Latin America’s new ‘pink tide’
LOOKING at a photograph the other day of Peruvian schoolteacher, union activist and Marxist Pedro Castillo in his traditional hat, I was reminded of another famous hat-wearing leftist of Latin America. I’m talking, of course, about Augusto C Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary of the 1920-30s from whom the later Sandinistas took their name before overthrowing the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979.
This weekend, as Peru finished counting the votes in a tight presidential run-off election, the signs are that Castillo, who has kept a lead of about 60,000 votes over conservative Keiko Fujimori, could well become the country’s next president.
Confirmation of the result has yet to come but should Castillo and his Free Peru party prove to have won, then the talk of whether what might be a far-reaching shift to the left in the region will take on new impetus.
Ravaged by Covid and brewing over with anger at ruling elites, many other leftist candidates are already running in Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, and Bolivia, bringing speculation that the region might be about to experience another “pink tide” which was kicked off by Venezuela’s election of Hugo Chavez in 1998.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Castillo’s core message as to how Peru’s economic model disadvantages the poor split the vote in the country with those in poorer communities overwhelmingly supporting him and richer urbanites supported Fujimori. The question now is to what extent that voting pattern might become evident in other looming election battles across Latin America.
The days ahead could be tricky for Castillo – dubbed by some as the “barefoot candidate” – given that Fujimori has already alleged fraud even though both domestic and international observers said the vote was clean. Then again, these days, post-Trump, it’s almost par for the course to make such accusations even without evidence.
More worrying, perhaps, for Castillo is that some of Fujimori’s supporters called for a military intervention last week, to which the army responded by saying it will respect the election results. Tense times lie ahead in Peru. Meanwhile, across a region with a population of almost 600 million in three dozen countries, Latin America defies easy generalisation.
But here the pandemic has taken a staggering toll and the political right has been found wanting. For that reason alone, those with an eye on the prevailing political current are convinced that the “pink tide” is once again rising.