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PERU: Pro-Indigenous Retired Colonel Sees Meteoric Rise in the Polls
By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Dec 13, 2005 (IPS) - Retired army colonel Ollanta Humala has experienced an
unexpected surge in the polls for Peru's April 2006 elections. He now has a
22 percent rating, putting him just three points behind the current
front-runner, right-wing candidate Lourdes Flores Nano, with 25 percent.
Humala, who is still in the process of registering his new party and his
candidacy, started out with a mere five percent voter intention rating, and
within the past four weeks rose from 11 to 22 percent in the polls.
Taking a radical stance against Peru's traditional political parties and
politicians, who he blames for all of the country's ills, from corruption to
extreme poverty, Humala reflects the disillusionment of Peruvians with the
government of President Alejandro Toledo and its predecessors.
Ollanta - which means "the all-observing warrior" in Quechua - is not a
leftist. He is an outspoken anti-United States nationalist. And while he is
not a socialist, he talks about nationalising the country's "strategic
enterprises".
Although he has mestizo (mixed-race) features and was born into a well-off
middle-class family in Lima, he puts a strong emphasis on his Andean
indigenous roots, and is especially popular among the rural poor.
His father Isaac Humala, a labour lawyer, is a former communist leader who
served as the model for a colourful character in internationally renowned
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's novel "Conversation in the Cathedral".
Isaac Humala was Vargas Llosa's instructor of Marxism-Leninism when the
writer - now a conservative - formed part of a communist cell in the
university.
Convinced that only the descendants of the Incas can pull Peruvians out of
their current plight of poverty and discrimination, Isaac gave Quechua names
to five of his eight children: Pachacutec, Ima Sumac, Cusicollur, Antauro
and Ollanta.
Isaac is also the creator of Peru's "ethno-nationalist" movement, which he
named "ethnocacerism" after General Andrés Avelino Cáceres, who refused to
accept Peru's surrender in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) and resisted
the Chilean occupation forces with a small band of indigenous guerrillas in
the Andes mountains.
Ethnocacerism is a form of extreme nationalism rooted in the vindication of
the indigenous roots of the majority of Peru's population. It is based on
the view that only the country's Andean indigenous peoples will be capable
of freeing Peruvians from the system of exploitation put in place by the
Spanish colonial power.
With the dream that one of his sons might turn out to be a new Cáceres and
head up an indigenous revolution to free the millions of Peruvians
impoverished by the "white elite", Isaac enrolled his sons Antauro and
Ollanta in the military school in Chorrillos. After they graduated, they
organised meetings in the barracks to spread the word of "ethnocacerism"
among their fellow officers.
As a result of what were seen as "conspiratorial" activities, Major Antauro
Humala was discharged from the army in January 1998. But his brother Ollanta
continued to spread his father's thinking.
Early in the morning of Oct. 29, 2000, Lieutenant-Colonel Ollanta Humala,
leading 69 soldiers and accompanied by a group of reservists headed by his
brother Antauro, seized a copper mine in the southern town of Toquepala and
demanded the resignation of then-president Alberto Fujimori and the arrest
of his security chief Vladimiro Montesinos.
On the day of the uprising, Montesinos fled the country by yacht to Costa
Rica, and from there to Caracas, Venezuela.
The army did not make much of an effort to capture the Humala brothers, who
in November turned themselves in, once caretaker president Valentín Paniagua
was in office.
They were later amnestied by Paniagua.
The Humala brothers' critics say the uprising was mounted as a "smokescreen"
to facilitate Montesinos' escape, and that they only staged the revolt once
the government of Fujimori (1990-2000) was on the verge of collapse and
represented no danger. The Humala family roundly rejects such allegations.
Today, both Fujimori and Montesinos are in prison - the former in Chile,
where he is awaiting extradition to Peru on charges of crimes against
humanity and corruption, and the latter in Peru, where he is being tried for
a long list of crimes.
After Toledo succeeded Paniagua in 2001, Antauro Humala founded the
Ethnocacerist Party of Peru, while Ollanta was reinstated to the army with
the rank of colonel. Toledo gave him the post of military attaché at the
Peruvian Embassy in France.
But due to his outspoken criticism of the government and the army brass,
Ollanta was transferred from Paris to South Korea in 2004, where he was
forced into retirement. In early January, while he was still in Asia, he
found out that his brother Antauro and a group of "ethnocacerist" reservists
had occupied a police station in the Andean town of Andahuaylas and taken
around a dozen police officers hostage, to demand that Toledo step down and
call early elections.
Ollanta at first told the press that he understood and supported his
brother. But after Antauro's men killed four of the police officers the next
day, he clarified that he did not support such methods.
Antauro is in prison awaiting trial, and Ollanta has made some efforts to
distance himself from his brother, although the official newspaper of
Antauro's Ethnocacerist Party of Peru is still called Ollanta.
In March, Ollanta began to organise his own party, the Peruvian Nationalist
Party (PNP), and in April he began to take the first steps in his bid for
the presidency.
Isaac, the family patriarch, told the press that Antauro and Ollanta shared
the same ideology and only differed with respect to their methods.
It was Ollanta himself who began the paperwork for registering his brother's
Ethnocacerist Party at ONPE, the office responsible for organising elections
in Peru.
He is also registering his own party.
But his ideological affinity and ties with his brother Antauro have not
stood in the way of his steady rise in the polls.
Analysts see the growth of his popularity as the latest expression of a
common phenomenon in Peruvian politics. In 1990, Fujimori presented himself
as the anti-establishment candidate, just as Toledo himself did 10 years
later and Humala is doing today.
In the view of former interior minister Fernando Rospigliosi, a researcher
at the Institute of Peruvian Studies, the retired colonel's appearance on
the Peruvian political scene indicates two things: "On one hand, a deep
rejection of politicians, and the way of doing politics in our country, by a
large part of the population, and on the other, the scant importance that
people put on democracy, their failure to heed the moral qualifications and
values of people like Ollanta Humala."
In Rospigliosi's view, if Humala "wins the elections, he will put an end to
democracy." He likened the presidential contender to Venezuela's
controversial leftist leader, President Hugo Chávez, who also spent time in
prison after leading an armed revolt as a lieutenant-colonel.
Humala has stated that he admires Chávez and has traveled to Caracas to meet
with leaders from his government.
Carlos Tapia, with the Centre for Promotion and Development of the
Population, a non-governmental development organisation, said Humala
"channels the resentment and rage of marginalised sectors of scoiety, who
believe that politicians personally and collectively benefit from
democracy."
"If Humala is doing well in the polls it is because of the widespread
discontent with the politicians and their parties," said Tapia. "And it is
the dishonesty of the Peruvian political class that has created that
sentiment."
Analyst Eduardo Toche at the Centre for the Study and Promotion of
Development believes that when Humala reveals his true objectives, his
popularity will begin to decline.
"I believe that on some points, Humala reflects fascist ultra-rightwing
positions, which casts doubt on what his real aims are," said Toche.
"Humala has not understood that participating in accordance with the rules
of the system is not the same as acting outside of the system. It remains to
be seen how skillful he is working on the inside," he said.
With an electorate that has shown itself in the past to be highly
unpredictable, anything can happen in the four months to go to the Apr. 9,
2006 elections.
Less than four weeks before the1990 elections, Vargas Llosa was slated to
win. But outsider Fujimori suddenly surged in the polls and forced the
writer into a runoff, which Fujimori ended up winning.
Fernando Tuesta, a former director of ONPE, the electoral authority, and a
sociologist by training said Humala's popularity represents a mood rather
than a reliable reflection of a voting tendency.
"I don't believe Humala can really be considered a threat, because his
positions are ambivalent and not even openly anti-system. We will have to
wait and see what happens," he said. (END)
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