Will Peru join populist tide sweeping South America?

LIMA, Peru — When Peruvians vote Sunday for a new president, some will go to the polls hoping a firebrand outsider will bring equality to the South American country. Others will want to give a second chance to a former president who says he has learned from his mistakes.

And then there are the rest of the voters, a lot of them, who will walk into the polling booths holding their noses and hoping for the best.

That last group will decide whether Alan Garcia or Ollanta Humala wins Peru's presidency in the runoff election. It will decide whether Peru joins the populist tide coursing through Latin America or stays on a moderate path that Peruvians may not love but they certainly know.

"I was only an adolescent, but I remember what it was like under Alan Garcia. It was a disaster," said 30-year-old construction worker Cesar Medina, referring to Garcia's 1985-90 presidency and its bloody human-rights violations, rampant left-wing terrorism and economic collapse. "But I think Ollanta presents a risk. I could see Peru rising with Ollanta or going straight down in collapse."

Medina supported Humala, 42, in the first round of balloting last month. He liked Humala's vow to cut the salaries of government officials and use the savings to help the poor.

But Humala won only 30 percent of the vote. A late surge by Garcia netted him 24 percent and second place, just ahead of a conservative woman who once had held a double-digit lead.

Garcia, 57, has kept up the momentum ever since: The latest opinion polls show him leading Humala by a comfortable margin in Lima and a smaller cushion beyond the capital. In one poll, 50 percent of respondents said that under no circumstances would they ever vote for Humala.

Even Medina, who struggles to find construction work and dreams of emigrating to Spain, now wonders whether Garcia's political experience and not Humala's fire is what Peru and its 28 million people need. His vote is up in the air.

Whatever candidate Medina and Peru choose, he will probably steer the country left of the political center.

Lure of the left

For Garcia or Humala, the temptation to veer left is strong. Free-market policies that promised to create wealth and provide opportunities have merely dented Peru's extreme poverty. Peruvians, like many Latin Americans, have seen the gap between rich and poor widen. And they have embraced the rhetoric of politicians such as Humala, who vow to overturn those policies.

Humala's appeal as an outsider is also a liability. Garcia and other candidates in the first round, plus the establishment media, have painted Humala as unpredictable and authoritarian.

President Alejandro Toledo, in a comment that brought him censure from electoral authorities, declared the election "a decision between democracy and authoritarianism."

Humala has other problems too.

Villagers in eastern Peru accuse Humala of human-rights abuses in 1992 when he commanded an army unit battling Maoist guerrillas from the Shining Path. And some Peruvians are wary of a man who led an armed uprising against the Peruvian government in October 2000, even if that government was headed by a wildly unpopular and allegedly corrupt president by the name of Alberto Fujimori. The uprising failed, but Fujimori fell anyway.

Garcia's tainted past

Humala's image also has suffered of late from his association with Hugo Chávez. The Venezuelan president faces strong criticism from Peruvians who see him meddling in their electoral affairs, and Chávez's support for Humala seems to be backfiring at the polls.

Yet Humala still has hope, in part because Garcia's presidency stirs such awful memories in so many Peruvians: Shining Path violence, electricity blackouts, curfews, rationing and long lines to get subsidized basic foods. At its worst, inflation exceeded 7,000 percent a year.

Garcia says he has learned from his mistakes, that his government will bring in experts from all parties, and that the populist and socialist measures he sought to employ in the past will not work in today's Peru.