Fujimori has been aided by Castillo’s erratic campaign, which has zigzagged between threats to nationalize large chunks of the economy and promises to respect property rights. For weeks, Castillo, 51, delayed revealing even whether he had a policy team, claiming that he did not want its members to be “stigmatized” and calling expert advisers a “corrupt” political tradition.
Fujimori, 45, has rolled out a fearmongering advertising offensive featuring Venezuelan refugees and stoking fears of economic ruin, “communism” and “terrorism.” The scare tactics received a boost from the reemergence of remnants of Shining Path, the Maoist rebels who wrought havoc in this Andean nation in the 1980s and ’90s, and who are accused of massacring 16 people in a remote valley last month, the worst atrocity in more than a decade.
Castillo and Fujimori reached the runoff with 19 percent and 13 percent of the vote in April’s crowded first round. Allowing for those who spoiled their ballots, left them blank, or failed to vote, the two candidates actually received the support of just 11 and 7 percent of the electorate.
The race between the two deeply unpopular candidates after five years of political turmoil — caused largely by Fujimori’s Popular Force party helping oust two presidents — has left Peruvians in despair. The country also is reeling from the pandemic; officials here have reported the world’s highest death toll per capita.
Fujimori has promised to crack down on crime. She has offered a list of populist economic proposals, including handing out a portion of the income from Peru’s corporate mining sector directly to individual citizens.
She has also promised to pardon her 82-year-old father, who won broad support here in the 1990s for presiding over the military defeat of Shining Path but is now serving a 25-year sentence for the extrajudicial killings of suspected subversives. Such a move would also shut down two pending trials for more killings and the alleged forced sterilization of thousands of mainly poor, indigenous women in the Andes and the Amazon.
Keiko Fujimori is facing a trial of her own, for allegedly laundering $17 million and obstructing justice. Prosecutors are demanding a 31-year sentence; she had to get special dispensation from a judge to campaign outside of Lima. If she wins, her trial will be postponed until she steps down in 2026.
“I ask for forgiveness from each and every one of you who may have felt affected or let down by us at some point,” Fujimori said last week. She repeated promises, if she wins, to respect judicial independence and step down when her term ends. “I do so with humility, without any reservation, because I know very well that there exist many doubts about my candidacy.”
But Antonio Maldonado, who led the team of prosecutors that extradited Alberto Fujimori from Chile in 2007, dismissed her pledges as “ritual, symbolic promises that lack sincerity and will not be kept.” He warned that any pardon for the former president would be a “grave wound to the rule of law.”
“If she is elected, she will clearly destroy all the advances that Peru has made in the anticorruption fight,” Maldonado said.
Yet most Peruvians are equally skeptical of Castillo. Although he has now sought to distance himself from his original campaign manifesto, it cites Lenin warning that the media can never be free under the “yoke of capital” and refers to Venezuela as a country that successfully nationalized its oil industry.
That screed was written by former regional governor Vladimir Cerrón, a Cuban-trained surgeon who chose the little-known Castillo to replace him on the presidential ticket after he was barred from running by a corruption conviction. Cerrón faces several more corruption investigations. Many voters believe he would be the power behind the throne.
“Let’s recover the riches of our country to distribute them fairly to our children,” Castillo, who teaches in a village school in the northern Cajamarca region, said as he closed his campaign on Thursday. “It’s urgent for Peru over time to stop thinking of itself as just an exporter of primary commodities.”
Whoever is sworn in as president on July 28 will struggle to establish legitimacy.
Large-scale protests are especially likely if Fujimori wins. Meanwhile, the highly conservative outgoing Congress is ramming through constitutional reforms that would, should Castillo win, curb his powers to dissolve the body.
Tellingly, lawmakers are maintaining the current low bar for presidential impeachment. They effectively set the precedent in November, when they ousted President Martín Vizcarra on a legislative whim.
Jorge Riveros-Cayo, a Lima travel agent, 52, is one of many Peruvian voters who cannot bring themselves to support either candidate. “If you think voting for Keiko is saving democracy, you’re wrong,” he says. “But so is this righteous attitude from the people who are voting for Castillo to stop corruption.”
“This is like a time bomb,” he added. “The longer it takes to resolve the problems facing our country the bigger the explosion. Neither candidate has the answers.”
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