With a former army officer winning the presidency, Peru joins Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela in tilting to the left.
Add Peru to the list of Latin American countries that have turned left. On
Sunday, Peruvians voted in a second-round run-off ballot and elected Ollanta
Humala, a 48-year old former army officer, president. This is Humala’s second
try for the office. In 2006, he came close to winning, but WikiLeaks cables
reveal that Peru's establishment politicians put aside their differences and
beat a path to the US embassy, asking for help smearing Humala as a Peruvian
Hugo Chávez.
WikiLeaks also reveals that that same year the Mexican right and the US State
Department worked together to defeat the populist presidential candidate Andrés
Manuel López Obrador, leading many in the US to gloat that the "left turn" in
Latin America had run its course.
Humala's victory suggests otherwise. Here's just some of what has happened
since 2006: In Bolivia, Evo Morales presided over the ratification of a new
social-democratic constitution and was re-elected as president in 2009 with 64
per cent of the vote. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa also easily won reelection and
ratified a new constitution that guarantees social rights and puts tight limits
on privatization. Recently, Ecuadorians likewise voted on ten progressive ballot
initiatives, passing them all. They included the strict regulation of two blood
sports: banks are now banned from speculation and bulls can no longer be killed
in bull fights.
And last year in Brazil, the trade unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left
office the most popular politician on the planet, handing over the presidency of
one of the world's largest economies to Dilma Rousseff, a former urban guerrilla
and economist who vows to continue to try to make Brazil a more humane and equal
nation.
All of these national left political projects—from Venezuela to Uruguay—have
their problems and shortcomings, and are open to criticism on any number of
issues by progressive folk. But combined, the Latin American left can claim a
remarkable achievement: It has snatched the concept of democracy away from
neoliberals and the corporate privateers who came close to convincing the world
that democracy equals deregulated capitalism and returned the term to its more
humane, sustainable definition. In Latin America, democracy means social
democracy. So considering the otherwise bleak global landscape, the return of
the Latin American left, now well into its second decade, is cause for great
cheer.
What does Humala's victory mean for Peru? Most importantly in the short run,
it has halted the return of Alberto Fujimori's style of death-squad
neoliberalism. Humala's opponent was Fujimori's daughter, Keiko, who pledged to
free her jailed father, who was convicted of murder, kidnapping and
corruption.
In the long run, many Peruvians, particularly those outside of Lima, voted
for Humala because they have seen little benefits from the country's celebrated
macroeconomic performance over the last decade, driven by the high price of
silver, zinc, copper, tin, lead and gold—which comprise sixty per cent of the
country's exports.
Over thirty per cent of Peru's thirty million people live in poverty and
eight per cent in extreme poverty. In rural areas, particularly in indigenous
communities, more than half of all families are poor, many desperately so.
Humala has promised to address this inequity with a series of pragmatic
measures—a guaranteed pension to people over 65; expanding health care in rural
areas, including the construction of more provincial hospitals; an increase in
public sector salaries, to be paid for with a windfall profit tax on the mining
sector.
In terms of foreign policy, Humala's election is another victory for Brazil
in its contest with Washington for regional influence. If Fujimori had won, she
would have aligned Peru politically with Washington and economically with US and
Canadian corporations.
Humala, in contrast, will tilt toward Brazilian economic interests. Indeed,
the Peruvian historian Gerardo Rénique said that the election, while
representing an important victory for democratic forces, could also be
understood in part as a contest between Brazil and the US over Peruvian energy
and mineral resources. In this perspective, one could say that it didn't matter
who won the Peruvian election: the Amazon lost.
Here then might be the question that determines the success of Humala's
presidency: As he tries to put into place his "growth with social inclusion"
agenda, will he be able to balance the conflicting interests of his Brazilian
allies and the social movements that elected him, many of which are fighting for
sustainable development and local control of resources?
In addition to reviving social democracy, the other major accomplishment of
the renewed Latin American left has been to dilute the entrenched racism that
has defined the continent for centuries. In Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil,
Venezuela and other countries, Native Americans and peoples of African descent
have led a remarkable, if still incomplete, democratization of politics and
culture. Peru, with its 45 per cent Amerindian population, has largely been left
out of this process. In fact, some say that racism has deepened over the last
decade, with the mining boom wreaking havoc on the dark-skinned Andean
countryside and Amazonian lowlands while financing the rise of luxury condos and
malls in white, middle-class Lima.
So however hard it might be for Humala to take on international
capital—Peru's stock market plunged 12 per cent the day after his election—an
equally difficult challenge will be to tackle Peruvian racism. "El Indio Humala"
lost Lima by a wide margin, driven mostly not by fears he would turn Peru into
Chávez's Venezuela but into neighboring Indian-governed Bolivia. Candidate
Humala did his best to deflect these concerns.
President Humala, however, will have to confront this racism directly if he
is to succeed in democratising Peru. After all, even before all the votes where
in, tens of thousands of his supporters began to fill the country's plazas,
including Lima's. They raised high the rainbow wiphala flag that became
ubiquitous in Bolivia, during the rise of the social movements that brought Evo
Morales to power. Today, it is waved throughout the Andes as a symbol of
indigenous pride and sovereignty.
Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of a
number of prize-winning books, including most recently, Fordlandia: The Rise and
Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan 2009), which was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book
Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.