Who is
Ollanta Humala? The current frontrunner in Peru's April presidential elections, he met this week with both president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and president-elect Evo Morales of Bolivia, and political commentators have compared him to both men.
He clearly has traits in common. Like Chavez, he is a former military officer implicated in a previous attempt to overthrow the government by force. Like Morales, his ethnic heritage is principally indigenous. Like both of them, his political rhetoric is nationalist, in favor of Latin American unity, and anti-American. At their Caracas meeting earlier this week both leaders appeared to endorse the Peruvian nationalist, leading Peru to recall its ambassador to Venezuela for consultations and the right-wing daily El Comercio to declare that Ollanta was "sponsored" by Chavez.
Is it happening? Is Chavez becoming the hemispheric leader of an anti-American Latin American leftist movement, the kind of movement Fidel Castro and Che Guevara attempted to create in the 1960s and failed? On the flip, let's look at Ollanta Humala and see.
Here he is, in a recent AFP photo taken while he was campaigning:
The first thing to know about Ollanta is that he has innate political skills. His National Party website (in Spanish, consulted on 1/6/06) prominently lists his endorsements by Chavez and Morales. Scan down the page and you'll see he has also been endorsed by Javier Perez de Cuellar, ex-Secretary General of the United Nations. The most surprising endorsement, however, has come from Isaak Mekler, a businessman who leads the Jewish Association of Peru (AJP).
In early December, the AJP accused Ollanta of anti-semitism and of being a "wolf in sheep's clothing." Ollanta then sought out Mekler personally and met with him on several occasions. In late December, Mekler announced that those conversations had led him to change his mind, and in fact he had decided to run for Parliament as a member of Ollanta's party. In his public statement, he declared that Ollanta's proposals were being "twisted and taken out of context":
with the intention of turning Comandante Humala into almost a demon, or a statist or expropriator. There is not a single line in his program that would envision expropriating businesses.
The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs questions whether Ollanta will form part of a rising "pink tide" in Latin America, following the footsteps of Chavez, Morales, Brazil's Lula da Silva, Argentina's Nestor Kirchner, and Uruguay's Tabare Vazquez. Reviewing his history from the 2000 "non-violent" military uprising he led against the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori and Vladimir Montesinos, and in particular through analyzing the distinctions between Ollanta Humala and his more volatile brother Antauro, COHA suggests Ollanta may simply be the latest in a series of outsider politicians who have offered themselves as the solution to Peru's long-standing, seemingly intractable political and economic crises. Though the COHA piece goes no further than current president Alejandro Toledo and his predecessor Fujimori, one could easily throw the populist APRista president Alan Garcia (1985-1990) onto the list. Although APRA has been an established party in Peru since the 1930s, it had never before won the presidency and Garcia's maverick policies represented a real break with the country's elite political consensus.
In the end, though, the key to Ollanta is that he is a military nationalist. He has spoken warmly of the Velasco military regime, which has been described by academics in the US like this:
the Velasco government saw its mission as one of eliminating class conflict and reconciling differences among interest groups within its own vision of a cooperative society.
Ollanta has criticized previous governments for territorial concessions made to Colombia and Ecuador. He has also promised to regain the southern province lost to Chile, which dates back to a war fought between the two countries in 1879!
In the most recent polling, Ollanta leads 21.7% to 21.2% over his closest challenger. In the Indian heartland of southern Peru, however, his lead is much greater. In the southernmost city of Tacna, on the Chilean border, Ollanta leads 35% to 13%, while in the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco his lead narrows to 25% to 14%.
The elections are a long way off, but Ollanta's curve has only been going up. It's entirely possible he will be elected either in April's first round, or a possible May run-off. Is he capable of providing Peru with a stable government and a prosperous economy? His three most recent predecessors (and then some) have all failed...