Outside of Latin America, today’s Peruvian presidential runoff elections have received scant media attention. This strikes me as rather surprising, given the controversial backgrounds of both candidates: Current predictions favor a once army renegade who evokes comparisons to Venezuela’s socialist revolutionary Hugo Chavez while his rival, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, whose authoritarian rule was ultimately marked by violence and controversy, trails narrowly.
What does not strike me as surprising in the least is that the elections, like most national elections in Latin America, have been perceived, analyzed and described in dichotomous terms. Peruvian stocks fell the most in seven weeks as a response to the poised win of presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, whose camaraderie with Chavez is evidenced as a clear link that, once as president, he would emulate Chavez’s penchant for nationalizing crucial sectors of the economy while allegedly undermining democracy. On the other end, Keiko Fujimori is a right-wing leaning lawmaker who is considered more market-friendly and dedicated to neoliberal economic reform.
The campaigns of Humala and Fujimori II, I want to argue, have been caught up in a pervasive narrative which affirms “bad” and “good” camps dividing Latin America’s leftist turn. For many, the “lite left” is said to definitively include the governments of Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, while the “radical left” invariably revolves around Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. U.S. hardliners have been quick to pigeonhole Humala in the Chavez and Morales camp, despite his claims of following a moderate “Lula” type of government; Keiko, it follows then, is the "least bad" option from the viewpoint of Washington.
In agreeing with James Bosworth of CS Monitor, many observers have it wrong when they insist that a Ollanta Humala or Keiko Fujimori victory, as compared to the other, would be automatically detrimental to Peruvian democracy and economic policy. Democracy in Peru cannot hinge solely on the executive branch; it also depends on reforming Peru’s weak and highly fragmented political parties which lack incentives for coherent policy-making geared toward achieving long-term, public interests. Furthermore, it is rather far-reaching to say that Humala would “pull a Hugo Chavez” and in effect jeopardize Peru’s emerging status in the world economy. Both candidates are already constrained by Peru’s relationship to global capitalism: Even with the Camisea gas fields, Peru lacks anything like Venezuela’s oil that would lead citizens and government officials to think that the country would escape prevailing economic constraints.
Peruvian Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa has pessimistically labeled the elections as "choosing between cancer or aids," while U.S. hardliners cite Humala as an "imminent threat." It would appear then that this dualized description has less to do with the candidates' platforms and potential presidential performances than with Washington's slipping relations with Latin America. Rather, the lack of any significant, sensationalized counter-assessment of Fujimori, who could be easily portrayed as an ushering in of a second regime of terror in Peru, is telling of Washington's losing the left.
Washington's former "backyard" has never been so united and independent of U.S. influence. Initiatives that seek to counterbalance U.S. influence in South America have been increasingly consolidated by even more moderate governments. Regional agreements seek to counter U.S. economic and political hegemony.The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CLACS) was founded in February 2010, excludes the U.S. and Canada, and is meant to replace the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS). And in spite of Secretary of State Clinton's active diplomacy, she has made little headway in convincing Latin American governments to accept Honduras into the community of nations after the unconstitutional military coup against Manuel Zelaya in 2009.
Whether Humala or Fujimori will fulfill expectations seems less ascertainable than U.S. entrenchment in the simplified “good/bad” understanding of Latin American politics as it tries to salvage its waning influencing. Washington needs to rethink its strategy for the region, and shedding its Cold War mindset may represent an important first step in approaching whatever government comes to power; in Peru, and in the rest what was once called our backyard.
