Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

POLITICS-PERU: Nationalist Candidate Humala, an Unknown Quantity

Ángel Páez

LIMA, Jan 25 2006 (IPS) - Since Peruvian nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s new President Evo Morales met earlier this month in Caracas, the press in Lima has taken to calling them the “Andean troika” because of their apparent ideological affinity. But it is still hard to tell whether retired army officer Humala will take a turn to the left if he is elected president.

There are no precedents of leftist activism in the retired lieutenant-colonel’s past, perhaps because any political expression was repressed during the nearly 25 years he served as an officer in military garrisons, in the context of the 1980s and 1990s fight against the Maoist insurgent group Shining Path and the Marxist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

What Humala did do in the barracks was to set up “study groups” with his brother Antauro, also an army officer, to discuss “ethnocacerism”, a form of extreme nationalism rooted in the vindication of the indigenous roots of the majority of Peru’s population.

Ethnocacerism was created by Ollanta’s father Isaac Humala, a former member of the Communist Party who fought against the dictatorship of General Manuel Odría in the 1950s.

Isaac Humala’s “ethno-nationalist” movement took its name from General Andrés Avelino Cáceres, a two-time president of Peru who refused to accept his country’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.

But Ollanta has left behind that movement, although he continues to stand up for indigenous rights, and is still a nationalist – characteristics that have brought him close to Venezuela’s charismatic leftist leader Chávez – also a retired officer – and to Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, who took office on Sunday.

Both Chávez and Humala have mestizo (mixed-race) features, not previously common among presidents in South America.

Humala, a 43-year-old native of Lima, has become the poll favourite for the first round of presidential elections on Apr. 9, according to the Apoyo polling firm. With 28 percent ratings, he has passed conservative candidate Lourdes Flores, who has a rating of 25 percent. In third place is former president Alan García (1985-1990), with 15 percent.

When asked whether he is right- or left-wing, neoliberal or socialist, Humala responds that the most important thing for the successor to unpopular President Alejandro Toledo to do is to overhaul the country’s social and economic structures. He insists that the difference between the candidates lies in whether they are for or against that objective.

“I am a nationalist,” he says. “Until now, it has not been understood that the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ have become a thing of the past in our country. Now the debate is between those who want to change the system and those who defend it.”

According to some analysts, that would explain why Humala has forged an electoral alliance with the group Con Fuerza Perú, led by former lawmaker María Jesús Espinoza, who supports disgraced ex-president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Humala also unsuccessfully sought an alliance with the New Left Movement, led by Maoist politician Alberto Moreno, and the Socialist Party, headed up by legislator Javier Diez Canseco.

Humala was not able to complete the steps for the formal registration of his Peruvian Nationalist Party (PNP), which he founded in mid-2005, until Jan. 4.

The delay in registering his party led him to seek an alliance with the Union for Peru (UPP) progressive party that in 1995 nominated former United Nations secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuellar as its presidential candidate, who was trounced by Fujimori in elections tainted by accusations of fraud.

The idea was to create a broader coalition, with not only the UPP and Con Fuerza Perú, but also the New Left Movement and the Socialist Party.

However, ideological differences torpedoed Humala’s plan.

“Ollanta Humala has made it clear that he is neither a socialist nor a leftist, because to be so means to share an ideology and a vision of the country that he clearly does not hold,” Socialist Party presidential candidate Diez Canseco told IPS.

“He bandies about socialist ideas in a highly improvised manner, but cannot explain how he plans to bring about change, nor with whom, because he is surrounded by people who represent the very system he says he wants to change. There is a divorce between what he says and what he does,” said the socialist candidate.

But Humala has also surrounded himself with people with socialist backgrounds. He surprised his rivals when he presented his running-mate. Although Gonzalo García Núñez is one of the directors of Peru’s Central Reserve Bank, he was an active member of the United Left when the party’s candidate, Alfonso Barrantes, became the first socialist mayor in Peru in 1983.

According to García Núñez, an economist, engineer and the chair of the PNP committee drafting Humala’s government programme, the candidate’s plan includes “a new model of development, democratisation of the country’s economic and social life, a society of healthy, safe citizens moved by solidarity, quality education, a reaffirmation of the national identity, Latin American integration and good management of the country’s natural resources.”

Humala has declared that he is no enemy of foreign investment or private capital. But he also announced that the rules of the game, if he is elected president, will be designed while keeping in mind the interests of the poor majority. “I am even capable of talking to the devil” if that would help pull the country forward, he stated.

With respect to Chilean investment in the country, which amounts to around one billion dollars, he clarified that he is neither xenophobic nor anti-Chilean, and that foreign investors “have nothing to fear.” But he later added that he would prefer to see them invest in “fast-food restaurants.”

García Núñez has given his assurance that if Humala wins, there will be no more privatisations of public assets, which he described as an “outdated” practice.

Moreno, the presidential candidate for the New Left Movement, who had seriously considered the offer to form an alliance with Humala, criticised the nationalist candidate’s proposals, which he said have no ideological basis or coherence.

“Ollanta has defined himself as a nationalist,” said Moreno. “There are no traces of Marxism or socialism in his propositions.”

“Nationalism is seen as progressive in countries like Peru, and it is along that spectrum that Ollanta Humala can be found. But his actions are not always in line with his words, because he also makes overtures to sectors that have nothing to do with nationalism,” Moreno said in an interview with IPS.

The leftist candidate was referring to meetings that Humala has held with business associations, in which he has reassured them that they have nothing to fear if he wins the elections, because no decisions would be taken unilaterally.

“When he addresses grassroots audiences, his ideological stances are in keeping with ours. But when he talks to sectors like the economic right-wing elite, he is no longer coherent,” argued Moreno.

“The alliance with Ollanta did not come about because he now believes an agreement with the left would not help him in the elections. That is why we have taken separate paths,” he explained.

A glance at Humala’s platform does not turn up any left-leaning campaign pledges. However, Sinesio López, one of his graduate school professors at the Catholic University of Peru, told IPS that “Ollanta can be considered a man of the left because it is clear that he is seeking change and justice. But he is a progressive rather than a Marxist.”

López recalled that when Humala was pursuing a master’s degree, he wanted to write his thesis on “the army and globalisation,” to “analyse how the globalisation process affected national sovereignty and especially the institutions in charge of protecting it.” (Humala, who received a degree in political science, did not complete his master’s degree).

“When he was my student, he never brought up the ideas of his father Isaac or his brother Antauro. He always maintained his distance from that ideology, ethnocacerism,” said López.

Both Isaac and Antauro Humala have criticised Ollanta’s bid for the presidency, and say he has turned his back on the family’s political vision. Instead, they back Ulises, an older brother who is also seeking the presidency, representing the Avanza País party.

Antauro Humala is currently in prison, awaiting sentencing for heading an uprising in the impoverished Andean town of Andahuaylas, in which four police officers were killed.

Antauro had hoped that after his brother retired from the army in January 2005, he would lead Antauro’s Ethnocacerist Party of Peru, whose newspaper is named Ollanta.

Sociologist Francisco Loayza, who acted as an adviser to Fujimori when the former president – now in prison in Chile awaiting extradition to Peru – was an unknown presidential candidate, was also at Humala’s side when Ollanta’s party, the PNP, first began to emerge.

“On the political spectrum, Ollanta Humala is at the centre-left, next to APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), for example. Although it is only speculation to place him in a specific category, because he has neither ideology nor doctrine,” Loayza told IPS.

“He is avoiding a clear definition of himself due to political calculations. He knows the left does not generate much sympathy and that the centre does not agree with many of his positions, which is why he prefers to keep things hazy,” he added.

For now, Humala prefers to merely describe himself as a nationalist, although he does acknowledge that his key reference points are José Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of Peru’s Socialist Party, which later became the Communist Party, and the creator of the centre-left APRA party, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre.