Daniel Alarcón: Let's Go, Country
I arrived in Lima on the third Sunday in January, the day the poll was released. The presidential election was still months away, scheduled for early April, but the outsider, Ollanta Humala, was now the front-runner, and this had happened with blinding speed, as things so often will in Peru. I met my cousin and a friend for a drink that night and, though we tried, we couldn't avoid discussing politics. Humala, a former lieutenant colonel in the army, a veteran of the war that raged in the 1980s and early 1990s, had been in fourth place as recently as November but now led the conservative candidate, Lourdes Flores, 28 to 25 percent-close to the margin of error, but leading nevertheless. Former president Alberto Fujimori had been jailed in Chile and declared ineligible, but that still left twenty-three candidates for the job; vying for the 120 open congressional seats were almost 3,000 men and women, so many that the national office of elections was having trouble fitting them all on the ballot. Many came from new political parties with names like the titles of self-help boob: Y Se Llama Peru ("And It's Called Peru," referencing a famous old Creole song), Con Fuerza Perú ("With Strength Peru"), Perú Ahora ("Peru Now"), or Avanza Pais (roughly, "Let's Go, Country"). One could imagine an exclamation point following each. An overweight pop singer named Tongo, who had scored a hit a few years ear lier with the song "Suffer, Peruvian, Suffer," was running for congress with a party called Andean Rebirth. Former president Alan García, who seemed never to tire of seeking the office he left in disgrace, had not yet recovered from "la patadita," an unfortunate incident in which he kicked a young man at a rally who stood between him and the television cameras. To make matters worse, the victim turned out to suffer from some kind of mental retardation. Rumor had it that an opposing political party had stepped in to help finance the young man's lawsuit.
A toothless waiter came by to empty the ashtray and then sauntered away without a word. At the table behind us, a man in a baseball cap and thick glasses read tarot cards for two visibly distressed women. It was a quiet Sunday night, and so I could hear snippets of their concerns: love, children, money. The walls were covered with posters for various cultural events that had already passed; January is a dead month in Lima. The tedium of the political scene had made us all drowsy and irritable. When I remarked on how interesting it all was, my cousin scowled at me. "Of course it's interesting to you, hvevón. You don't live here."
No one said much for a while. Then another friend arrived, her beaming, bearded Socialist boyfriend in tow-kisses all around, chairs dragged to the table. The Socialists had staged their internal party elections that day, and the boyfriend's ticket had won. He couldn't contain his happiness. He told us all the details, the deals, the debates, the compromises, the obscure machinations. His energy was almost unseemly: in the crowded presidential field, the Socialist candidate was polling less than a percentage point. Wasn't it all a circus? Hadn't we just concluded there was no point?
The Socialist seemed not to mind. "In fact," he said, "if my candidate had any real chance of winning, 1 probably wouldn't vote for him. His government would be a disaster."
One always admires Socialists, if only for their ability to balance their long-term dreams with short-term cynicism. "If it comes down to Humala and Lourdes in the second round, who will you vote for?" I asked him.
He didn't hesitate. "Lourdes."
I raised an eyebrow. The conservative? Ollanta Humala-whose first name in Quechua, Peru's main indigenous language, means "all-seeing warrior"-was the Chavista candidate, showily allied with the new Latin American left. Just two weeks beforehand, he had appeared on stage in Caracas with President Hugo Chávez and then President-elect Evo Morales of Bolivia. Chávez also sang the opening lines of the Peruvian national anthem, misidentifying it as the anthem of Bolivia. A week later the Venezuelan president further inflamed matters by calling Lourdes Flores "the candidate of the oligarchy."
I rattled off the names of a few other Humala supporters, men with solid credentials, politicians ideologically more progressive than Lourdes.
The Socialist scratched his beard. "Sure," he said, "but think of it this way. If Lourdes wins, I know I'll get a chance to vote her out in five years. If Humala wins, who knows what will happen?"
Such was the panic that attended the campaign of forty-three-year-old Ollanta Humala. His victory in April, Peruvians had been told, would destroy the country's economy, sink its fragile democracy. A young, handsome mestizo, a military veteran, a rebel with an indigenous name and a populist message-a candidate more loathsome to the middle and upper classes could not have been created in a lab. Of course, Humala had done little to calm these fears: he publicly declared his admiration for General Juan Velasco, a populist dictator who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, nationalized the major industries and the press, and also seized and broke up the large haciendas that formed the core of Peru's agricultural economy. It perhaps was unsurprising, then, that Humala's dramatic rise in the polls over the previous weeks had coincided with a 14 percent drop in the Peruvian stock market. The media, too, was obsessed: photographs of Humala ran on the front pages of Lima's tabloids, alongside such impartial headlines as IT WILL BE A DISASTER and WHAT OLLANTA IS HIDING. The eminent novelist Mario Vargas Llosa used his newspaper column to call Humala a racist and a barbarian. Peru's then president, Alejandro Toledo, with his approval rating in the teens, weighed in on the so-called Humala factor, calling the candidate's proposal to review international contracts "suicide" and potentially "fatal" to the Peruvian economy. The campaign, which had hardly begun, was very messy already, and it would only get worse.
Eventually, Lourdes Flores would wilt as Alan Garcia surged, with the first-round vote on April 9 so close, and its counting so slow, that the result would not be certified for more than three weeks. And although Humala would receive the most votes of any candidate in the first round, the outcome of the June 4 runoff against Garcia was essentially a foregone conclusion: in a two-man race, there were too many Peruvians for whom an Humala vote would seem far too dangerous to contemplate.
The week after I arrived, the members of Humala's party descended on Lima from all over Peru to finalize the parliamentary list. The process became contentious and then violent. A group of party members from eighteen provincial committees took over the central office, demanding to speak with the candidate himself and refusing to leave for many hours. There were accusations of irregularities, of popularly elected candidates being replaced by friends and family members of Humala's inner circle. On the news that night and the front pages of the next day's newspapers, Peruvians saw the chaos: angry men and women with placards clamoring behind the closed gate of the party headquarters. For a candidate whose disconcertingly authoritarian slogan was "security, Discipline, and Order," this kind of scene was distinctly off-message.
I visited the central office the following day, hoping to find an explanation for what had happened. The chaos had subsided, and the office looked less like the site of a tense political struggle than a poorly decorated waiting room. The tiles were coming up in places. There were people scattered about in groups, speaking in low whispers. A dark-skinned man in a black T-shirt smoked a cigarette and flipped lazily through a newspaper, and I counted five people asleep in the white plastic chairs that lined the walls. I approached two men and struck up a conversation. They eyed me suspiciously but eventually told me they were from Ate-Vitarte, an immense district of more than 400,000 along the Central Highway on the dusty eastern edge of Lima. I asked them about the problems that all the papers had talked about.
"No problems," they said, almost in unison.
This seemed hard to believe. According to one local paper, a contingent of protesters had held one of Humala's chosen parliamentary candidates hostage while they waited for the candidate to come speak to them. Nor was this all: that morning I had been downtown interviewing a cocalero named Iburcio Morales, who had been left off Humala's parliamentary list. Any candidate who dared visit his hometown of Huánuco, Morales told me, would be tossed out by force. This rancor was coming from a representative of the agricultural and coca-growers union, a natural ally of Humala. Wouldn't this count as a problem?
One of the men, who introduced himself as Marino, cleared his throat. "It's complicated," he said. He had a disarming smile and was in need of a haircut. Outside agents, he said, were attempting to destabilize the party, an assertion for which he gave convincing testimony-convincing by its sincerity, not because he offered any proof-as his companion nodded. All this chaos was the work of paid instigators: Fujimori, Montesinos, the CIA, the banks.
"They're afraid of us," Marino told me.
In Peru, it should be noted, such paranoia is entirely reasonable. Only six years ago, video documentation of a dismayingly widespread bribery ring brought down the government of President Alberto Fujimori. Everyone was in on it: opposition politicians, businessmen, journalists, judges, generals. Tragically, even Héctor Chumpitaz, a national soccer hero, had succumbed to the temptation. As for infiltrating the gatherings of political opponents to instigate violence, this is so common in Peruvian politics that it is nearly a cliché, and so suspicion must always be the default stance, especially in regard to strangers.
Once I had convinced the men from Ate-Vitarte that I was not a CIA agent myself, they invited me to visit them. Marino introduced me to the rest of their district committee. I exchanged phone numbers with a serious, square-faced young man named Justo Uchasara, and we made plans to meet the following week. I was about to leave when the man in the black T-shirt suddenly slammed his hand on the table where he had been sitting. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he yelled.
Everyone looked up. Those who had been sleeping raised their heads.
"Are the following people here? If the following people are here, they need to speak to me immediately." He read off a dozen or so names in an angry voice. No. one came forward.
"Compañero, who are they?" said a voice.
He waved his newspaper violently. "The paper says these men have negotiated with Humala! I don't know these people! Does anyone know these people? More lies, compañeros, more lies!"
Comandante Ollanta Humala strode onto the political stage October 29, 2000. With the corrupt regime of President Alberto Fujimori near collapse, Humala and his younger brother Antauro (himself a former member of the armed forces) staged an uprising that day at the military headquarters in Locumba, in southern Peru. It was above all a symbolic gesture: with their commanding officer as a hostage, Humala led his men to Toquepala, a remote, poorly defended mining operation in the vast southern sierra, and captured it without firing a shot. Humala faxed a communiqué to the media and gave a few interviews. He demanded the resignation of President Fujimori and the corrupt generals implicated in the deepening bribery scandal. A manhunt began, but Humala, along with his brother Antauro and seven enlisted men, managed to evade arrest long enough for the political landscape to shift dramatically: Fujimori eventually fled the country, then resigned via fax on November 19, 2000. The Humala brothers surrendered to authorities on December 16 and were pardoned by the congress six days later. The entire episode was an unqualified success: no deaths, plenty of press, and a sudden political presence for the brothers. Lima's center-left daily, La República, called Ollanta Humala "the conscience of Peru" and described him as "valiant and decisive."
If the uprising was praised by the political class, it was only for dislike of Fujimori's government, not because anyone was paying attention to the brothers or their views. The Humalas for years had espoused a set of ideas called "ethno-cacerism," after Andrés Avelino Cáceres, a hero of the war with Chile in the 1880s. The ethnocacerist program called for the creation of a grand state based on the historical borders of the Inca Empire, comprising Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, along with parts of Chile and Argentina. In an ethno-cacerist state, the "copper-skinned" majority would once again rule and corruption would be punishable by death. Peru's population would grow from 28 to 108 million, with every fourth child belonging to the Fatherland-in other words, conscripted into the armed forces. The extent to which Humala was ever a true believer in these ideals would remain a primary source of tension surrounding his candidacy.
Once pardoned, Ollanta Humala returned to the military and was sent abroad as an attaché, to Paris and then Seoul; the motivation seems to have been to keep him out of the country so he couldn't cause trouble. But his brother Antauro remained in Peru, organizing the discontented military reservists, young men hardened by the war against the Shining Path and disillusioned after their generals were convicted of accepting bribes. For them, the ethno-cacerist message was a seductive one. In 2003, Antauro founded Ollanta, a histrionically nationalist biweekly newspaper with a circulation of 60,000, a kind of through-the-looking-glass take on Peruvian current events. Anti-Semitic, anti-Chilean "news" ran alongside xenophobic editorials with such headlines as PARK OF THE LEGENDS [Lima's zoo] IS KOREAN-OWNED! The design was rudimentary-the article about the zoo was illustrated by a grainy photograph of a wild pig with KOREA stamped across its side-and the writing was atrocious, but Ollanta's consistently angry and denunciatory tone seemed to strike a chord with readers. It became common to see uniformed reservists selling copies of it in the streets of Peru's southern cities.
On January 1, 2005, the day after Ollanta Humala was forced into early retirement, Antauro struck again. The site was Andahuaylas, an impoverished town in the central Peruvian sierra, but the script was the same: the forceful takeover of a remote, militarily insignificant target, followed by a call for the immediate resignation of an unpopular president. In this instance, however, the uprising got out of hand, with four policemen and one of Antauro's men dying in a firefight. Antauro and his supporters eventually surrendered and remain in prison today.
Although he was thousands of miles away in Seoul at the time, Ollanta Humala was the immediate beneficiary. He returned to Peru with his name once again in the news, and after losing an appeal to be reinstated in the military, he heralded his entry into politics with the formation of the Nationalist Party of Peru (PNP). He also began distancing himself from his brother and the most virulent language of the ethno-cacerists. Eventually he allied himself with another, more established political party-the Union for Peru (UPP)-for the purposes of getting on the ballot.
This was enough for Antauro to accuse his brother of betrayal. Abruptly he renamed the newspaper after himself, though the content of Antauro remained much the same (sample headline: YES! IT IS PATRIOTIC TO PLANT COCA, MORE AND MORE!). To complicate matters further, a third brother, Ulises, announced his candidacy for president, running as a proxy for Antauro, who proclaimed him the real ethno-cacerist. By the time I arrived in Lima, with Ollanta rising in each successive poll, even his father, Isaac, a self-proclaimed "racist," had become a national celebrity, regularly trotted out by the television stations in an apparent attempt to spook middle-class voters. The old man did not fail to oblige. He threatened war with Chile, mused about the seizure of power as a "family project," and proposed a system of parallel nationalities, a sort of Peruvian apartheid, whereby the "copper-skinned" would be nationals and the "neo-Creoles" simply citizens with rights. He called Ollanta's new allies "impure politicians" and announced his intention to vote for Ulises, though he admitted that an Ollanta victory would be a useful step toward an eventual ethno-cacerist government.
Ollanta Humala's steady reply-that he was his own man, not a clone of his brothers or his father-did little to quell the panic. The markets trembled, the dollar fluctuated. Financial analysts warned of an Humala-induced economic meltdown. In Lima one daily asked on its front page whether Humala's movement was a "political party or an insane asylum." Nor was the fear confined to Peru. One Argentine newspaper, Página/12, ran an article entitled "Mein Kampf, Andean Style."
Humala may very well be the nightmare that his opponents suggested, but by far the most fearful political force I saw while in Lima was the ferocious campaign to bring him down. The day before the chaos at the campaign headquarters in Pueblo Libre, the head of the Central Reserve Bank (BCR) took to the radio to denounce what he characterized as deliberate attempts to manipulate the price of the dollar. Two banks, it seems, had bought $13 million and $15 million with only ten minutes remaining in the trading session, directly affecting the exchange rate. The Reserve responded by putting more U.S. dollars on the market, a move then denounced by business interests as political, an attempt "to clean Humala's image." Given that Humala's first vice-presidential candidate, Gonzalo García, was himself on administrative leave from the bank in order to campaign, it was easy to doubt the intentions of either side of the fluctuating-dollar scandal. Some name-calling ensued, but the fact is that any change in the exchange rate is a threat to the household economy of millions of Peruvian families, people whose budgets have very little flexibility. If there are interests willing to engage in such high-stakes gamesmanship in response to a public opinion poll, one can imagine how they might respond to an Humala presidency.
I met Justo Uchasara at the gates of Gamarra, one of Lima's busiest commercial districts. Some 17,000 small businesses, mostly in textiles, are crammed into twenty square blocks, and within this labyrinthine bazaar one imagines there is nothing that cannot be purchased: the latest CDs and movies, name-brand knockoffs of every variety. It is, by some estimates, the densest concentration of commercial activity in all of Latin America. Roughly 60,000 people work there, and 40,000 to 50,000 people visit each day. Women sell clothes hangers, bags of lemons, Jell-O in plastic cups; boys squat on the hot cement, tending to glassy-eyed lizards in shoeboxes. Everywhere people, in an impossible and endless parade, clog the streets and pour from the buildings.
We made our way through Gamarra and emerged into a modern market-the tiles newly laid, everything neat and orderly. We sat at a cevichería, and Justo ordered for both of us. He poured me a glass of beer and said, as a toast, "En primera vuelta"-"in the first round," a reference to the two-step voting process in Peru. For a candidate to win without a second-round vote, he or she must get more than 50 percent.
Justo comes from a village called Unicachi, which is in Puno, a province on the border with Bolivia and one of Peru's poorest regions. The Unicachinos had arrived in Lima with nothing, no wealth to speak of aside from their labor. But in Justo's lifetime-he is only thirty-two-the capital they have built up is impressive. The market we were sitting in was theirs: an entire city block, with more than 400 stalls, half of which were owned and half of which were being rented. It was almost fully occupied, according to Justo, and there were plans to build more commercial space on a second floor. All the workers in this market, he told me, were from two or three villages in Puno. They had very little schooling but were all hard-working and trustworthy. "Peru is a multinational country," he said. "The nation of Quechuas, the nation of Aymaras. We exist, too. We can do this because we are Aymara. We did all this without the state."
I asked Justo what he thought about Evo Morales, the new president of Bolivia and an Aymara. Bolivia, he argued, had elected Morales because the desperation of the masses had overcome fear. He spoke admiringly of the social unrest, the street protests and mobilization that had wrenched power from the traditional elites who had governed Bolivia for generations. The threat, the panic, the dire predictions that had preceded Evo's election in Bolivia, were not unlike what was happening in Peru-and still Evo had won handily. "There's nothing worse than poverty," Justo said. "Bolivians aren't afraid of anything."
At the stall across the way, I noticed a poster for a candidate from Unicachi, his affiliation with the town prominently displayed just below his name. I asked Justo if he knew him.
"He's my cousin."
Although Justo was supporting Humala, his cousin Edgar Arhuata was apparently running for congress as a member of Antauro's ethno-nationalist party. Was there any tension between them? Justo shook his head-of course not. In fact, Justo himself had been approached by Antauro's people, but he felt he was too young to run for congress. In 2011, though, he would for sure.
That Sunday I went with Justo to the Club Unicachi in Villa El Salvador, in search of his cousin Edgar. It was cloudy for a summer day, but the place was packed: blankets spread on the grass, families of Puneños eating and drinking. There were three soccer matches going on, and Andean music blared from a loudspeaker. Justo and his friends had a game later on, against a team from Ollaraya, another town in Puno, with whom the Unicachinos cultivated a good-natured rivalry both in sports and in business. Justo's teammates prepared for their match by sharing a few beers, drinking in the traditional way of the Andes: communally, with a single glass passed from hand to hand, each man toasting the next.
I caught up with Edgar after the first match. He was a compact man with a chubby face and rounded glasses that seemed just a bit large for his face. Before we spoke, Justo warned me not to ask him too much about racial issues. "Everyone is sensitive about that," he said.
Edgar had come to the club to campaign, and although he had been well received, he had no illusions. "We're small," he said. "This is a modest campaign. It will be fifteen, twenty years before we have a truly nationalist government in Peru. This isn't something that's going to happen right now."
The problem, Edgar said, was that neoliberalism had transformed Peruvians into simple consumers. It had provided opportunities only for those with money. Globalization, as he saw it, was just another word for colonization, and nationalism was its antidote. It implied something new and different: a respect for all the cultures that make up Peru, and an extension of those ideals into the economic realm. "The Humalization of politics is under way," Edgar said. "Everyone wants to be a nationalist."
This was undeniably true: before Humala was a presence in the campaign, there was no mainstream candidate talking about reviewing international contracts, or halting Chilean investment in the ports, or not signing the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Humala's presence had succeeded in changing the terms of the debate, and would help turn the election into a kind of referendum on the neoliberal model.
But what about ethno-cacerism? I asked. Wasn't that different?
Edgar shrugged. He was a businessman, part of the Unicachi economic machine that had done so well, and still his disenchantment was complete.
"Racism has always existed in this country," Edgar said. "The most racist people in this country have always been members of the dominant class. We are proposing an anti-racist discourse, a tolerant discourse. We must respect ethnic differences, because we aren't all the same. We condemn racism, but let me tell you what happens. The little people are crushed by the law. For the big people, the law is flexible. And who are the big people? The children of the Spanish, the children of those born abroad. This is the social situation of the country.
"Yes, there is a racial component," he said finally. "I am Aymara. Aymara are poor, and poor people have no political rights in this country."
The Thursday of my first week in Lima, Humala had held a press conference at a downtown hotel. The assembled journalists made small talk and heckled Humala's advance team-We want diet soda! Turn on the air conditioner!-as they set up a video projector and strung a banner behind the table where Humala would be sitting. A rumor ran through the room: there's a video; it's a bombshell. We had just begun to revel in the excitement when Humala's people took down the projector. No video, they said, to palpable disappointment.
I had spent most of the week trying, without success, to meet Humala. It had taken a fair amount of cajoling just to get on the press email list. The media attacks had been ferocious, and Humala's team was wary of all reporters, especially those unknown to them. Through a mutual friend, I had made plans to talk off the record with someone very close to Humala. As I was leaving home, my friend called to cancel, saying the contact didn't want to get involved. He was afraid of talking to the press. Even Humala's father, usually voluble to a fault, had apparently been put on mute. When I called the house, the woman who answered the phone stammered that there was no one there by that name, that I shouldn't call back. Then she hung up on me.
Humala arrived casually dressed, looking tense and bothered. Flanked by his wife, his two vice-presidential candidates, and other members of the party hierarchy, he took the microphone and launched into a rabid denunciation of the conspiracy against his campaign. He claimed he had been followed by the intelligence services for years, that "a dirty war" had been under way since he announced his candidacy. He was visibly angry, his voice at times nearly cracking. He rejected the various charges that had been leveled against him, consistently using the third person to refer to himself: "They want to bring down Comandante Humala . . ."
This harangue was only a preamble to the very strange substance of the press conference. Apparently a reporter had arrived at Humala's house that afternoon with a video for the Comandante. The video, as Humala described it, showed one party member, a man with the almost comically villainous name of Dante Yorges, negotiating with an assassin to murder José Vega, another party member. At one point the unidentified assassin asks how the act should be done, and Yorges answers that a single shot in the head is fine. He then implies that Humala will be very satisfied with the outcome. Even in this thumbnail sketch that Humala gave us, the whole affair sounded sordid and preposterous. José Vega sat next to Humala, looking rather glum, while the candidate railed against those people who wanted to destroy the Comandante and his movement. When he had finished, Humala took a few questions and then invited the press to come with him to the police station, where, in the presence of the would-be victim, he would make an official complaint.
That night Dante Yorges appeared on television, giving interviews from the improvised jail cell where he was being held by members of Humala's party. Completely bald, with a heavy brow and deep-set eyes, Yorges looked crazed and power hungry, a malevolent Telly Savalas. He seemed to be enjoying his moment, throwing accusations in every direction, embracing his role as the ambitious lunatic. In the end, none of it was real: the would-be assassin turned out to be a former bodyguard of President Alejandro Toledo who also moonlighted as a blackmail artist. Dante Yorges was upset he had been left off the parliamentary list, but there was no money and no plot to kill anyone. The whole story had been fabricated to sell to a television station.
By the time the truth had come to light, there were new and more serious accusations to monopolize the front pages: Humala, the media now said, was a torturer. The new charges originated in Madre Mía, where he was stationed in 1992, a town in the Upper Huallaga Valley, site of some of the most bitter fighting in the war against the Shining Path. Torture and extra-judicial killings were not uncommon in this region; in fact, given the crude methods that the Peruvian military often employed, the allegations were entirely plausible. On the other hand, after exhaustive study, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in August 2003 had recommended for prosecution more than a hundred cases of abuse and human-rights violations by current and former military, and Humala's was not among them. Humala has been a public figure in Peru for over five years; given the history of dirty tricks in Peruvian politics, his supporters had every right to ask why the allegations would surface now.
Even if Humala was a torturer and not the victim of a smear campaign, the hypocrisy of the Madre Mía uproar was astonishing. Politicians who had expressed indifference to the Truth Commission and its findings-who, during the war, had minimized the scope of the violent military repression that was affecting mostly poor, mostly indigenous Peruvians-were now pounding their chests, demanding that Humala be brought to justice. Former president Alan García, who presided over the clumsy and brutal government response to the Shining Path, suggested that Humala "take a stroll over to the police station to answer the charges"-this from a man whose first vice-presidential candidate, former general Luis Giampietri, has been repeatedly accused of complicity in the deadly 1986 El Frontón prison riots, in which hundreds of terrorism suspects were summarily executed. Giampietri has never been prosecuted for his role in the massacre, though the Truth Commission and human-rights activists have asked that his case be reopened. Giampietri has come out strongly against the Truth Commission, dismissing its members as Marxists. When humanrights advocates call El Fronton a massacre, it is, Giampietri wrote in a 2005 editorial, "just like when Jews recall their Holocaust."
As it happens, I was downtown one afternoon at the offices of Caretas, Peru's leading newsmagazine, looking over the files they had on Humala, and I came across a somewhat arresting letter to the editor from June 2003. In it, the writer promised a "cholocaust" (cholo is a word often used in Peru to describe people of indigenous background) if the Humalas did not respect the rights of the rich, white minority. Of course the history of Peru is littered with cholocausts, and a joke like this can only be made by someone who has not thought very deeply about this history. For millions of Peruvians-perhaps a majority-this history is neither abstract nor buried in some distant past.
Simple demographics demand that campaigning for president of Peru be done almost exclusively among the poor, in places like San Francisco de Pariachi. The neighborhood is just a fistful of houses staggered on a steep hill overlooking a graveyard. It lies about fifteen minutes off the Central Highway, along mostly dirt roads that wind up into the dry hills. There are thousands of places like this in Lima. From the bottom of the neighborhood there is a view of a dry valley, sliced by a newly paved avenue. The hills are crisscrossed with streets and dotted with houses. Twenty-five years ago, none of it existed. When the war drove the campesinos from the sierra to the coast, they arrived in places like these and remade their lives at the edge of the city.
Humala's people had come to San Francisco de Pariachi to campaign at a neighborhood committee meeting. Two metal desks had been set up in the flat open yard just below the community center. Piero, a dark-haired party representative with a reddish mustache, spoke first, and though I had never heard him speak before, I soon discovered that I knew the speech by heart-the repeated slogans, the phrases from every rally: "The Neanderthal right," "the traditional politicians," "the neoliberals." He then introduced the special guest, a doctor named Máximo Charapaqui Poma, who was running for congress on Humala's ticket. He had come, along with a few other party members, in a white Suzuki 4 x 4 that drew more attention than anything he had say. Charapaqui Poma wore wraparound shades and a red-and-white striped shirt; a chirping Nextel was clipped to his belt. In a speech peppered with Quechua, he spoke about his ambulance business. His confidence bordered on bluster. He promised to bring a few medics to check on the children, and the crowd nodded skeptically. "The only way to change anything is with Ollanta Humala," he said, a little more emphatically, and this was met with polite applause.
The residents of San Francisco de Pariachi sat along the wall, or stood on the slope just above it, watching the proceedings with arms folded. In front of a little store, a child used an old bicycle tire as a hula hoop without much success. A dusty haze hung like a scrim over the valley. It was difficult to gauge how much was being understood: certainly the men seemed to be paying closer attention than the women. When Charapaqui Poma announced, "I have known poverty, brothers and sisters," a woman to my right harrumphed.
Her name was Rosa Olaguibel, and she wasn't even pretending to listen. I had been standing to the side and attempting to take notes, but I could barely hear over her incessant muttering. It seemed almost rude of me not to engage her. A heavyset woman who spoke in the singsong accent common to the jungle regions, Rosa later told me she had come to San Francisco de Pariachi during the war. She worked washing clothes, earning 200 soles a month-about $64-with which she helped support her eight children. She had a plot of land back home in a jungle town called Chanchamayo, but the war had made that life untenable. She was not impressed by Humala. "We want to smash all politicians," she said. "It's all a lie."
Another woman joined our conversation. Her name was Carmen Paz, she said, and she had been living in San Francisco de Pariachi for fifteen years. She wasn't any more moved than Rosa by what she had seen. "We sympathize, but not deeply, because the party is new," she said. "We don't have politics. Our politics is to be poor and to be hungry. If you complain, they arrest you and you disappear."
After a few more speakers-including Justo Uchasara, who told the residents that he, too, was from the provinces, from Puno, that he was Aymara, that the big money was financing the media attacks on Humala-Charapaqui Poma asked for volunteers to form a neighborhood committee. There was an awkward silence, and the Humala team began to plead with the audience. We can't waste another five years in this country, the organizers said. Think of the children. (More silence.) Don't be afraid of politics. Everything is politics. Even going to the bathroom is politics. Please, compañeros. Finally, there were questions: How much work will there be? It's just until April, right?
Painfully, uncomfortably, a few men and women were railroaded into joining the committee. A man named Victor was chosen as director, and the organizers led the crowd in a few obligatory chants: Long live Comandante Humala! Long live nationalism! Long live General Velasco! Then the new volunteers gathered to set a time for the meeting. "When will we meet?" Piero asked.
Victor was a short, dark-skinned man who spoke Spanish haltingly, with a thick Quechua accent and the convoluted syntax of a man struggling to speak formally. "Regarding the possibility of a meeting," he said slowly, "the time could be perhaps Tuesday, at eight."
The party leaders, Piero, Charapaqui Poma, and a few others, agreed, and each gave a florid toast to the will of the people, raising plastic cups of soda to mark the occasion. Then Victor was invited to close the meeting. He smiled awkwardly, thanked God twice, and then fell silent.
Piero looked at him, as if expecting more. When it was clear that this was all, he raised his glass again. "Nationalist applause!" Piero said, and everyone clapped.
I went back a few nights later to attend the first meeting of the neighborhood committee. While I waited for the event to start, I wandered a bit, up the steep staircases of San Francisco de Pariachi. From above, it was possible to see the extent of the growth: orange street lights sprinkled in the hills, only the slightest hint of a grid. I was surprised to find that the corner store rented DVDs. The community center below-just a small room with a dirt floor and blue plastic tarp as a roof, tied down along wooden rafters-was equipped with a loudspeaker. I could hear Victor's voice as I walked, calling the members of the committee by name, asking them to hurry down, warning that the meeting was about to start.
The Madre Mía charges had been on the front pages of many of the papers. Channel 5 in Lima had dedicated its Sunday news show to the accusations, and Humala had responded by saying that if there was proof, they should arrest him. A woman had been interviewed in La República, saying that Humala had ordered her head shaved bald as punishment for complaining about a debt. As if it were necessary to further antagonize the press, Carlos Torres Caro, Humala's second vice-presidential candidate, who had been publicly accused of sexual harassment, lost his cool in an interview and called for life sentences for journalists who committed libel.
By the time I made it back down to the community center, Piero had finally arrived and the meeting was set to begin. He launched into a wide-ranging and free-associative lament about the current state of Peru, addressing first the desperation of the campaign against Humala. "The press is bringing him down," Piero said. "It's a right-wing conspiracy, a dirty war. The press is mad because we want everyone out of the congress. We want to get those people off the nipple of the state. They say we want to kill them all. But that's just a bunch of lies."
Then he spoke of foreign policy and the principal obsession of the nationalists: Chile. Why was Chile arming itself? he asked. Was Peru in danger? Piero argued for obligatory military service: "So the rich kids feel the pain, too."
After a long, somewhat convoluted history lesson, which included the allegation that the CIA had assassinated General Velasco, the floor was opened to questions. It was a reticent crowd. "We're all here to learn," Piero said, encouragingly.
Victor, the chairman of the neighborhood committee, asked if Humala's plan included growing more rice.
Of course, Piero said. But everything is accomplished with money, and for now, Piero said, the rich had all the power. They have the government, the banks, the mines, the armed forces, the Catholic Church. It was the kind of scattershot invective I'd heard at the central office: vague and seductive and not untrue. The big people do run the show-in Peru, and everywhere. "Didn't you see how the war in Iraq happened? Didn't you see how the media did nothing but support the Pentagon? That's how things work. What about Correo?" Piero said, referring to a local tabloid. "Correo belongs to the CIA! Everyone knows that!"
Among the gathered residents of San Francisco de Pariachi there were only blank looks. Piero turned to local politics, rattling off a long list of corrupt politicians: the mayor, the assemblymen, the congressmen, all of whom, according to Piero, had property and cars bought and paid for by the people. I had seen the mayor of Ate-Vitarte the previous Sunday, marching up and down the Central Highway, a brass band trailing him as he shook hands with potential voters. Piero was good: the mayor's display, which I had thought of as folkloric and colorful at the time, seemed now, under the influence of this angry speech, to be sinister and manipulative.
Eventually the committee assigned tasks, which were accepted with much the same reluctance I had seen at the first meeting. The residents spoke about the problems of the neighborhood, principally the lack of water. This is a rather intractable issue that no ideology-nationalist, ethno-cacerist, or neoliberal-is going to be able to solve. There is simply no water in the bone-dry foothills of the Andes. It must be trucked in, and one day Lima will run out. Piero didn't say any of this, of course. It wasn't the time or place, I suppose. Instead, he gave a vague answer about the fair distribution of resources.
When one member of the neighborhood committee asked what exactly nationalism meant, my ears perked up. I had been wondering this myself. Piero took a deep breath and smiled. His explanation was essentially this: you make popsicles at home. You buy the ingredients, you put in the labor. Shouldn't you be able to control the price? With the current system, you can't. Other people, in other countries, decide at what price you sell your popsicles. With nationalism, you set the price.
The meeting continued while I puzzled over this, and afterward I spoke briefly to Carmen Paz, one of the women I'd met on my previous visit. She had seemed so skeptical on Sunday, I was surprised she'd come. She explained that her husband supported Humala, and she supposed she would, too. She wasn't even against volunteering as long as it didn't involve too much work.
"I liked his newspaper," she said, referring to Ollanta.
But that wasn't his newspaper anymore, I said. His party was different.
Apparently the news hadn't made it to San Francisco de Pariachi. Carmen shrugged and protested that she didn't know much about politics. "But," she said, "this was a beautiful country before the Spanish came and trampled us."
By the end of January, the media panic had subsided somewhat. A Merrill Lynch statement blithely noted that the "more organized campaign against" Humala should help to ease the markets in the near term. Humala's numbers were no longer on the rise. The campaign office in Pueblo Libre had been closed. The drumbeat about Madre Mía had been consistent, and some of the testimony was truly harrowing. In the newest polls, Lourdes Flores had regained the lead, in some cases by ten points-though naturally everyone associated with Humala questioned the polls' validity. There was the sense, when speaking to people in the Humala campaign, that a victory that had looked inevitable a week before was now slipping away. The elections were still far away, and Humala would remain competitive, but it seemed that the momentum had shifted. Humala was now on the defensive.
Every evening at dusk along the Jirón Quilca, just off the Plaza San Martín in central Lima, a crowd gathers to talk politics. It's a lively scene, with debates and shouting matches forming among a group of regulars and hangers-on who come to be entertained. One can buy yellowed back issues of the Shining Path's defunct newspaper El Diario de Marka, pamphlets recounting the history of Velasco's land reform, or, these days, old photocopied articles from Ollanta. The Socialists have their circle, as do the defenders of Velasco, as do those who offer their listeners an idealized vision of a Peru without Europeans or their descendants. I heard one man, a tired-looking street sweeper, give the same speech two nights in a row, complete with figures drawn in chalk on the dirty sidewalk to represent the different segments of Peruvian society. He asked the assembled crowd: "What will we do with the whites who don't support our new system? What do you do with people who stand in the way of history?" When no one answered, he made a chopping motion with his open hand. "You cut them down," he said, and shrugged. "What else is there? You cut them down."
I spent some time on Quilca, listening to dozens of competing theories as to why Peru is the way it is. It is an endless debate, and there are always new villains to join the old, but mostly the same accusations are hurled: terrorist, oligarch, fascist, racist, communist, white, Indian. One night, after two dismal hours of this, I went down the street for a drink at El Munich, one of Lima's historic old taverns, a grimy and beautiful cave not far from Quilca. It was like coming home. There was an old man in a Hawaiian shirt playing a piano, and a few people were scattered at the far ends of the bar. I sat at a long picnic bench, facing the piano and the cement dance floor, with three impeccably dressed old men in red button-up shirts, waxed mustaches, and graying hair combed neatly-straight back, of course. My cousin and her friend showed up a while later to join me, and the drinks kept coming, but the night really took off when a short black woman with a tremendous smile stood and announced that, because it was her birthday, she was morally obligated to sing. This was met with hearty applause, and so the impromptu peña began: old school songs, the ones my parents used to play, Creole songs, and soon one of the old red-shirted gentlemen had asked my cousin to dance. When she hesitated, he smiled. "Darling," he said, "I may be old, but so is the ocean, and it still moves."
They went off to dance, and then the birthday girl sat down and was replaced by drunker, less skilled voices. It didn't matter. The night had become one of those epic sing-alongs, when a dozen strangers unite behind a melody, and life seems, briefly, to be a very beautiful thing indeed. At one point in the evening, I mentioned to the old men that I lived in the United States, that I was in Lima to write about Humala. They nodded severely at the mention of him. They offered a sarcastic toast to the electoral process and, clinking glasses, declared that anyone but Humala would be fine with them. By two in the morning, the bar was in ecstasies: four or five couples moved in rhythm while the piano player banged away at the keys in a fever, a gaggle of voices bellowing out a song my mother and father might have danced to forty years ago, cheek to cheek. It was then, with the music at its most triumphant, that one of the red-shirted old Creoles threw his arm around me.
"Aren't we so much fun?" he shouted in my ear, and then shook his head. "And imagine: Humala wants to kill us!"
