Left-leaning candidate gains support in Peru

LIMA, Peru — When Venezuela's populist leader welcomed Bolivia's socialist president-elect at a ceremony in Caracas, an unexpected guest had a front-row seat: Ollanta Humala, a left-leaning nationalist who is surging in popularity in Peru's presidential race.

Humala, a former army lieutenant colonel like his Venezuelan host, President Hugo Chávez, glowed in the praise he got in Caracas. But the gathering reinforced fears of Peruvian elites that he may be part of the tide of elected leftist leaders rising across South America — or, worse, a military dictator in the making.

Two days later at a news conference in Lima, Humala urged Peru's leftist parties to join his "nationalist project" and laid out policies that would make fundamental changes in Peru's free-market economy.

Wearing a green military-style jacket and an Andean Indian scarf, Humala also proclaimed deep admiration for the 1968-75 leftist dictatorship of Peruvian Gen. Juan Velasco, who carried out a largely failed agrarian reform, nationalized industries and forged close military ties with the Soviet Union.

"You could question his macroeconomics, but Velasco gave dignity to the people who lived in the countryside," Humala said, referring to Velasco's reforms, which freed rural workers from serflike conditions on large estates.

Humala, 43, has risen strongly in opinion polls heading toward April's presidential election, moving into a tight contest with conservative former Congresswoman Lourdes Flores.

Public-opinion analysts say his rapid rise — from 5 percent in August to 23 percent in December — is based largely on voters' disgust with Peru's political parties, which are widely viewed as corrupt.

Humala's economic plans unsettle many in the middle and upper classes. And some voters worry that his father describes himself as a Marxist, expresses admiration for Hitler and believes Peru's Indians and mestizos should rule. Humala insists he does not share these beliefs.

Many Peruvians, especially the poor majority who feel they have not participated in Peru's solid economic growth of recent years, see Humala as the tough military man the country needs to punish the corrupt and impose order.

Humala said he would impose greater state control over the economy and give preference to Peruvian investors over foreign capital. He wants to boost taxes and royalties on foreign mining operations and take at least a 49 percent share for the government in Peru's giant Camisea natural gas fields, now run by a consortium of foreign companies.

Like Bolivian President-elect Evo Morales, an Indian activist who is a coca farmer, Humala said he does not support the U.S.-financed eradication of coca, the raw material for cocaine, because it hurts poor farm families. "They're human beings trying to do the best for their children," he said.

He said he would battle drug trafficking in other ways.

Humala burst into the spotlight when he and his brother, Antauro, a former army major, led some 70 followers in a short-lived military rebellion in October 2000, a month before President Alberto Fujimori's autocratic 10-year regime collapsed in a corruption scandal. Humala was later pardoned.

He has taken on the mantle of the anti-establishment newcomer, a role that Fujimori, a university dean, played to the hilt to get elected in 1990.

Current President Alejandro Toledo, a close U.S. ally who is barred from running again, also ran as an outsider in 2001, becoming the country's first elected leader of Indian descent.

Humala said he is not anti-American and hopes to have good relations with Washington.