Shining Path stalks polls in Peru
PERUVIANS vote today for a new president after a polarising hard-Left versus hard-Right campaign dominated by the bloody re-emergence of remnants of the Shining Path Marxist terrorists.
Pedro Castillo, a radical teachers union leader, faces off against Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the disgraced Nineties strongman Alberto Fujimori, in an election that has left many in the pandemic-ravaged Andean nation in despair. The most recent polls had the pair in a dead heat.
Mr Castillo, 51, began the run-off race with a 20-point lead. But Ms Fujimori, 46, has steadily hauled him in, helped by what critics regarded as Mr Castillo’s erratic, amateur campaign and the backlash to a massacre of 16 people in a remote coca-growing valley where the last surviving members of the Shining Path are now cornered.
The terrorists shot up two rickety, open-air bars on May 23, before vanishing back into the jungle. They left behind a pamphlet bearing the hammer and sickle and warning Peruvians not to vote for Ms Fujimori. The attack has been seized on by Ms Fujimori’s supporters, who warn of Mr Castillo’s alleged terrorist sympathies.
Alberto Fujimori remains revered by some in Peru for presiding over the crushing of the Shining Path, which slaughtered nearly 40,000 people, most of them from impoverished indigenous communities in the Andes and Amazon. But his government collapsed amid accusations of grand-scale corruption and he is serving a 25-year jail sentence for ordering the extrajudicial killings of suspected subversives, most of whom turned out to have nothing to do with the Shining Path.
Deeply unpopular among many, Ms Fujimori now faces a trial of her own for allegedly laundering $17 million (£12 million). The case will be postponed, should she win, until she steps down in 2026. Nevertheless, she scraped into the run-off by taking just 13 per cent, in a field of 18 candidates, to Mr Castillo’s 19 per cent. “Keiko’s only possibility of growing her support was to create a monster, and she has been extremely successful,” says Giovanna Peñaflor, of Imasen, the pollsters.
Although Mr Castillo has run on an explicitly Marxist platform, there is no evidence to link him to the terrorists.
Peru, with a population of 33 million, last week revised up its Covid death toll to 180,000, giving it the world’s worst per capita death toll.