TOUGH ON CRIME: The top candidates vowed to take on extortion gangs and hitmen, with one saying she would establish courts with judges who conceal their faces
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AFP, LIMA
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A comedian, an autocrat’s daughter and a businessman who likens himself to a cartoon pig lead the polls ahead of Peru’s presidential vote on Sunday, but a crowded field leaves plenty of room for surprise.
Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the polarizing late Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and a perennial candidate for the top job herself, led polls in the final days of the campaign, but with a record 35 candidates in the running, the election is almost certain to go to a runoff in June.
Keiko Fujimori, the once combative founder of the right-wing Popular Force party, has adopted a more moderate tone on her fourth attempt to become president, after the former congresswoman was defeated three times in a runoff vote.
US Army Staff Sergeant Matthew Blank, left, and his wife, Annie Ramos, pose for a photograph at their wedding in Houston, Texas, last month.
Photo: Jen Rickling via AP
The US-educated business administrator, who is of Japanese descent, presents herself as the safest pair of hands to take on the extortion gangs and hitmen terrorizing Peru.
She has capitalized on nostalgia for the rule of her father, still revered by many in Peru for crushing a bloody leftist insurgency in the 1990s despite signing off on massacres, for which he spent 16 years behind bars.
“Our country needs order, and we already achieved that” in the 1990s, Keiko Fujimori said during a TV debate.
If elected, she said prisoners would have to work for their food.
She would also withdraw Peru from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to establish “faceless” courts, where judges with concealed faces would try suspects.
TV comedian Carlos Alvarez, a well-known political impersonator, is the big surprise of the election. From rank outsider at the start of the race, he surged a week before the vote to place second in opinion polls behind Keiko Fujimori, ahead of far-right candidate Rafael Lopez Aliaga.
The 62-year-old Alvarez has promised an “iron fist” approach to Peru’s extortion and murder epidemic and said hitmen would face the death penalty.
“Those wretches don’t deserve to live,” he said.
“Alvarez is an outsider in every sense of the word. Those looking for someone new see him as an alternative,” political scientist Carlos Melendez said.
While the right is tipped for victory, a left-wing candidate could spring a surprise, as what happened in 2021 when schoolteacher Pedro Castillo, dubbed Peru’s first poor president, emerged victorious.
Castillo, who was impeached a year and a half later for trying to dissolve Congress, was polling seventh a week before the first round of the election.
The main left-wing contender in the race is Roberto Sanchez, a 57-year-old former trade minister under Castillo.
Like his jailed mentor, whom he has promised to pardon if elected, he draws his support mainly from poor rural communities in the southern Andes.
Aliaga, a devout Catholic and millionaire businessman who has embraced the nickname “Porky” for his perceived resemblance to the cartoon character Porky Pig, is running for president for a second time, after placing third in 2021.
The 65-year-old member of the conservative Catholic Opus Dei movement, who leads the Popular Renewal party, was mayor of the capital, Lima, from 2023 to last year.
An engineer by training, he made his fortune at the helm of a financial, hotel and railway conglomerate.
To combat crime, he proposes deporting undocumented Venezuelan migrants “back to their beloved Venezuela,” and allowing US forces to capture wanted criminals on Peruvian soil.
He also suggests building penal colonies in the Amazon rainforest, surrounded by a “natural fence” of vipers.
“Like Trump, he’s the kind of politician you can’t imagine moderating his position,” Melendez said.
