Messages of Hope Leave Residents of Peruvian Shantytowns Skeptical

For nine years, Carmen Aguilar saw the same dreary panorama from her shack in a shantytown built into a rocky hill on the capital’s outskirts.

But the scenery changed for the 49-year-old mother of three in November when a gigantic sign went up on an adjacent hillside: “Peru, country with a future.”

Each day she ponders the words, and each day they make less sense.

“How are we supposed to understand ‘country with a future?’ ” she says, peering at the sign. “It’s a lie. Look how we live.”

She shifts her gaze to the inside of her dirt-floor shack, a flimsy construction of wood scraps, woven straw mats and cardboard. Inside, one of her daughters perches on a low wooden stool and scrubs clothes with water she has hauled up from the street below.

President Alberto Fujimori, seeking a third 5-year term in the April 9 national elections, is flooding the airwaves with the “country with a future” slogan via government-paid public service ads.

And his supporters have plastered it along highways and onto walls and the sides of buildings throughout the country’s poorer districts. The slogan looms from barren hillsides overlooking the slums that ring Lima.

Fujimori enthusiastically endorses the message as an expression of hope and national pride. His opponents charge the ad campaign is a blatant misuse of public funds for electoral purposes.

Transparencia, a private citizen’s group working for clean elections, counted the “Peru, country with a future” signs. The organization found that 1,997 of the murals adorn the main avenues of greater Lima, covering the equivalent of nearly 53,000 linear feet.

Aguilar and her neighbors know little about the political debate raging around the signs. But the sign’s message has struck a raw nerve for many in the lunar-like landscape of Peru’s desert coast, inspiring more cynicism than hope.

“I’m not going to vote for any candidate, because none of them has anything to offer me. Nothing,” says Aguilar, who sells candy and cigarettes on Lima’s downtown streets.

Hope was what Fujimori offered Peru’s poor when they lifted him to a surprise election victory in 1990 --a time remembered for leftist rebel car bombs that rocked the capital and inflation that topped 7,000%.

He was reelected in a 1995 landslide by Peruvians grateful for the capture of rebel leaders and his success in ending economic chaos.

During his 10 years in power, Fujimori has been widely credited with bringing roads, electricity and higher health standards to Peru’s poor. Last year the World Bank reported a 28% decrease in infant mortality.

But even Fujimori’s supporters in Aguilar’s shantytown say his free-market reforms have failed to generate the jobs and higher wages he promised. Only one in two people in the labor force has steady work, according to government figures.

Despite a widespread perception that Fujimori has not delivered on new jobs, opinion polls give the 61-year-old president a comfortable lead over election rivals.

Peruvians still consider Fujimori “the most valid option,” says Guillermo Loli, a project coordinator for the private polling company Apoyo. “People are aware of his problems, but they will vote for him anyway since none of the other candidates have jelled.”

His chief opponents, Lima Mayor Alberto Andrade and former social security director Luis Castaneda, accuse Fujimori and his government intelligence service of waging an illegal campaign of dirty tricks and intimidation to derail their candidacies.

Both have been the targets of smear attacks in a half dozen government-bankrolled tabloids that pollsters say are major shapers of public opinion in Lima’s shantytowns.

Jose Ayma, a shantytown resident who earns barely enough to feed his wife and two children, says Fujimori will not get his ballot. But the textile factory worker cannot say who will.

“I have no idea whom I’m going to vote for,” he says. “There are no good candidates.”

The “country with a future” motto is repeatedly dropped by Fujimori in his public statements, often with a slight alteration: “Peru, a pacified country with a future.” That one added word refers to the political violence that drove tens of thousands of shantytown dwellers from their homes in the countryside to escape the cross-fire between leftist rebels and the military.

Fujimori has all but said a vote for his rivals amounts to a vote for a return to those chaotic years.

“Because of Fujimori, we are finished with terrorism. Now we all live in peace,” says Gladis Espejo, who makes shoes with her husband.

Espejo says they can’t compete with the inexpensive foreign shoes that have flooded Lima under Fujimori’s free-market reforms.

“But that’s my only complaint,” she says. “I’m going to vote for Fujimori anyway.”