LIMA, Peru – On paper, the candidates for the presidential election in Peru on Sunday are a left-wing former schoolteacher with no government experience and the right-hand daughter of an imprisoned ex-president who ruled the country with an iron fist.
However, voters in Peru face an even more elementary choice: whether to stick to the neoliberal economic model that has dominated the country for the past three decades and has achieved some previous successes but ultimately fails to make sense to millions of Peruvians during the time support the pandemic.
“The model let a lot of people down,” said Cesia Caballero, 24, a video producer. The virus, she said, “was the last drop to tip the glass.”
Peru suffered the region’s worst economic slump during the pandemic, pushing nearly 10 percent of its population back into poverty. On Monday, the country announced that the virus death toll was nearly three times what it was previously reported, suddenly raising the per capita death rate to the highest in the world. Millions were unemployed and many others were displaced.
Left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo, 51, a union activist, has pledged to overhaul the political and economic system to combat poverty and inequality and to replace the current constitution with one that gives the state a greater role in the economy.
His opponent Keiko Fujimori, 46, has vowed to uphold the free-market model of her father Alberto Fujimori, who was originally credited with fighting back violent left-wing uprisings in the 1990s, but who is now despised by many as a corrupt autocrat.
Polls show the candidates in a close tie. But many voters are frustrated with their options.
Mr Castillo, who has never held office, has teamed up with a radical former governor convicted of corruption to launch his application. Ms. Fujimori has been arrested three times in money laundering investigations and faces a 30-year prison sentence for running a criminal organization that traded illicit campaign donations during a previous presidential run. She denies the allegations.
“We are between an abyss and an abyss,” said Augusto Chávez, 60, an artisan jeweler in Lima, who said he could cast a defaced vote in protest. Voting is compulsory in Peru. “I think extremes are bad for a country. And they represent two extremes. “
Mr. Castillo and Ms. Fujimori each won less than 20 percent of the vote in a crowded first-round race in April that forced the runoff election on Sunday.
The election follows a rocky five-year period in which the country went through four presidents and two congresses. And the pandemic has taken voter discontent to new levels, fueling anger over unequal access to public services and growing frustration with politicians embroiled in seemingly endless corruption scandals and political settlements.
The hospital system has become so strained by the pandemic that many have died of a lack of oxygen, while other doctors have paid for places in intensive care units – only to be turned away in excruciating ways.
Who wins on Sunday, said the Peruvian sociologist Lucía Dammert: “The future of Peru is a very turbulent future.”
“The deep injustices and the deep frustration of the people have moved, and there is no organization or no actor, neither private companies, the state, nor trade unions, which could give this a voice.”
When Fujimori’s father came to power as a populist outsider in 1990, he quickly broke an election promise not to implement a market-economy “shock” policy promoted by his rival and Western economist.
The measures he took – deregulation, cuts in government spending, privatization of industry – helped put an end to years of hyperinflation and recession. The constitution he introduced in 1993 restricted the state’s ability to participate in business activities and dissolve monopolies, strengthened the autonomy of the central bank and protected foreign investments.
Subsequent centrist and right-wing governments signed more than a dozen free trade agreements, and Peru’s pro-business policies were declared a success due to Peru’s record poverty reduction during the commodity boom of this century.
But little has been done to remove Peru’s reliance on raw material exports and long-standing social inequalities, or to ensure health, education and public services for its people.
The pandemic exposed the weakness of the Peruvian bureaucracy and underfunding of the public health system. The country had only a small fraction of its peers’ intensive care beds, and the government was slow and inconsistent in providing even a small amount of cash to those in need. Informal workers were left without a safety net, which led many to turn to high-interest loans from private banks.
“The pandemic showed that the underlying problem was the order of priorities,” said David Rivera, a Peruvian economist and political scientist. “Apparently we had saved money for so long to use in a crisis, and during the pandemic we saw that macroeconomic stability remains a priority, not people dying and starving.”
Ms. Fujimori blames the country’s problems not on its economic model but on the way previous presidents and other leaders have applied it. Still, she says, some adjustments are needed, such as raising the minimum wage and raising pension payments for the poor.
She designed her campaign against Mr Castillo as a struggle between democracy and communism, sometimes using Venezuela’s socialist-inspired government, now in crisis, as a foil. Mr. Castillo, a native of the northern highlands of Peru, gained national recognition by leading a strike by the teachers’ union in 2017. He wears the broad-brimmed hat of the Andean farmers and has performed with supporters on horseback and dancing.
“For us in the countryside we want someone who knows what it’s like to work in the fields,” says Demóstenes Reátegui.
When the pandemic started, Mr Reátegui, 29, was one of thousands of Peruvians who hitchhiked from Lima to his rural family home after a government lockdown pushed migrant workers like him out of their jobs.
It took him 28 days.
Mr Castillo has revealed little about how to keep vague promises to ensure the country’s copper, gold and natural gas resources benefit Peruvians more widely. He has promised not to seize any of the company’s assets and instead renegotiate contracts.
He said he wanted to restrict imports of agricultural products to support local farmers, a policy that economists have warned against would lead to higher food prices.
If he wins, it will be the clearest rejection by the country’s political elite since Fujimori took office in 1990.
“Why do we have so much inequality? Are you not outraged? ”Said Mr Castillo at a recent rally in southern Peru, referring to the country’s elites.
“You can’t lie to us anymore. People woke up, ”he said. “We can recapture this country!”
