Monthly Archives: June 2021

Lima, Peru — More than most presidents-elect, Pedro Castillo, Peru’s apparent new leader, will need to put his transition team to work as soon as possible. On the one hand, a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic looks increasingly likely in the Andean nation, which already has by far the world’s worst per capita COVID-19 mortality. The highly contagious Delta variant has just been detected in Arequipa, with the authorities scrambling to cut off Peru’s second city from the rest of the country. On the other, Castillo, 51, a radical left outsider who no…Read more …

LIMA, Peru — False claims of fraud in Peru’s presidential runoff election have unleashed a wave of racism in the bitterly divided country targeting the apparent winner, a far-left schoolteacher from the Andes, and his largely rural supporters. Pedro Castillo has a lead of just 44,000 votes after election officials finally finished counting the 18.8 million ballots Tuesday.  But his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of imprisoned right-wing 1990s autocrat Alberto Fujimori, is falsely claiming “systematic fraud” — despite the fact that international electoral observers have praised the clean and transparent nature of the June…Read more …

Pedro Castillo, the rural schoolteacher on the brink of becoming Peru’s next president, wants to reshape the Covid-battered country in the style of one of his Leftist idols by seizing the profits of big business. Like Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, Mr Castillo, 51, rose from humble beginnings in his country’s rural hinterland to become a populist, rabblerousing union leader, before then trampolining to national office. And just like Mr Morales, Mr Castillo is bent on reshaping his country’s economy to favour the poor, in a deeply unequal society divided between a…Read more …

LIMA, Peru — The choice for Peruvians in Sunday’s presidential runoff offered no middle ground — a left-wing union leader versus the daughter of a former right-wing strongman — as critics warned that no matter the outcome, the country’s fragile democracy is under threat. Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the jailed former president Alberto Fujimori, has overcome a 20-point deficit in the polls — and a looming corruption trial — to draw level with first-time candidate Pedro Castillo, a teachers union leader running as the candidate of a Marxist-Leninist party. Fujimori has been aided by Castillo’s…Read more …