior and urban shantytowns who see the populist Fujimori as the first leader in memory to have bettered their lives.

Opinion polls suggest that Toledo has a good chance of denying Fujimori 50% of the vote and forcing a runoff election.

“I have lit a flame in the interior of the nation, a chemistry with people who identify with me,” Toledo said in a recent interview. “And that will be hard to extinguish.”

Toledo’s backers predict an upset comparable with Fujimori’s first-round showing 10 years ago against novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the apparent favorite. Fujimori’s triumph was based partly on his appeal to Peru’s indigenous and mixed-race majority as an outsider who, like Toledo today, cobbled together an upstart coalition.

Nonetheless, Fujimori remains the man to beat. He runs a vast political machine. His popularity has declined because of his increasingly authoritarian image, but his tough-guy style has advantages in a nation that has vivid memories of economic and political chaos.

Critics accuse the president of using government resources to aid his campaign for a third term that would grant him five more years in power, which would make him one of the longest-ruling elected leaders in recent Latin American history.

The tone of recent days has been shrill and tense: Rivals accuse the military and intelligence service of plotting to steal the election. Fujimori and Toledo have complained of bias by international election observers.

The election’s outcome will hinge largely on whether a wary, conservative voting public wants to risk a change of leadership.

“You don’t see great fervor in the street for Fujimori,” said Giovanna Penaflor, director of the Imasen polling firm. “His candidacy can be summed up by the fear of change, the fear that things will get worse. Processes of change have been traumatic in the past.”

Toledo, meanwhile, is riding the momentum of a 20-percentage-point surge in polls and his empathy with an indigenous majority that may be on the verge of a historic political awakening by electing one of its own.

His economic expertise is another strength, according to political scientist Fernando Tuesta. While the international community and the Lima elite debate the future of Peru’s democracy, working-class Peruvians worry about their pocketbooks.

“Before becoming a candidate, he was one of our best-regarded economists,” Tuesta said. “This is an advantage in a nation where the economic issue is grave.”

Peru’s macroeconomic health is solid, especially compared with that of its struggling neighbors; the economy grew 3.8% last year. But as is true elsewhere in Latin America, the benefits of free-market modernization and international investment have not trickled down in a meaningful way. The poorer half of the population remains mired in unemployment and underemployment, with many hustling for informal jobs in a harsh street-level marketplace.

Lamenting the number of accountants, lawyers and economists working as taxi drivers, Toledo promises change while giving Fujimori credit for defeating terrorism and inflation.

“We want to build on the achievements of President Fujimori,” Toledo said. “We will manage the economy with absolute discipline. We will not spend more money than we print. We will create a climate of political, economic and judicial stability to attract private investment.”

Central Power Issue Divides Candidates

The challenger differs from the incumbent concerning the issue of decentralization.

Fujimori resists ceding power to regional and municipal governments. He is popular in rural areas because he bestows roads, bridges and other public works projects through his omnipresent Ministry of the Presidency. An engineer by training, the president takes pride in having personally reviewed blueprints for hundreds of new schools.

Toledo sarcastically describes the presidential ministry as Peru’s most powerful municipal government.

“Peru has never been as centralist as it is now,” Toledo said. “This is part of the ‘deinstitutionalization’ of Peru. I link [this] with unemployment and poverty. And ultimately it creates huge social instability and an adverse climate for investors.”

Toledo first ran for president in 1995, when Fujimori easily won reelection. Learning the lessons of his weak performance, Toledo has honed his message and zoomed past Lima Mayor Alberto Andrade, until recently the most prominent leader of the political opposition, and six lesser-known candidates to emerge as Fujimori’s top challenger.

Toledo’s campaign has struck a chord with its Inca symbols and down-to-earth attitude and the star quality of his wife, Eliane Karp, a redheaded Belgian anthropologist who speaks the Quechua indigenous language fluently.

Toledo is compact and sturdy-looking with longish black hair. He has a theatrical, animated speaking style, both one-on-one and on the stump. He wears a bulletproof vest during rallies and accuses the government of threatening his life and plotting against him.

“I think the cost of leaving power for the president’s inner circle is very high, so anything could happen,” he said during the interview. “But I think if there is any reason to die, this is it.”

Fujimori denies any role in the harassment of opposition candidates. Campaign fervor aside, Toledo’s sense of a personal mission grows out of his extraordinary past, which has prominent California connections.

He was born in a remote and wind-swept farming hamlet in Ancash province. His father, a man of mixed indigenous and African heritage, had migrated to the mountains from Lima. Toledo shared his father’s big-city tenacity and restlessness.

“I was conscious of my poverty from the age of 4,” Toledo wrote in a 1995 autobiography. “I saw people huddled in the town square, watching time go by. The men and women had resignation in their gaze, but there were others who felt enormous fury at their misery, a desperate desire to confront it. These are images that become fixed in one’s imagination and cannot be erased.”

The family soon moved to Chimbote, a thriving port city where Toledo worked as a street vendor, shoeshine boy and teenage newspaper correspondent. The family became landlord for two Peace Corps volunteers from California, a married couple who helped the studious youth win a scholarship to the University of San Francisco.

Feeling very much the wide-eyed country boy, in a a green suit knitted by his mother, Toledo arrived in 1965 in a Bay Area full of hedonistic hippies and militant Black Panthers. He won a soccer scholarship and ultimately earned a doctorate in economics at Stanford.

Toledo says his firsthand experience of economic hardships enriches his academic expertise and leadership skills. Like Fujimori a decade ago, however, he is a relative political neophyte and a man without a long-established party.

That could be a double-edged sword in a runoff election, which would be in late May or early June. Toledo seems well positioned to forge a coalition of opposition forces who want to topple Fujimori at any cost. But voters may wonder about his ability to maneuver in the arena of relations with the armed forces, which have been obedient allies of the president and his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos.

“He will need to act from a position of strength, and that means reaching out to sectors of the armed forces,” said Tuesta, the political scientist.

The military also plays a role in a more immediate and explosive matter: the fairness of an election already under a cloud of suspicion.

International observers will be scrutinizing today’s electoral process closely, and the U.S. Senate approved a resolution Friday warning that Peru could face sanctions if the elections are not clean.

Watchdogs warn of potential fraud in outlying areas of the Andes and Amazon, where the armed forces tend to be a dominant presence and, along with other government officials, could intimidate voters of limited education.

There also are fears that the government will capitalize on a lack of poll-watchers in remote areas to doctor the results. Already, authorities are investigating allegations that Fujimori operatives falsified about 1 million voter registration signatures.

Safeguards in Place to Fight Poll Fraud

Not all observers expect major fraud. Although the federal human rights ombudsman has aggressively criticized the government for denying media access to candidates and committing other abuses that have marred the campaign, he says a new electoral computer system has created an important safeguard.

“Fraud would not be very easy,” ombudsman Jorge Santistevan said. “The election system in Peru has made some of the greatest technological advances in Latin America.”

Santistevan did say he is concerned that government officials may not remain neutral on election day.

And the unevenness of the playing field so far makes it almost inevitable that a first-round victory by Fujimori would cause an uproar. Toledo has warned that he will “lead the revolution” in the event of fraud.

“There is a sector of the electorate who feel that if Fujimori wins, he will have won fraudulently, and this becomes a powder keg,” Tuesta said. “Even if Fujimori wins and the victory is seen as legitimate, it is already a wounded government in a difficult situation. . . . We are in Peru, and anything could happen.”