Choosing the lesser of two evils

last updated 8 January 2015

Peru

José Coronado

Peru is facing a rotten choice, said José Coronado in La Paz’s Jornada. With the elimination of the right-wing candidate in the first round of the presidential election, the country is left with two unappealing contenders. One of them, former President Alan Garcia, has already proved to be inept. When he was in office in the late 1980s, the populist Garcia presided over hyperinflation and social unrest. Worse still is the front-runner, Ollanta Humala, a radical leftist in the style of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Humala is such a “polarizing” figure in Peru that when he went to vote in his middle-class neighborhood, he was surrounded by an angry mob calling him “everything from dictator to killer.” How sad that Peru could not muster a more inspiring left-wing figure. The parties of the “more traditional, social and progressive left” are no longer a force in Peru’s elections. Just as elsewhere in Latin America, the socialist crusaders of yore “have been virtually gobbled up by the ultranationalist left.” Peruvians now have little hope of preventing “a resurgence of corruption” in government.