LIMA, Peru (AP) - Few could have guessed a year ago that a fringe radical who started his campaign with single-digit support could come so close to winning Peru's presidency. But retired army Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, whose name means "warrior who sees all" in Quechua, has capitalized on the deep resentment of Peru's poor majority by promising to rewrite the constitution to strip power from Peru's political establishment, intervene in Peru's free-market economy and radically redistribute the wealth.
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Peru's middle classes are generally terrified by his economics and similarity to Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's militantly anti-U.S. president. That helps to explain why he is trailing behind Alan Garcia in the polls.
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But just making it to Sunday's runoff vote is quite an accomplishment, considering where he began. "We are a new project, with great drive, ideology and desire to serve the nation," Humala told tens of thousands of cheering followers at a rally Wednesday night in a Lima slum. "We are not corrupt, shameless, and we are not thieves."
Humala, 43, burst onto the political scene when he led a small-scale, bloodless military rebellion in 2000 in an isolated mountain region a month before ex-President Alberto Fujimori's corruption-riddled government fell.
During the campaign, the married father of two has repeatedly had to disavow the biases of his family, an ultranationalist clan, on subjects ranging from race to homosexuality. He also has tried to distance himself from Venezuela's Chavez, who openly endorsed him while insulting Garcia, his rival. |