Lima, Peru – Urban Peruvians were willing to give Alan Garcia a chance to atone for his catastrophic first presidency in last weekend’s election runoff, fearful of handing the country to his nationalist opponent.
Now the president-elect’s challenge is to win over what he has acknowledged is the other Peru: the long-neglected southern and central highlands, where Quechua-speaking Indians and mixed-race mestizos voted overwhelmingly against him.
“We can reconcile the social fractures of our country,” Garcia said Tuesday in a meeting with foreign correspondents. “There must be concrete action, less talk.” He also extended an olive branch to his rival in Sunday’s election, Ollanta Humala, calling the upstart former military officer a de facto opposition leader and praising him for championing the rural poor, who have long been neglected by Peru’s political elite.
In a country where more than half the population survives on less than $2 a day, the poorest Peruvians live in isolated, often lawless lands where support was strong for Humala’s pledge to punish corrupt politicians, intervene in the free-market economy and radically redistribute wealth.
Humala received nearly 70 percent of the vote in the southeastern Puno region, where his strongman image played well in communities clamoring for a greater police presence and thieves are frequently bound to lamp posts by angry mobs, beaten and set on fire.
Even more voted against Garcia in the highlands Ayacucho state, the epicenter of Peru’s 1980s dirty war against the Maoist Shining Path insurgency. For the people of Ayacucho, Garcia’s imminent return to power conjures nightmarish memories of food shortages and military massacres of villagers caught in the crossfire during his 1985-1990 first presidency.
“There was no sugar, no rice, no kerosene, no milk. Everybody remembers that,” said Gladis Coras, a 52-year-old midwife in Ayacucho, where Humala took more than 80 percent of the vote.
“Everyone heard Alan’s message, and here it sounded like a lie.” For many people, Garcia’s center-left Aprista party epitomizes not only state neglect but also the corruption and patronage that prevents direly needed services from reaching the country’s most isolated regions.
Aprista members still have a lock on public sector jobs in Ayacucho, where the regional president belongs to the party, Coras said. “For example, in education, their people are in place. In health care, their people are already in place,” she said.
Garcia, who takes office July 28, has vowed to redeem his legacy.
He insists he will not repeat the errors of first administration, when Aprista membership was a prerequisite for landing state jobs. He has promised to give immediate attention to rural Peru with programs to improve roads, health care, housing and bring potable water to 500,000 people.
He also said he would restore agricultural credits to peasant farmers – a short-lived program in his first administration – and speed up a highway project started last year to connect Brazil’s Atlantic coast to Peru’s Pacific ports.
The good news is Garcia inherits a far healthier economy than the one he left behind in 1990, when he drained the nation’s reserves for populist spending and defiantly limited foreign debt payments. Peru’s economy grew nearly 7 percent last year, helped by booming exports. Inflation and the fiscal deficit are under control, and foreign reserves are solid.
With spending cuts and market-friendly policies, most economic predict the country can afford the $400 million “immediate action plan” Garcia has announced for the first few months of his administration.
The president-elect’s biggest stumbling block could be Humala, whose nationalist party won the largest voting bloc in Peru’s 120-member Congress in April 9 elections. It has 45 seats, compared with 36 for Garcia’s center-left party.
Humala has his sights set on regional and municipal elections in November to continue what he has called the “great national transformation of Peru.” Enrique Cornejo, the chief of Garcia’s economic team, said the new government will meet the challenge with concrete proposals.
Even before Garcia takes office, “we want to have ready a package of measures so the south clearly knows that we are addressing its concerns,” Cornejo said.
