Juliaca, Peru – When the rocks started raining down on her campaign caravan, Lourdes Flores didn’t flinch. She kept her smile and forged ahead on the back of a pickup truck, protected by a plastic shield held by an aide.
Flores, a single 46-year-old former legislator in a tight race to become Peru’s first woman president, was in enemy territory, a town on the cold, bleak Andean plain bordering Bolivia.
Supporters of Ollanta Humala – a left-leaning nationalist candidate who has captured the imagination of Peru’s poor in the run-up to the April 9 elections – were not happy about her visit.
As her motorcade entered this Andean city, Humala sympathizers hurled rocks at her pickup. But Flores pushed on, bringing her free-market message to the Puno region of Aymara Indian communities, 12,700 feet above sea level.
“Peru needs a high dose of tolerance and I have been rejecting this intolerance without losing my calm, my good humor or my spirit of appealing broadly to everyone,” Flores said.
A big woman with a toothy smile, Flores is an embracing mother figure in a country where women are symbols of honesty, and she hopes that image will help her replicate the triumph of Michelle Bachelet, who was elected as neighboring Chile’s first woman president last December.
But she is also viewed with suspicion among the poor, most of them dark-skinned mestizos, because of her light complexion, privileged upbringing and pro-business views.
She has come here hoping to convince people that she cares, showing the common touch by patting the heads of children and hugging their mothers as she listens closely to what they say.
In a country of 27 million where politicians are almost universally regarded as corrupt, “people are deeply skeptical,” Flores said in an interview with The Associated Press.
She has worked hard to overcome the distrust by visiting all of Peru’s 197 provinces in recent years – a feat unmatched by her rivals – going from door to door to battle her rivals’ claim that she is the candidate of big business.
Peru’s free-market economy has grown at an annual average of 5 percent under outgoing President Alejandro Toledo, but poverty has barely inched down – from 54 percent to 52 percent of the population.
Flores has moved toward the center, criticizing “trickle-down” economics and promising government support for small business owners and farmers.
“My constant travels around the country, which have brought me close to farmers, artisans, campesinos, small businessmen, have convinced me that there must be a change in our country’s economic model but without losing fiscal discipline,” she said.
Large crowds turned out to hear her message, but bands of Humala hecklers also dogged her in Juliaca and Puno, the largest cities in the border region.
As her caravan entered the central plaza in Puno late in the afternoon, two dozen Humala followers tossed rotten fruit and shouted insults.
“I’m from the countryside around Acora and I know how the villagers suffer,” Moises Machaca Condori, 42, said, defending his actions. “They don’t even have bread to eat. She has been a congresswoman. What has she done for us? Nothing.” Humala, the man Machaca supports, is a retired army lieutenant colonel playing on his image as a stern military man who would punish corrupt politicians.
But race, a sensitive issue in Peru, has also contributed to Humala’s successful rise into a narrow lead over Flores in the polls.
Humala, 43, belongs to a high-profile mestizo clan of avowed racists who believe Peru’s “copper-colored” majority should have superior status over whites.
He insists he does not share his relatives’ views, but they have benefited him anyway, according to Jorge Bruce, a psychoanalyst and respected social commentator.
“He has not needed to champion the racist preaching of his father and his brothers because people see him anyway as someone who is going to put the whites in their place,” Bruce said. “It is a crude, primitive utilization of a sentiment deeply rooted in Peru – because we are a racist country, profoundly so.” Flores uses gender to counter race, frequently ending speeches about her policy plans with the phrase: “You have my word as a woman.” “Being a woman is in no way a disadvantage,” she said, noting that “women traffic police are perceived as perhaps the most honest figures in public administration” – unlike their bribe-taking male counterparts.
Flores clearly had support among women in Puno, where the plaza filled with thousands of her followers. A band of some 50 Aymara women, wearing brown felt hats over braided hair, entered the square chanting pro-Flores slogans in their native language and ignoring the Humala hecklers.
“We are going to support Lourdes,” Julia Mamani Cruz, 40, said defiantly. “All our lives men have governed. But the time for a woman has arrived!”
