In presidential runoff, Peruvians choose between a Fujimori and a leftist milita

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In presidential runoff, Peruvians choose between a Fujimori and a leftist

military man

By Bajak, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press – 13 minutes ago

LIMA, Peru - Peruvians voted Sunday in a tight presidential runoff between a

leftist military man who promises the poor a greater share of Peru's mining

wealth and the daughter of imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori.

The campaign has sharply divided Peruvians. Many consider both choices a

potential threat to democracy.

Keiko Fujimori appeals largely to the pro-business status quo and to those who

consider her father a hero for vanquishing hyperinflation and fanatical Shining

Path rebels during his 1990-2000 rule. She would be Peru's first female leader.

Her rival, cashiered army Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, is championed mainly by the

one in three Peruvians who live in poverty, without running water, having

benefited little from a mining boom that fueled economic growth averaging 7 per

cent annually since 2001.

Humala held a slim edge in two opinion polls released Saturday. One, by the

Ipsos-Apoyo firm, gave him 52 per cent to 48 per cent for Keiko Fujimori. Its

error margin was 1 1/2 percentage points.

Humala narrowly lost the 2006 presidential election to Alan , and got

nearly a third of the vote in this election's April 10 first round. Fujimori

came in second as three candidates split the centrist vote, combining for 45 per

cent.

Humala has the endorsement of former President Toledo, who finished

fourth. Fujimori is backed by third-place finisher Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a

former prime minister and investment banker.

Both Humala and Keiko Fujimori, a congresswoman, are populists who promise a

raft of giveaways for the poor, including free meals for schoolchildren and free

preschool care.

But Humala, unlike his opponent, also insists on taxing windfall mining profits

and exporting less natural gas so it is cheaper for Peruvians.

That's why Isabel Apaza, a 56-year-old street vendor, voted for him.

" Peru has so many riches, so many natural riches from which the people earn a

pittance, " she said in Villa el Salvador, a poor, sprawling Lima district.

Humala has softened his rhetoric to make it less offensive to investors, and has

backed down from early calls for renegotiating free trade agreements and

rewriting the constitution.

He now disavows Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who openly backed him in

2006, and swears he's a democrat. The business community, though, fears he would

follow Chavez's playbook of seeking to cling to power while nationalizing

industries and expropriating land.

Such things happened in 1968-75 in Peru under the leftist military dictatorship

of Gen. Velasco, a Chavez hero. At stake now, for starters, is the

potential for losing more than $40 billion in investment pledged over the next

decade for Peru's thriving mining sector.

" He's going to change the constitution and stay in power. And the investors are

going to go away, too, " said , a Villa El Salvador street vendor

who voted for Keiko Fujimori.

Voters who reject her fear a return of the autocratic, kleptocratic regime over

which her father presided. He is serving a 25-year sentence for authorizing

death squads and kidnappings as well as corruption, and his daughter shares many

of his former close advisers.

" She is a 36-year-old, relatively unknown woman and the main draw is dad, " said

Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist in Peru for the election.

Human rights issues also dog Humala. He was accused but never tried for rights

abuses as a counterinsurgency commander in the 1990s. And he encouraged, in a

radio address from abroad, a 2005 revolt against Toledo by his now-imprisoned

brother, Antauro, that claimed the lives of four policemen.

Peru's largely business-friendly news media made no attempt to mask its

anti-Humala bias.

The Nobel-winning novelist Vargas Llosa was so angry about it that he

pulled his commentary column from El Comercio, calling Peru's dominant newspaper

a " propaganda machine " for Keiko Fujimori. He lost the 1990 election to her

father.

While the Humala camp has indicated it could summon supporters into the streets

if there were fraud, international vote monitors said Saturday they saw little

possibility of serious fraud.

" The only possibilities of fraud come from what are called the voting tables,

small type of fraud, but I think the institutions are in good shape here, " said

former New Mexico Gov. Bill , an Organization of American States

observer.

Keiko Fujimori was Peru's first lady from 1994, when her parents' marriage ended

nastily, until her father resigned in disgrace six years later in a corruption

scandal. She has expressed regret for abuses during her 72-year-old father's

rule but still calls him Peru's best president.

She said when he was convicted in 2009 that she'd become president so she could

pardon him, but has since reversed herself.

Humala too has said he would consider pardoning Alberto Fujimori, who had

pre-cancerous growths removed from his tongue, if he were seriously ill.

Peru has one of Latin America's widest gulfs between rich and poor. Its mining

bonanza is credited with expanding the economy 8.7 per cent last year. But the

wealth hardly reaches the rural highlands where most mines are, and where two in

three live in poverty.

" The prosperity is fundamentally confined to the coast, " said Cesar Hildebrandt,

a veteran Peruvian journalist.

" Everything along the (Pacific) ocean has gotten better. Everything in the

Andean part is the same or worse. "

For Sunday's election, Aymara Indian strike leaders decided to lift a nearly

monthlong road blockade in the southern highlands state of Puno demanding the

cancellation of a Canadian-owned silver mine they believe will poison their

water.

Their reasoning: Opinion polls give Humala better than 65 per cent support in

Puno. Protest leader Walter Aduviri told The Associated Press by telephone that

he believed Humala would negotiate in good faith and Keiko Fujimori would

exhibit the indifference his people have come to expect from far-off Lima.

" There has never been dialogue with us, " Aduviri said. " They call us radicals

but we're so forgotten that they only notice us when there are protests. "

___

Associated Press writer lin Briceno contributed to this report.

___