PERU: Critics fear that the politics of Ollanta Humala, who is set to win Sunday's election, border on fanaticism, writes Tom Hennigan in São Paulo
A former military rebel whose message mixes anti-globalisation rhetoric with an extreme nationalism that critics say borders on fascism is set to top the poll in Sunday's presidential election in Peru. The prospect is leading to concerns that the country is readying for a return to authoritarianism after a dismal five-year experiment with democracy.
Drawing support from Peru's poor mestizo majority, Ollanta Humala is expected to capture a third of the votes, making him the favourite to win a run-off round in May against either the conservative Lourdes Flores or former populist president Alan García, his nearest rivals.
Saying "I belong with those downstairs", Humala has promised a "revolution" for the country's poor, mainly Indian-European mixed race or Andean Indians. Himself a mestizo, he has repeatedly accused the country's white elite of putting the interests of foreign capital ahead of ordinary Peruvians. A first-time candidate, Humala is benefiting from widespread disillusion with democracy in Peru.
The outgoing president Alejandro Toledo came to power in 2001, after a decade of the civil-military dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori. He promised to restore democracy and combat inequality, but instead presided over an administration characterised by incompetence and graft.
Peru's economy has been one of the best performing in South America in recent years. But this has mainly been due to high prices for its mining exports, thanks to demand from China for minerals and metals. But this has not translated into jobs or wider prosperity in a country where the majority of the 27 million population is desperately poor.
Claiming "we are living in a dictatorship of the rich", Humala promises to increase state control of the economy by nationalising "strategic sectors", to curb foreign investment, to raise taxes on foreign mining operations, and to put up trade barriers to cheap Chinese imports in order to create more jobs at home.
Humala is also the latest front-running presidential candidate in the region to attack US influence in South America and promises to scrap a recently agreed free-trade deal with the US.
And like Evo Morales, the newly elected president in neighbouring Bolivia, he has pledged an end to Peru's US-backed coca eradication effort. Peru is the world's second biggest producer of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine.
"We're looking for an alternative to the neo-liberal model. We want to belong to the Latin American family looking for changes," says Humala, talk that has won him backing from leftist presidents in the region, notably from Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
But many critics say that while adopting the rhetoric of the left, Humala is an old-fashioned Peruvian authoritarian playing on the country's racial divisions and appealing to a deep strain of xenophobia.
Humala's father and early mentor, Issac, is the leading ideologue of a proto-fascist movement called etnocacerismo which claims the country's mestizo races are the true Peruvians, and not the mainly white elite.
The movement is named after a 19th-century Peruvian president who resisted Chilean occupation. It is virulently anti-Chilean and anti-Ecuadorean, two neighbours with whom Peru has border disputes that sporadically result in military skirmishes.
Concern about Humala's rise in the polls is in part due to the militaristic make-up of his movement. The core of his support comes from fellow veterans of military campaigns against the fanatical Maoist Shining Path insurgency of the 1980s and early 1990s and a border war with Ecuador in 1995. Most of these unemployed demobbed soldiers and reservists now feel abandoned by the country's military and civilian leadership.
Humala first came to prominence when, with his younger brother, he staged a military uprising in the dying days of the Fujimori dictatorship. Both were pardoned, but his brother is currently in jail for a subsequent uprising last year.
During his election campaign Humala has tried to distance himself from his family and its ideology, but not always convincingly.
He recently had to tell his parents to remain silent for the rest of the campaign after his mother said he would shoot the country's gays once in power.
He has also faced accusations that he used torture as an officer in the military's counter-insurgency campaign against Shining Path.
"Humala's project has elements of racism and elements of fascism. In his speeches he always talks about the rich people, the dominant class, the bankers, but behind this speech is always the sensation that he is talking about the privilege of white people," says Victor Andres Ponce, a Peruvian writer and political commentator.
In a recent article, Peru's world-renowned novelist and former presidential candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa, warned that Humala "represents authoritarianism and the lack of liberty. To maintain democracy or to go to a dictatorship, that is what is in play in these elections." Strongman politics has a strong appeal in Peru where many mestizos feel excluded from the benefits of modernisation.
Many Peruvians harbour fond memories of previous authoritarian regimes such as the 1968-75 military dictatorship of Gen Juan Velasco or the civil-military regime of Fujimori, which ran the country during the 1990s.
Instead of remembering their human rights violations or corruption they recall Velasco's land reform and Fujimori's taming of hyperinflation and defeat of the Shining Path.
Within the military there are many who still believe the army, together with a strong leader who can establish a particular relationship with the people, is the master key to developing the country, says Ponce.
"Humala expresses best a negative vote, a protest against the uselessness of the Peruvian political system," says Prof Eduardo Toche of Lima's University of San Marcos.
"The Humala vote is a No. It is not an affirmation of something - it is not a Si to anything."