Peru Elections: The people does not want 'more money'

“Canon for the people” was the subject of an intense right wing campaign.

As Castillo nears victory, Peru prepares for what comes next

Left-wing presidential contender Pedro Castillo keeps slim lead over Keiko Fujimori, but official result not yet released.

Simeon Tegel

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/13/as-castillo-nears-victory-peru-prepares-for-what-comes-next

13 Jun 2021

Lima, Peru – The official result has yet to be declared but Pedro Castillo appears all but certain to be Peru’s next president.

The radical-left outsider will face an uphill struggle to unite the bitterly divided Andean nation, however, and the most urgent question will be whether he moderates his politics or insists on the Marxist policies in his Free Peru party manifesto.

Those proposals include making Peru’s vast mining sector leave 70 percent of its profits in the country, nationalising the media, and spending 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on education and healthcare – more than the country has ever raised in tax revenues.

With all of the 18.8 million votes cast in the June 6 presidential runoff now counted, Castillo has 50.15 percent support, giving him a razor-thin lead of just more than 50,000 votes against his hard-right opponent Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the jailed 1990s president Alberto Fujimori.

She has cried fraud – despite international observers giving the elections a clean bill of health – and this week hired some of Lima’s top lawyers in an attempt to annul 200,000 votes, mainly from impoverished rural areas in the Andes and Amazon where Castillo won overwhelmingly, in some cases with more than 80 percent support.

But Fujimori’s effort, which is unprecedented in Peruvian electoral history and has delayed the official declaration of a winner, appears to have failed.

Peru’s National Electoral Tribunal (JNA, according to its Spanish acronym) ruled on Friday that most of her challenges had come after the legal deadline. There are now just less than 40,000 votes still in play, not enough to overturn the result.
Deeply polarised

Nevertheless, the last-ditch effort by Fujimori, 46, who faces trial and a potentially lengthy jail sentence for alleged money laundering, has further polarised Peru after the divisive presidential campaign.

Many commentators have noted how her legal team, made up largely of white lawyers, was effectively attempting to disenfranchise Indigenous and mixed race voters.

“It’s part of our political and legal culture, all this paperwork,” Arturo Maldonado, a political scientist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, told Al Jazeera. “This is a candidate who has everything to lose and is using these tricks to win in the tribunal what she couldn’t do on the pitch.”

Fujimori’s refusal to concede has likely also increased the challenges Castillo, 51, a provincial schoolteacher and union leader, will face to establish his legitimacy in office.

The two deeply unpopular candidates received just 13 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in the crowded first round, and the runoff was viewed by most Peruvians as a vote for the candidate deemed the lesser of two evils.

With no experience in public office, and having frequently contradicted himself on the campaign trail, Castillo will face a splintered and right-leaning incoming Congress that is unlikely to sign off on his economic plans, especially any nationalisations.

He will also face the risk of impeachment, with or without cause. The outgoing Congress established that precedent last November when it removed then-President Martín Vizcarra from office on the basis of corruption allegations that were not just unproven but had yet to be seriously investigated.

“It’s possible Castillo just turns his back on Congress and tries to govern by plebiscite,” said Maldonado.
Anti-corruption effort

Another key question will be how Castillo approaches Peru’s anti-corruption fight.

Two cases will serve as early litmus tests. The first is Keiko Fujimori’s, in which prosecutors are demanding a 31-year sentence on money laundering charges that she denies, while the second is that of Vladimir Cerrón, the former regional governor and Cuban-educated surgeon who founded Free Peru.

Cerrón had picked the little-known Castillo to replace him on the presidential ticket after he was barred from running for the presidency because of a corruption conviction. On Thursday, a court controversially overturned his conviction and four-year suspended sentence. The judge is now being investigated, and Cerrón, who many Peruvians believe will be the backseat driver in the Castillo administration, faces half a dozen more corruption investigations.

Cerrón frequently made controversial comments suggesting he, not Castillo, was leading the campaign. The presidential candidate sought to play that down, however, insisting in one instance that his mentor would not even be hired as a “janitor” in his administration.

“Castillo needs to do much more to clearly distance himself from Cerrón,” said Samuel Rotta, who heads the Peruvian chapter of Transparency International. “His presidency could depend on it, but so could his anti-corruption strategy.”

Hope for ‘enlightenment’

Meanwhile, the mood has been tense in Peru as the country waits for the final result. The legal challenges are expected to run into next week, delaying the start of the transition as the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the country.

Fujimori supporters were picketing the offices of the electoral agency, ONPE, and the homes of the head of the JNE and ONPE. Interim President Francisco Sagasti has called on both sides to avoid declaring victory before the official result is announced, prompting some lawmakers to even suggest censuring him for supposedly being biased against Fujimori.

Anna Luisa Burga, 46, a historian from Castillo’s native Cajamarca who now lives in Lima, summed up the mood of many Peruvians who had reluctantly voted for Castillo and are now hoping that the untested apparent new president-elect will be able to rise to his enormous new responsibilities.

“I didn’t vote for him in the first round, and I wasn’t going to vote for him in the second round, but then came this wave of racism, classism and discrimination, and I decided it was important, including for the symbolism, to have a president like Castillo,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I still have my doubts, and I think it is going to be very difficult for him. But I just hope for his enlightenment, and that he surrounds himself with good people.”

Castillo claims victory by around 80,000 votes, Fujimori will challenge the results legally

https://en.mercopress.com/2021/06/10/peru-s-elections-castillo-claims-victory-by-around-80-000-votes-fujimori-will-challenge-the-results-legally

June 10 2021

Leftwing candidate Pedro Castillo, from the Peru Libre party, Wednesday announced he had won the presidential runoff in Peru when votes were still being counted.

But after the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) had processed 99.98% of the votes, Castillo decided there was no use in waiting any longer despite his narrow lead over Fuerza Popular's Keiko Fujimori.

Castillo had 50.22% of the votes, while the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori reached 49.77%. Or 8,775,422 votes, against 8,696,376. The difference was only 79,046 votes.

In this scenario, Fujimori cried “fraud” and vowed to take action to reverse these results, while supporters of both parties marched through the streets.

Former Bolivian President Evo Morales has already congratulated Castillo “on this victory, which is the victory of the Peruvian people, but also of the Latin American people who want to live with social justice,“ seeing in Castillo ”a fraternal soul and companion in the struggle.“

In the first round, held on April 11, Castillo won with 19% of the votes, followed by Fujimori, who received 13% of the vote.

Fuerza Popular has announced it will seek the annulment of Castillo's votes, especially in the centre and south of the country, where they claim there was “fraud”.

The disputed 802 minutes ”represent 200 thousand votes,“ Fujimori explained, meaning that if the annulments are granted those votes must with subtracted from the total tally.

Fujimori later added other minutes to the complaints, meaning there were ”500,000 votes are at stake,” although she insisted she would accept the final decision of the electoral authorities.

But according to Electoral law scholars only bribery, intimidation or violence are plausible causes for an annulment after election day.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN MINING AREAS: THE PEOPLE DOES NOT WANT "MORE MONEY", THEY WANT A BETTER RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MINING INDUSTRY

CooperAcción Informa

June 7 2021

At the end of the second round of the presidential elections, while the votes are counted in a statistical tie that makes it difficult to determine the winner, the projections lean towards a narrow advantage of the Peru Libre candidate, Pedro Castillo. Meanwhile, there are some lessons that can already be drawn clearly and forcefully. One of them is that the promise of the candidate Keiko Fujimori to distribute the money from the mining canon directly to the families did not receive much support in the areas where mining activity is being developed.

The results in the provinces with important extractive projects are very clear: in all of them, Fuerza Popular candidate lost by a very wide margin, while the Peru Libre candidate got a comfortable victory. For example, in Chumbivilcas (Cusco), where the Constancia project of Hudbay mining company is located, Castillo wins with more than 96% of the votes; in Cotabambas (Apurímac), where the Chinese capital MMG Las Bambas copper project operates, more than 91% of the electorate favored the leftist candidate; in Espinar (Cusco), where the Antapaccay project owned by transnational company Glencore is located, Castillo obtained more than 92%; and in Huari (Áncash) where BHP Billiton and Glencore Antamina mine is located, he obtained over 80%.

In the last part of her campaign, Fujimori had raised the proposal called "canon for the people", which would allocate 40% of the funds from the mining canon to direct payments to families in the areas of influence of the extractive activity. This proposal generated great controversy and CooperAcción questioned its viability.

The “canon for the people” was the subject of an intense campaign in the last weeks of the election and a website was even published where citizens could calculate the money they would get (https://larepublica.pe/elecciones/2021/05/31/piden-investigar-pagina-que-ofrece-dinero-de-canon-minero-e-induce-al-voto-pltc/), which was questioned by many as a form of anticipated “purchase” of votes.

What the electoral results express is that the proposal to hand over the money directly, with which the candidate surely sought to obtain votes in the mining areas, has been largely turned down. A myth that is always used in mining conflicts falls: that people protest because they want “more money”, because they want direct economic benefits. These results indicate the opposite: the citizens of the territories where there are extractive activities do not want “money”, what they want is a different relationship with the mining companies.

A will for change is expressed in the vote for Castillo, who instead of distributing the money already contributed by the companies has proposed to rethink the rules of the game so that mining contributes more and in better ways to the country. To do this, tax reforms were proposed as well as a greater presence and regulatory capacity on the part of the State.

This relationship must be expressed in local development and better public services in areas such as education and health, and not only in “cash” or infrastructure “jobs” that do not always have an impact on improving the quality of life.