Lima – The alliance of Ollanta Humala’s Nationalist Party and the Union for Peru, or UPP, which served as the platform for the retired colonel’s failed bid for the presidency, dissolved Monday with news that as many as nine coalition lawmakers are cutting their ties with the ex-candidate.
Carlos Torres Caro, Humala’s erstwhile running mate and now a congressman-elect, made the announcement and justified the split by pointing to the former officer’s tilt toward the radical left and his “diversion of the nationalist project.”
“We cannot subject the country to someone’s personal agenda,” Torres Caro told a press conference, saying that Humala “has made a pact with the radicalism” that Peruvians rejected at the polls on June 4.
Humala, who lost the presidential race to social democrat and former head of state Alan Garcia, has gained the allegiance of several parties for his plan to form a radical front in opposition to the next administration.
Torres Caro said that the parliamentary bloc he plans to form with as many as eight of his UPP colleagues will remain independent from “the ultra-left and radical sectors which the lieutenant-colonel (Humala) has convened to become his allies.”
His faction, Torres Caro said, will constitute a “constructive opposition,” backing the Garcia government “to the degree that it supports the Peruvian people and responds to its demands.”
UPP Aldo Estrada hinted last week at the impending breakup of the electoral alliance.
“We will talk with Humala to set forth for him clear and categorical scenarios under which the integration can continue, but if Humala says no, the alliance ends, period,” said Estrada, who founded the UPP in 1995 along with veteran Peruvian diplomat and former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar.
Humala ran under the UPP banner in the election because his own Nationalist Party did not meet the registration deadline.
The arrangement also served the UPP, rescuing the party from political oblivion and enabling it to gain 45 of the 120 seats in Congress in the first round of balloting on April 9, enough to enjoy a plurality in the legislature.
But 26 of those races were won by Humala supporters who will presumably remain loyal to him.
The other big blocs in Congress will be those of Garcia’s APRA, with 36 seats; the conservative National Unity, with 17; and the Alliance for the Future, whose 13 lawmakers are partisans of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori. EFE
