Unexpected and almost unknown, a new potential president of Peru appears. Is called Pedro Castillo Terrones, he is 51 years old and works as an elementary teacher. It has so far garnered 18.1 percent of the vote in Sunday’s unpredictable and crowded election where 32.5 million Peruvians have been called to elect the man or woman who will lead the country over the next five years. A union leader in Cajamarca, a city perched in the northern Andes and a radical leftist, Terrones was not among the favorites in the polls. He stood in the rear group of 18 candidates (13 from the right, three from the center and two from the left, including one woman) who fought with percentages that hardly exceeded 12 points.
Peru in revolt, the interim president resigns. Two deaths in the clashes. Vargas Llosa: “This repression must stop”
by Daniele Mastrogiacomo
It was voted by the voters of the peripheral regions, especially in the center and north, mainly peasant and commercial, many of indigenous origin, the heart of that middle class that the pandemic has hit the most and made poor again. The large centers, especially Lima which alone is home to 8.5 million inhabitants, instead dispersed their vote on various candidates without favoring anyone in particular. The demonstration of how widespread the disaffection towards official politics and parties overwhelmed by a continuous series of corruption scandals that appears rampant is widespread. The favorites, like the entrepreneur linked to Opus Dei Rafael Lopez Aliaga, the former goalkeeper of the national team and Borussia Dortmund George Forsyth or the same Veronika Mendoza, a historic member of the left, have not managed to exceed the 10 percent threshold. In second place it appeared instead Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former president-dictator Alberto, leader of Fuerza Popular, the party that has the majority in Congress.
Peru, looking for a president who warms hearts: elections in a month between uncertainty, mistrust and corruption
by Daniele Mastrogiacomo
The ballot is in full swing. If the trend is confirmed, the eternal presidential candidate, already defeated three times, could see it in the ballot with the anonymous teacher who has been teaching since 1995 in a small elementary school in Puña, in the mining province of Chota. A corruption trial weighs on Keiko Fujimori (she has already been in preventive prison) which could sentence her to 20 years and the bad judgment of 70 percent of Peruvians who always said they did not want to vote for her. She is considered the director of the corruption system and her involvement in the forced sterilization of thousands of peasant and indigenous women often illiterate in an absurd birth control campaign ended up compromising her project of modernization of the country. But in the face of the surprise of a potential president of the radical left, the horrors and ghosts of Sendero Luminoso, the decade of bloodthirsty terrorism, would resume. Leveraging the nightmare of “ending up like Chávez and Maduro’s Venezuela”, many would eventually choose Keiko. The lesser evil.
Three presidents ousted last year by a youth uprising in two weeks have emptied the Peruvian political arena. Everyone is asking for a change, the relaunch of the economy that has lost 20 percentage points due to Covid, invoke the strong man who knows how to fight corruption. Without giving in to gay marriages, abortion, the wave of Venezuelan immigrants who have invaded the country. The master-unionist Terrones encompasses them all. The redemption of the peripheries isolated and forgotten by the center, the end of the historical social and economic difference that has always divided the rich of the cities from the poor of the Andes and the jungle.
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