Wallet x Conscience? Cancer x AIDS?
Peru election offers voters stark choice
Runoff election offers choice between Keiko Fujimori,
daughter of corrupt former leader, and leftwing Ollanta Humala
It might seem extraordinary that the daughter of a former leader who was jailed for directing death squads and looting his country's treasury could become president, a decade after her father fled the country in disgrace.
But in Peruvian politics almost anything is possible. On Sunday the country will vote in a runoff election, offering them a stark choice between two populist candidates from the opposite extremes of the political spectrum.
One is Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Alberto Fujimori who two years ago was jailed for 25 years after being convicted of corruption and authorising the death squad killings of 25 people.
She faces former army officer, Ollanta Humala, once an admirer of Venezuela's leader, Hugo Chávez, who has sworn off his radical roots in favour of the softer left of Brazil's former leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Both candidates have capitalised on dissatisfaction among the third of the country's population of 29.5 million living in poverty. But each has also struggled to cast off the shadows of their own past.
The two candidates have been locked in a contest which has grown steadily tighter since a first round in April failed to produce a clear winner among five candidates.
Most opinion polls give Fujimori a slight edge, but with around 10% of voters expected to abstain or spoil their ballots the candidates must battle for a tiny number of undecided voters.
"Both could return the country to authoritarianism - it's part of the attraction," says Peruvian writer and columnist, Mirko Lauer. "It's as if the country had voted for one single authoritarian candidate split into two."
Peruvians are divided between those who believe Humala will hamper the growth which has given the country one of the world's fastest growing economies and those who fear Fujimori could be return the country to a dark past.
Last year, Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, described a run-off between Humala and Fujimori as like "choosing between cancer and Aids".
Fujimori was just 19 when she became her father's first lady in 1994, taking on the role when her parents separated after her mother, Susana Higuchi, alleged she was tortured for denouncing corruption.
Her father casts a long shadow over her campaign. He still enjoys the solid support of a fifth of Peruvians who credit him with defeating the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas. His supporters also claim he rescued Peru from economic ruin and sowed the seeds for its extraordinary growth.
Keiko Fujimori embraces his legacy, but she is also at pains to distance herself from what she calls his "mistakes". The elder Fujimori fled to Japan in November 2000 as his administration collapsed under a corruption scandal. Investigators found at least $600m has been stolen from state coffers.
When he was sentenced in April 2009, Keiko Fujimori said that if she were elected president her "hand would not tremble" to pardon him. She has since backed away from that pledge, and promised to respect the court's decision.
But Alvaro Vargas Llosa, director of the Centre on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute in Washington (and son of the Nobel Laureate), said that her team remains intimately bound to the government of her father. "Every single person around her not only answers to Mr Fujimori but had a direct participation in a dictatorship that was corrupt beyond belief and violated human rights on a systematic basis."
Exposed to the public eye from a young age, Fujimori employs the same highly personalised populism as her father did, but her campaign slogans omit her tainted surname and focus instead on her distinctive first name.
Ollanta Humala has also struggled to banish the memories of his past. The former army officer came to prominence when he led a bloodless military uprising in 2000 in the dying days of the Fujimori regime.
He first ran for president in 2006 when, as a red T-shirted radical, he railed against US imperialism and touted his friendship with Hugo Chávez, then kingmaker of leftist election wins across Latin America.
But times have changed, Venezuela no longers exerts the influence it did five years ago while Brazil's star is rising. This time around, Ollanta Humala has hired campaign advisers from Lula's Workers' Party. He has dropped talk of nationalisation, swapped the red T-shirt for a suit and courted business leaders, promising to respect private investment and central bank independence. He even swore on the Bible to maintain the economic model and not to change the constitution.
"I've changed a lot and learnt a lot in these last years of political life," he said ahead of his first round win. "We've been checking the pulse of the country … and we understand that it's changed."
But the gestures have not won him the support of the business elite, the establishment and the conservative elements in the Catholic and Evangelical churches, who have lined up behind his opponent.
Nevertheless, he has won the support of mainstream economists, and many of Peru's artists and intellectuals who - almost without exception - reject his rival. Mario Vargas Llosa has said he would vote for Humala "unhappily and with fear".
SOURCE
Title is a reference to the BBC article. Any hermanos peruanos here? I wanted to post about the election and all the articles I read about it are pessimistic and depressing, I almost gave up on this post. I'd love to hear from a Peruvian.