A Candidate in Peru Tacks Toward Brazil’s Course

 

But in a transformation this year that points to the eclipse of Venezuela by Brazil, Mr. Humala has swapped the red shirts for dark suits, explicitly rejected talk of seizing private companies and celebrated Brazil’s market-oriented economic model, while distancing himself from Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

Mr. Humala, 48, made the shift after hiring Brazilian campaign advisers tied to Brazil’s governing Workers Party. Now, in a surprise to Peru’s establishment, whose candidates split the vote in the first round in April, the strategy has helped make Mr. Humala, a former army officer who led a military revolt in 2000, the front-runner in polls in a tight race with Keiko Fujimori.

“The Venezuelan model is not applicable to Peru,” Mr. Humala said bluntly in a wide-ranging interview at his home here. If he is elected, he said, Peru will not join the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA, the Venezuelan-led political bloc that includes Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua.

In contrast, Mr. Humala repeatedly praised Brazil and Brazilian companies, which are major investors in Peru’s mines, steel industry and hydroelectric projects, and the new Interoceanic Highway connecting western Brazil to Peru’s Pacific coast. All together, Brazilian investment here could climb above $30 billion over the next decade, according to the Brazil-Peru Chamber of Commerce and Integration.

“The Brazilian experience has delivered success and results by respecting freedom of the press, the adequate management of the macroeconomy, monetary stability,” Mr. Humala said. “Brazil has combined economic growth with social inclusion.”

Ahead of the June 5 runoff election, doubts surrounding Mr. Humala have accentuated a notable schism within Peru’s conservative elite.

Fearing a return to the authoritarianism and generalized corruption of the government of Ms. Fujimori’s father, Alberto Fujimori, who is jailed here after being convicted of human rights abuses, the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa said he preferred Mr. Humala, “unhappily and with fear,” over Ms. Fujimori, who has surrounded herself with her father’s old advisers. (In recent days, Ms. Fujimori has also spoken glowingly of Brazil’s economic and social policies.)

Prominent figures like Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima have since lashed out at Mr. Vargas Llosa, Peru’s leading intellectual, for supporting Mr. Humala, and the established news media have mounted a barrage of coverage critical of his candidacy.

Undaunted by the controversy, Mr. Humala, speaking in a measured tone for more than 90 minutes in his spacious home, insisted that his transformation was genuine. But his family figures in this election, too.

Ollanta Humala has publicly disavowed the thinking of his father, Isaac Humala, a lawyer who espouses an ultranationalist ideology that calls for the supremacy of “copper-skinned” Peruvians, and the candidate said his own ideas were merely “nationalist in the context of consolidating the Peruvian nation.”

“Peru has changed, so we politicians must also change,” he said, referring to Peru’s recent economic boom. “Politicians cannot keep seeing ghosts, keep seeing cold wars and past schemes.”

Calling the United States a “brother country,” Mr. Humala further distanced himself from Venezuela’s president by saying he wanted to “qualitatively improve” ties with Washington, partly by engaging in a cooperative fight against drug trafficking in Peru, which is grappling with soaring cocaine production.

“We must work hand in hand,” Mr. Humala, dressed in a white shirt and jeans, said of Peru and the United States and of plans to strengthen ties with the Drug Enforcement Administration, which Venezuela and Bolivia have expelled. “We need to improve our intelligence cooperation.”

For Mr. Humala, who took 31.7 percent of the vote in the first round against 23.6 percent for Ms. Fujimori, it has been a struggle to lure middle-class voters in Lima and other cities to his side. His plan to raise taxes on mining companies to finance social programs appeals to poor voters in the mountain regions and tropical lowlands, but fears over his controversial past as a military officer, and doubts about his nationalist statements in the not-so-distant past, have many on edge.

“He isn’t what he intends to portray,” said Claudia Carrillo, 37, a secretary here. “Even if you burn a chicken’s beak, they’ll continue pecking.”

Mr. Humala still chafes at criticism of the military uprising he led in 2000, calling it an “insurgency” instead of a “rebellion.” Another episode that haunts Mr. Humala involves claims that he disappeared and tortured civilians while stationed at the Madre Mía counterinsurgency base in 1992 during the war against the Maoists of the Shining Path.

Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Lima.