Reading Between the Lines
Jun1
Category Archives: Peru
Apr22
Sendero contests official story in Camisea Hostage Affair
By Enaemaehkiw Túpac Keshena
April 21, 2012
The growth of the Peruvian People's War prior to the capture of Chairman Gonzalo
Peru’s Panamericana TV on April 18 broadcast an interview with the leader of the Sendero Luminoso guerillas who last week took hostage some 40 Camisea gas pipeline workers in the lowland rainforest of Cuzco—adding further confusion to the already extremely murky affair. In the interview, Martín Quispe Palomino AKA “Comrade Gabriel” boasts that his forces freed the hostages voluntarily and that the abduction served to lure more government troops into the territory so as to heat up the insurgency. A smiling Comrade Gabriel said: “We asked for a ransom but we knew they [the government] wouldn’t pay. We did it so that these hopeless reactionaries would send in the armed forces and we could annihilate them. This was our objective.” He added: “Let them militarize the pipeline. We’d have the upper hand and would annihilate the armed forces, right?”
Contradicting initial accounts, Gabriel also said two National Police agents had been killed in the attempted hostage rescue. The agents “were getting out of a helicopter and we machine-gunned them… Since they resisted, they were annihilated.” In its own account of the April 14 incident, the government only said one police agent was killed.
The group of journalists from Panamericana and the newspapers La Republica and El Comercio were apparently trekking though the jungle in search of a National Police helicopter that had been shot down by the guerillas on April 12—although initial accounts had not said that the Huey had been downed; only that it had been fired upon, killing one crew member. Seemingly by chance, they encountered the guerillas in the Alto Lagunas area, west of the village of Kiteni. Reports continue to refer to the area as part of the Apurímac-Ene River Valley (VRAE, which has become a code word for Sendero territory), despite the fact that it is actually in the basin of the Río Urubamba, the next river to the east of the Apurímac-Ene.
Also at odds with initial accounts, Reuters says the downed helicopter “was flown by local police and owned by the United States…” No other reports have stated that the chopper was US-owned, although it was almost certainly US-supplied.
Comrade Gabriel is said to be the younger brother of Victor Quispe Palomino AKA “Comrade Jose”—purported leader of the VRAE Sendero column. In his interview, Gabriel criticized imprisoned Sendero Luminoso founder Abimael Guzmán AKA “Chairman Gonzalo”— who he accused of genocide and called a traitor. He had similar insults for the leader of a rival Sendero faction, the recently captured “Comrade Artemio,” who commanded a column in the Upper Huallaga Valley. He also had harsh words for the authorities’ labelling of his group as “narcoterrorists”:
They call us terrorists, narco-terrorists, to confuse the people. Lies. You aren’t dealing with a general, with an official educated in Las Palmas, in Chorrillos [Peru’s leading military academy]. You’re dealing with a man of the people. We aren’t manipulated by the CIA or by the Pentagon. And we’re under this tree. And under this tree is the truth. From here, we communists have a better view of the world. From under this tree we have a better view of Peru.
Prime Minister Oscar Valdés—like President Ollanta Humala, a former military officer—continued to assert that the government’s handling of the hostage crisis was “impeccable.” According to Reuters, he warned the guerillas: “We won’t permit any piece of our territory to be a no man’s land where the terrorists do what they please. The government’s position is very clear. He said President Humala has ordered the rebels be captured “dead or alive.”
Nov22
China-LatAm Summit Opens in Peru
November 21, 2011
Lima, Nov 21 (Prensa Latina) Peruvian President Ollanta Humala on Monday highlighted China as Peru’s major trading pattern, while an expert said that Asian market has compensated the fall in Peruvian exports to the United States and Europe.
In his speech at the opening of the 5th China-Latin America Entrepreneurial Summit, Humala said that it is important to give everyone in Latin America access to learn the Chinese language and the Spanish language in China.
The Peruvian president pointed out that China has become Peru’s major trading pattern, and noted that trade should be strengthened.
According to economist Juan Carlos Mathews, the Chinese market has been very important for Peru because it has compensated the decrease in Peruvian exports to the United States and Europe, which were affected by the world financial crisis.
“It is important to explore all operations that include added value in trading with China,” said Humala, while adding that the future is to take another step towards industrialization.
The 5th China-Latin America Entrepreneurial Summit is attended by the vice president of the Permanent Committee of the People’s National Assembly of China, Hua Jianmin, as well as 600 Latin American business people and Chinese officials.
Jun6
Leftist Humala wins Peru’s presidential runoff: unofficial results
by Maja Wallengren
LIMA, June 5 (Xinhua) — Ollanta Humala, the left-wing candidate for the nationalist Peru Wins alliance, narrowly wins the second round of Peru’s presidential elections Sunday, according to results from an independent election monitoring group.
While no official results have been released yet. Transparencia’s figures show that with more than 90 percent of the ballots counted, Humala garners just over 51 percent of the vote while his rival Keiko Fujimori gets nearly 49 percent, daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori.
Exit polls by three other survey firms showed earlier that Humala would win with more than 52 percent of the vote.
According to Ipsos Apoyo consultancy, Humala would have gained 52.6 percent of the votes and Keiko Fujimori from Force 2011 mustered 47.4 percent.
CPI consultancy’s figures showed Humala got 52.5 percent and Fujimori 47.5 percent, while Datun said Humala got 52.7 percent and Fujimori 47.3 percent.
Both Humala and Fujimori have said they will respect the results of Sunday’s vote.
There were no immediate reports of problems and eyewitnesses told Xinhua the voting process had been calm and that Peru’s almost 20 million registered voters had been able to cast their ballots peacefully across the country.
Incumbent President Alan Garcia called on all Peruvians to vote for peace and democracy, and urged his successor to work for national unity.
“Peruvians must unite to consolidate Peru as one of the leading countries in the region,” Garcia told reporters after casting his vote in the capital Lima’s San Borja district.
He appealed to the next president to form a government of political reconciliation that will ensure “economic growth, the generation of jobs and fight against poverty.”
As all the exit polls released put Humala in the lead, thousands of Humala supporters streamed out in the streets to celebrate and crowds gathered in front of the headquarters of the Peru Wins alliance in the capital Lima and in cities all over the country.
There were no immediate comments neither from Humala nor from Fujimori and her Force 2011 party, but spokesmen for both parties said they were awaiting the release of official results by Peru’s National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE).
Guillermo Palomino, spokesman for Force 2011, told local press that the party will wait until the release of official results before making any comments, and said “we are confident the numbers can still revert and turn in favor of Keiko Fujimori.”
Daniel Abugettas, one of the spokesmen for the Peru Wins alliance and a member of the Peruvian parliament, said the party of Humala will “wait for the official results with caution” and appealed to people to “remain calm” and allow for an orderly transition.
The ONPE has said it will release preliminary results only if one of the candidates have a clear lead in what is still expected by many to be a close final vote count. The civil society Transparencia, meanwhile, denounced 56 acts of irregularities, all of which were related to acts of proselytism or problems with election material at voting stations.
The final weeks of the Peruvian election campaign have been marked by harsh personal attacks and two opposite political visions that has left Peru’s population of some 30 million people bitterly divided.
Political analysts in Peru called on the two candidates to ensure that national unity prevails while Peruvian news papers appealed to Humala and Fujimori to work hard to build political reconciliation after Sunday’s vote.
“We are going through a crucial time in Peru. Whoever will be the elected, the results must be respected and the candidate who wins must make a great effort to call for national consensus,” said the leading Peruvian daily El Comercio in an editorial.
More than 103,622 polling tables were set up across Peru in addition to over 3,800 stations abroad, while some 77,000 police and 45,000 other security personal were deployed nationwide to safeguard the electoral process.
Peru’s new president for the five-year term 2011-2016 will take power on July 28.
Jun3
Why Washington Is Worried about Peru’s Election
by Mark Weisbrot
June 2, 2011
In just a few days, on June 5th, an election will take place that will have a significant influence on the Western Hemisphere. At the moment it is too close to call. Most of official Washington has been relatively quiet, but there is no doubt that the Obama Administration has a big stake in the outcome of this election.
The election is in Peru, where left-populist and former military officer Ollanta Humala is facing off against Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Peru’s former authoritarian ruler Alberto Fujimori, who was president from 1990-2000. Alberto Fujimori is in jail, serving a 25-year sentence for multiple political murders, kidnapping, and corruption. Keiko has made it clear that she represents him and his administration and has been surrounded by his associates and former officials of his government.
Fujimori was found to have had “individual criminal responsibility” for the murders and kidnappings. But his government was responsible for many more widespread murders and human rights abuses, including the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of women, mostly indigenous.
Between the two candidates, whom do you think Washington would prefer? If you guessed Keiko Fujimori, you guessed right. I spoke Monday night in Lima with Gustavo Gorriti, an award-winning Peruvian investigative journalist who was one of the people that Alberto Fujimori was convicted of kidnapping. “The U.S. Embassy strongly opposes Humala’s candidacy,” he said. Harvard Professor of government Steven Levitsky, who has written extensively on Peru and is currently visiting professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), came to the same conclusion: “It’s clear that the U.S. Embassy here sees Keiko as the least bad option,” he told me from Lima on Tuesday.
Humala’s opponents argue that Peru’s democracy would be imperiled if he were elected, pointing to a military revolt that he led against Fujimori’s authoritarian government. (He was later pardoned by the Peruvian Congress.) But his record is hardly comparable to the actual, proven crimes of Alberto Fujimori.
Humala is also accused of being an ally of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez. He has distanced himself from Chávez, unlike in his 2006 campaign for the presidency. But all of this is just a right-wing media stunt. Chávez has been demonized throughout the hemispheric media, and so right-wing media monopolies have used him as a bogeyman in numerous elections for years, with varying degrees of success. Of course Venezuela is also irrelevant to the Peruvian election because almost all governments in South America are “allies of Chávez.” This is especially true of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Uruguay, for example, all of whom have very close and collaborative relations with Venezuela.
As in many other elections in Latin America, right-wing domination of the media is key to successful scare tactics. “The majority of TV stations and newspapers have been actively working for Fujimori in this election,” said Levitsky.
The thought of another Fujimori government is so frightening that a number of prominent conservative Peruvian politicians have decided to endorse Humala. Among these is the Nobel-prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who hates the Latin American left as much as anyone. Humala has also been endorsed by Alejandro Toledo, the former Peruvian president and contender in the first round of this election.
So why would Washington want Fujimori ? The answer is quite simple: it’s about Washington’s waning influence and power in its former “backyard” of Latin America. In South America there are now left-of-center governments in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay. These governments have a common position on most hemispheric issues (and sometimes other international issues such as the Middle East), and it often differs from that of Washington.
For example, when the Honduran military overthrew the country’s elected left-of-center president in 2009, and the Obama Administration sought to legitimize the coup government through elections that other governments would not recognize, it was Washington’s few right-wing allies that first broke ranks with the rest of South America.
Prior to last August, the only governments in South America that Washington could count as allies were Chile, Peru and Colombia. But Colombia under President Manuel Santos is no longer a reliable ally and currently has very good co-operative relations with Venezuela. If Humala wins, there is little doubt that he will join the rest of South America on most issues of concern to Washington. The same cannot be said of Keiko Fujimori.
And that is why Washington is worried about this election.
May26
Protests Continue in Peru despite Military Deployment
Lima, May 25 (Prensa Latina) A protest against mining and oil concessions which has shut down the border with Bolivia entered its 17th day Wednesday in the South Andean region of Puno, Peru, without any prospect of a quick solution. The protest also cut off access to Puno City, capital of the region with the same name, which has been shut down since yesterday by about 10,000 local protesters.
According to Gen. William Andia from the 4th Mountain Division of the Army, the protest continued even after the armed forces took control over buildings, basic public services and other strategic points.
The military deployment was enforced based on a government resolution stipulating the intervention of the armed forces to support police as a preventive measure, Andia said.
Puno Mayor Luis Butron expressed his solidarity with the strikers, who oppose the mining and oil drilling acitivites because of their polluting and harmful effects on agriculture and cattle raising, traditional activities in southern Puno.
According to press reports, on Wednesday, four provinces of northern Puno will begin waging 48-hour general strikes, blocking road, and demonstrating in solidarity with the protest in the south.
Meanwhile, Peru’s Chamber of Commerce announced that losses caused by the border blockade totaled about 20 million USD.
May8
Ollanta Humala Urges Victory for Peruvian People
Lima, May 8 (Prensa Latina) Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta Humala on Sunday called on the Peruvian people to win the June 5 election runoff by defating his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, describing her as the candidate of economic power.
“The people have an opportunity to win,” Humala said at a meeting with leaders of teachers and students.
The masses should not resign themselves to losing by a close margin, he said.
He also appealed to the almost 20 percent of citizens who, according to a recent survey, say they do not vote or had not yet decided on a candidate.
The June 5 election will define who is with democracy and who is with the dictatorship, Humala said, referring to the fact that his rival, Keiko Fujimori leads the supporters of her father, ex-president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), jailed for various crimes.
Humala, candidate of the Gana Peru (Peru Wins) progressive coalition, also met with hundreds of mothers in a working-class neighborhood to celebrate Mothers Day and said they would be the main beneficiaries of his pension program for the poor elderly.
He denied that his supporters had harassed the conservative journalist Jaime de Althaus, as claimed in right-wing media reports after an incident that was also exaggerated by business associations.
Apr24
Leftist leads poll on Peru’s presidential runoff
April 24, 2011
LIMA, Peru — A leftist former army officer is leading the race for Peru’s presidential runoff, according to the first poll released since he and the daughter of imprisoned ex-President Alberto Fujumori survived the first round of voting.
An Ipsos-Apoyo poll published Sunday gives Ollanta Humala 42 percent support against 36 percent for Keiko Fujimori. Just over 20 percent don’t like either candidate or are undecided about the June 5 ballot.
The poll has an error margin of 2½ points.
The free-market friendly Fujimori is ahead in Lima while Humala leads outside the capital. Humala says he’ll redistribute wealth while respecting institutional democracy.
Humala won the April 10 first round with 32 percent. Fujimori was second with 24 percent.
Apr19
Peru election: No country ‘left’ behind
April 15, 2011
Presidential front-runner Ollanta Humala has promised a better distribution of wealth in mineral rich Peru.
Beating his four main rivals with over 30 per cent of the vote, Humala, who has called for a fairer distribution of Peru’s enviable economic growth, scares Washington and Wall Street.
Peruvians have committed “political suicide”, declared a former US ambassador to the country following the vote.
Equally unnerved is Peru’s Noble Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, who often uses his considerable descriptive talents to render in subtle hues the anxieties of Lima’s upper-class whites.
Since Humala didn’t get 50 per cent of the vote, he will face Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of jailed ex-president Alberto Fujimori, in a June run off – a choice Vargas Llosa describes as akin to one between “AIDS and terminal cancer”.
Many Peruvians, though, have worse fates in store for them than those two diseases. Despite Peru’s impressive macroeconomic performance, including low inflation, over the last decade, well over thirty per cent of Peru’s thirty million people live in poverty, and eight per cent in extreme poverty.
In the countryside, particularly the indigenous countryside, more than half of all families are poor, many desperately so.
Chavez soup
Central areas in Lima, the capital, are booming. Profits skimmed off the high price of precious metals – silver, zinc, copper, tin, lead, and gold make up sixty per cent of the country’s exports and finance the rise of luxury condos and malls.
But the city is also sprawling outward. Mining and other high-capital, low-labour export industries – among them, logging, petroleum, natural gas, and biofuels plantations – are ripping up the Andean highlands and Amazonian lowlands, throwing a steady number of families into Lima, where they add block after block to its perimeter.
Terminal cancer might be a concern among Vargas Llosa’s condo constituency, but these economic refugees, particularly their children, are more likely to suffer shantytown diseases, including malnutrition, protein deficiency, dysentery, and drug-resistant tuberculosis. Peru ranks 23rd out of 26th in Latin America for access to waste treatment.
While all the other candidates offer variations on a theme of “more of the same”, Humala promises mild reform. He pledges to improve health care for the poor and implement a means-tested pension plan for the elderly.
To pay for it, he said he will raise the taxes on mineral exports. This is hardly a radical program, but those who have grown fat off of Peru’s unsustainable model of economic development view it as catastrophic.
News of Humala’s first-round victory sent Peru’s currency and bond prices sharply down. Opinion and policy makers in Lima and the US rushed to their keyboards to warn of “class warfare”, as did the former US ambassador cited above.
The “outcome”, he said, “could not have been worse”. There is a saying in Latin America to describe the hysteria that overcomes elites when they hear someone suggesting a more equitable distribution of wealth: “when they sit down to dinner, they see Hugo Chavez in their soup.”
Power relations
Can Humala win in June? According to The Economist, polls taken before last week’s election found that “more than 77 per cent of voters expressing an opinion wanted to modify the country’s development model”. And 37 per cent wanted radical change.
But Humala also ran strong during Peru’s last election in 2006, only to have the country’s entire political class join forces against him.
Recently released WikiLeaks cables reveal that establishment politicians beat a path to the door of the US embassy, asking for help in smearing Humala as an extremist and unifying his opponents. In the 2006, election, Humala won the first round but went on to lose to Alan Garcia by about five points.
This time though Humala will face the daughter of imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori, herself a polarising figure.
Peruvian historian Gerardo Rénique notes that an “important sector of the centre-right with democratic credentials in the struggle against her father” will have a hard time pulling the lever for Keiko, especially since she has promised to pardon her father, convicted for “crimes against humanity”.
Third and fourth place candidates, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Luis Castañeda, will either endorse Fujimori or remain neutral.
But there is a possibility that former president, Alejandro Toledo, who came in fifth with sixteen per cent of the vote, might throw his support to Humala in exchange for influence in the next government.
The rise of the populist left
For his part, Humala will have to walk a fine line in the coming campaign, demonstrating that he can govern responsibly so as to capture the centre while keeping his base of poor supporters mobilised and inspired.
Like other places in the Andes, Peru has seen the reemergence of a strong, diverse social movement comprised of environmentalists, students, peasants, indigenous activists, and progressive religious folk in recent years.
In 2009, widespread indigenous protest broke out against legislation that would have opened up the Amazon to even more logging, mining, and oil drilling.
The government responded brutally, killing a number of demonstrators. But it was compelled to table the legislation.
More recently, the run up to the presidential election witnessed a number of strikes and protests, including one that forced the government to cancel a large copper mining project due to environmental concerns.
Humala points not to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela as a model but rather Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s Brazil. And indeed, Brazilian political consultants have played a large role in his campaign.
So far, the strategy seems to be working, for even Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Laureate, has said he would consider voting for Humala in the second round if he could be convinced he would govern more like Lula than Chavez.
If Humala does win, it will provide even more evidence that the ongoing threat of an in-your-face populist left in Latin America has shifted the terms of the debate, making a trade-unionist social democrat like Lula suddenly acceptable to a free-market ideologue like Vargas Llosa.
All hail the populist left
But the question as to whether Humala will be a Peruvian Hugo Chavez can best be answered by those most worried about the possibility, that is, those who hold most of Peru’s wealth.
After all, Hugo Chavez, the outsider who won Venezuela’s 1998 presidential election, was not Hugo Chavez, the confrontationalist, until Venezuelan elites made it clear they would be willing to destroy their country (through, among other tactics, an ill-conceived oil strike that crippled the country’s economy) if it meant preserving their privilege.
Peru doesn’t have much foreign debt, so holders of Peruvian bonds and credit default swaps probably don’t have to worry about Humala following Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa’s lead, who in 2009, successfully “repudiated” a portion of his country’s debt. Correa ingeniously bought back Ecuador’s discounted bonds on the secondary market, thus avoiding the kind of lawsuits that Argentina, following its default, continues to face.
And aside from trying to raise taxes and collect higher royalties on mineral exports, Humala won’t move to nationalise the mining sector (unless, of course, elite obduracy provokes greater political polarisation, as it did in Venezuela).
He has, though, campaigned on a promise to convene a constitutional assembly to adopt a new charter that would prevent the privatisation of public services and resources, like water.
However moderate a program he pursues, a Humala win will have international repercussions, aligning Peru with other left Andean countries, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
Like Evo Morales in Bolivia, Humala counts among his constituents Peru’s cocoleros, peasant coca growers hard hit by Washington’s militarised and pointless “War on Drugs”.
And like Morales, and Correa in Ecuador, he would probably seek some middle ground with the US, continuing to support anti-narcotics efforts to limit the cocaine trade while trying to minimise their more punitive impact on small scale coca producers.
Humala will undoubtedly tread lightly in areas of foreign policy as well. But here too he can take cover behind the more powerful Brazil, which regularly opposes Washington’s positions on a range of issues, including climate change, Iran, Libya, Palestine-Israel, and Venezuela.
Even if disagreements with the US remain reasonable and minimal, the idea of yet another small country taking the ideal of sovereignty seriously is a big deal, leaving Washington alone with Colombia as its primary collaborator in the region.
The left turn that Latin America took-off a decade ago with Chavez’s 1998 election in Venezuela, and which continued most recently with Dilma Rousseff’s victory in Brazil last year, succeeding Lula, might still be going strong.
Apr10
Exit polls put Peru leftist in the lead
April 10, 2011
Low-income voters were expected to hand a victory to Humala, who has talked about fair distribution of wealth
Humala, 48 – who just missed out on the 2006 presidency – would win between 31.6 and 33.8 per cent of the vote, according to three exit polls broadcast as voting closed at 4pm local time on Sunday.
In the run-up to Sunday’s election, Humala had a lead over his three leading rivals, who are favoured by big business in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
However, Fujimori’s lead over the third-placed candidate, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, was narrow, meaning Kuczynski could still have a chance of contesting the run-off, the polls showed.
“Ollanta Humala is a clear front-runner,” Mariana Sanchez, Al Jazeera’s correspondent, reported from Lima before the polls were announced on Sunday.
“But polls say that no candidate will be able to reach the 50 per cent plus one vote needed to win, so clearly there will be a run-off.”
Despite a decade-long boom, a third of Peruvians live in poverty and low-income voters were expected to hand the victory to Humala.
Norma Correa, a social policy analyst at the Catholic University of Peru in Lima, told Al Jazeera that Humala’s popularity was a reflection of a widespread desire for change, and for economic redistribution of the national wealth in particular.
However, given his lack of a decisive majority in the first round, Humala was unlikely to be able to govern alone, she said.
“He needs to establish alliances with other political forces.”
‘Gradual’ change
A Datum exit poll gave Humala 33.8 per cent of the vote, followed by Fujimori with 21.3 per cent. Pedro Pablo, a former prime minister, Kuczynski had 19.5 per cent and Alejandro Toledo, a former president, 15.2 per cent.
The results were similar in an Ipsos exit poll that showed Humala with 31.6 per cent, Fujimori with 21.4 per cent, Kuczynski on 19.2 per cent and Toledo, 16.1 per cent. A CPI poll gave a similar reading.
Humala”s rivals have sought to hurt his chances by saying he would step up state control over the economy, rolling back reforms and jeopardising some $40bn of foreign investment lined up for the next decade in mining and energy exploration.
But Humala has surged in the race by shedding his hardline image and recasting himself as a soft-left leader in the vein of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian president.
He has promised “gradual” change to ensure the country’s decade-long boom reaches the one-third of Peruvians who have been left behind in poverty.
“Although there’s an economic boom here, no candidate has made a clear plan about how they plan to tackle poverty,” Al Jazeera’s Sanchez said before the polls were announced.
“Ollanta Humala is really the favoured candidate because he’s the only one who has talked about a fair distribution of wealth.”
The prison gates are open... 