General elections are to take place in Peru on Sunday, April 10th. While the media and the majority of the Presidential candidates avoid serious debate and try to continue with “business as usual”, voters in Peru look set to express their desire for change as left leaning Ollanta Humala tops the polls.

In the slums of the city of Lima, a giant puppet dances alongside Presidential Candidate Pedro Kuczynski, a millionaire businessman and former Wall Street banker.  Desperate to ingratiate himself with voters in urban slums who make up the majority of the population of Lima he is accompanied on the campaign trail by a guinea pig   - an important and sacred Andean symbol.  To a background of catchy traditional pan pipe music Kuczynski and the guinea pig puppet dance while women passers by are invited to touch the Presidential candidate´s groin.

In a country where 50 % of the population in rural areas do not have access to adequate water and sanitation facilities, where over 22% of children under 5 suffer from chronic malnutrition and where the impacts of climate change and rising food prices mean that the majority of the population go to bed hungry at night, the election campaign for the majority of presidential candidates has consisted of dancing, dressing up in costumes, organising free concerts, participating in afternoon television talk shows and avoiding any serious debate or discussion.

“The distribution of wealth, tax, concentration of land and private property, corruption and human rights are not being discussed by the presidential candidates,” says Hector Bejar of The Global Call to Action Peru...

The other presidential hopefuls include – 36 year old Keiko Fujimori, daughter of  former dictator Alberto Fujimori now in prison, Luis Castañeda, former Mayor of Lima widely accused of corruption during his mandate, former President Alfredo Toledo also accused of corruption and known to holds close ties with powerful economic groups in Israel and the US, and finally Ollanta Humala, a moderate leftist candidate who is accused by the right wing and corporate controlled media of being an “agent” of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

According to Bejar all of the candidates have been forced to declare their continued loyalty to the neoliberal system imposed by the international financial institutions during the Government of Alfredo Fujimori in the 1990s.   Under this system, the Government followed the IMF doctrine of cutting back on social spending (net social expenditure was reduced from 37% in the 1990s to just 27%  in 2010) while opening up the Peruvian economy to foreign investment...

By Ollanta Humala | April 6, 2011

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/2985-perus-presidenti...

Submitted by Aletho News on Wed, 2011-04-06 20:17

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