Lima, Peru – Days before Peru’s presidential runoff, the headquarters of the country’s oldest and most disciplined political party is buzzing with furious campaign activity. Come election day, its old-fashioned, spread-the-wealth politics could return Alan Garcia to power.
During Garcia’s 1985-90 term, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance party became known for patronage jobs, bare-knuckled politics, economic chaos, guerrilla violence and rampant corruption. Alberto Fujimori’s 10-year autocratic presidency followed, along with the downfall of Peru’s political parties.
But in the six years since the collapse of Fujimori’s government, APRA has made a steady recovery that could return Garcia to the presidency in Sunday’s elections, living up to its 75-year history of party discipline that has sustained it even when it was forced underground by authoritarian regimes.
The comeback tale offers a curious contrast to political trends in other Latin American countries, where traditional parties have crumbled in a wave of frustration over poverty and corruption. That has given rise to firebrand populists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.
Peru could still follow a similar path if voters choose retired army Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, a former coup leader and Chavez admirer who won the April presidential elections but fell well short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff.
Garcia has overtaken Humala in recent polls, holding a 10-point lead. Pollsters attribute that gain to Peruvians’ mistrust of Humala’s allegiance with the leftist Chavez, a concern Garcia has exploited in a war of words with the Venezuelan leader, whom he denounced Tuesday as a “dictator.” Garcia was himself a fiery, young populist who defied Western bankers during his term, and he remains a dazzling orator. But some analysts credit ideological loyalty and party vision more than Garcia’s charismatic leadership for his recent political rise.
After all, while Fujimori’s movement was called “Fujimorismo” and Venezuelans talk about “Chavismo,” Garcia’s followers are known simply as “Apristas.” “Even though Garcia today has a very important presence, APRA is much more than Alan Garcia,” said sociologist Santiago Pedraglio.
At the party’s headquarters in congested downtown Lima, teenagers trudge inside with rolled up campaign banners – reflecting a new generation of Aprista faithful. They stride past clinics where Aprista doctors, lawyers and teachers provide heavily discounted or free services to working-class Peruvians – a tradition that has long helped the party survive.
“The other parties have nothing like this,” said Beatriz Mondieta, 50, an administrative secretary in the “People’s Health Clinic,” where an X-ray or tooth extraction costs less than $1.
“That is why the people do not forget us.” While some Peruvians still revere Garcia, many more remember his term for the food shortages, terrorist strikes by the Maoist Shining Path insurgency and inflation that topped 3,000 percent.
Garcia, 57, says both he and his party have learned their lessons, promising “to study past errors so they are never repeated.” He pledges, if elected, to bring talent from across the political spectrum into his government, trying to calm concerns that, once again, only card-carrying Apristas will be considered for public sector jobs.
Meanwhile, Garcia has stoked fears that Humala, 43, is a would-be authoritarian aligned with Chavez and Morales, who have both turned widespread frustration with political elites into mandates to remake their governments.
“Our nation’s past has had militaristic governments for 30 of the last 50 years,” Garcia said in his only debate with Humala.
“So I ask, who represents the past and what has our motherland gained?” On Wednesday, Humala tried to distance himself from Chavez’s endorsement of his candidacy, saying the Venezuelan president should butt out of Peru’s internal affairs.
Humala’s main appeal is as a political outsider, a role defined by Fujimori, who dealt Peru’s political parties one of their harshest blows in 1992 when he sent tanks to shut Congress and then rewrote Peru’s constitution to sidestep term limits and elect a new legislature stacked with his supporters.
Humala is backed by a fledgling nationalist alliance that has none of the reach of a traditional political party. He has presented himself as the ideological heir of leftist Gen. Juan Velasco, whose 1968-75 military dictatorship Humala describes as “perhaps the last nationalist patriotic government” in Peru.
Garcia looks to a different leftist mentor – Aprista party founder Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, who also espoused an anti-imperialist message.
He says that from its inception, APRA dealt realistically with U.S. hegemony, while rejecting communism – a path he says Peru should follow.
