Peru leans to strict candidate

UQUIA, Peru — On April 9, every adult who lives in a cluster of adobe huts clinging to the Andean mountainside here will rise before the sun, walk miles down a rocky path to a larger village and stand in line for hours to vote for a new president.

If they don't, they will face a fine of about $40 — an enormous sum in a country where half the population lives on $1.25 a day or less, and in a community where securing one's property often means tying the family pig to a 10-pound rock.

But their votes will be valuable for another reason — poor Peruvians are helping make a front-runner out of Ollanta Humala, an authoritarian, nationalistic ex-military commander who promises to redistribute wealth like a 21st-century Robin Hood.

"A president must be strong and strict," said Estelita Celmi, 35, a mother of three who sat under a thatch shelter knitting a blanket last week. "And it's better when they are from the military, because they work harder, earn less and suffer more. They understand our lives."

Humala's support in villages like this one in the Ancash region has helped him climb to the top of a presidential ballot with 20 names on it. Surveys show he has a 6-point lead over Lourdes Flores Nano, a former congresswoman who's trying to follow Chile's Michelle Bachelet to become Latin America's second female president elected this year.

If no candidate gets at least 50 percent of the vote, a second round pitting the top two finishers will be scheduled within a month.

Foreign critics often compare Humala to Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez. The two are friends who share a penchant for tough talk, revolutionary rhetoric and a deep distrust of the free-market policies that many economists say have helped Peru achieve record economic growth in recent years.

That growth, Humala contends, hasn't translated to new jobs, relieved the poverty and illiteracy plaguing the countryside or increased social services.

"We are living a dictatorship of the rich," Humala, 43, said while campaigning last week in the southern city of Tacna. "I am happy that the rich and powerful call me anti-system if it is their system that keeps Peru in poverty and misery."

Although his words echo neighboring Latin American leftists like Chávez and Bolivia's President Evo Morales, the crooked sign hand-painted on an adobe wall near the village suggests a source of inspiration far closer to home: "Humala — Velasco Lives!"

Gen. Juan Velasco, a populist army officer, oversaw a military coup in 1968 and ruled Peru with an iron hand until 1975. The era was marked by the nationalization of industries, attempts to redistribute land from the wealthy to the poor and the state takeover of the print and broadcast media.

Humala's admiration of Velasco — as well as his plans to take more control of the mining and energy sectors and impose a windfall tax on highly profitable companies — has earned him enemies among the Peruvian elite in Lima, the capital, where most newspapers are full of critical stories about his outspoken family and volatile campaign.

His mother has said she would shoot homosexuals to set an example if she were in power.

His father said his son should release the leaders of the Shining Path, a guerrilla group that terrorized the countryside in the 1980s and 1990s with calls for a Marxist revolution.

His brother is in jail for trying to force President Alejandro Toledo to resign last year after he and 120 army reservists seized a southern town; he has now called for the execution of Toledo and all 120 members of congress for selling Peru to foreign interests.

This week, Humala fired his campaign spokesman after he used a common Spanish obscenity to describe first lady Elaine Karp, and recently he has tried to distance himself from his family's views.

Meeting with journalists Friday in Lima, he emphasized that his government would respect property rights, press freedoms and foreign investment.

But he also placed himself in a new generation of Latin American leaders who aim to represent the poor and powerless, saying, "I am not going to promise a bridge, a little school, those things. I am going to seek to construct dignity."

"This is a process happening throughout the region," Humala said. "New regimes have surged within these conditions, democratically. We are seeing a new face of Latin America. It's trying to construct a family, a Latin American family."

In Uquia, where information about the candidates is usually spread by word-of-mouth, people are not familiar with the more sensational reports about Humala's family.

"I hadn't heard that," said Rodrigo Menacho Albino, when asked if he knew Humala had once been jailed for attempting to seize a U.S.-owned copper mine to protest government corruption.

What he has heard, the dirt-poor farmer said, is that Humala may finally bring electricity to all parts of his village.

His friends, who all grow potatoes and corn on small plots of steeply sloped land, told him Humala might be as good a president as Alberto Fujimori.

Fujimori, who swept to office in 1990 on a similar wave of popular discontent, cracked down on a Maoist guerrilla movement and reformed Peru's economy.

But his authoritarian style alienated many, and he was driven into exile in 2000 after allegations of human rights abuses and corruption. He is now in prison in Chile.

President Toledo, who is of mixed indigenous and Spanish blood, also appealed to many poor Peruvians and promised to develop the country more equitably.

But his tenure has been tarnished by mismanagement and charges of personal misconduct, and in this village his legacy is symbolized by bare wooden poles that still lack electrical wires.