PERU: Pro-Indigenous Retired Colonel Sees Meteoric Rise in the Polls

By Ángel Páez Reprint | | Print |

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.