Humala wrong man for presidency

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

If former comandante Ollanta Humala wins the upcoming elections in Peru, his father, Isaac, the family patriarch, advocates the execution by firing squad of homosexuals, Chilean investors, Jews, members of Congress, President Alejandro Toledo and his wife, Eliane Karp, and the writer Jaime Bayly.

The Humalas, as everyone knows, are a political clan fervently devoted to collecting phobias. In addition to that copious list of people who must be shot at dawn, the Humalas detest white people, Americans and capitalists.

Of course, they also have their sweet and impassioned fondnesses. They venerate the memory of Juan Velasco Alvarado, a ridiculous military dictator who ruined Peru pitilessly several decades ago. They love Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro and Evo Morales and favor the release from prison of the leaders of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the bloodthirsty Maoist gang that murdered thousands of people in the 1980s and '90s.

Where does this bizarre outlook come from? That's no secret. It is the natural product of the four basic components of the family's political DNA: xenophobic nationalism, indigenism, militarism and socialist collectivism. When those ingredients are dropped into an ideological cocktail mixer and shaken furiously for a while, the final result is the Humala tribe: a mixture of innumerable stupidities, authoritarianism, disinformation, violent attitudes and prejudices that are deeply rooted in much of the Latin American population.

Xenophobic nationalism provides the hatred toward Chileans and Ecuadoreans, neighboring peoples against whom Peruvians have waged war in the past. Indigenism, a machista and profoundly misogynist trait, brings forth homophobia, anti-white racism, hatred toward Spain and contempt for Western culture.

Militarism turns the Humalas into intolerant chieftains who oppose democratic procedures and are incapable of seeking a consensus. Socialist collectivism makes them anti-American and anticapitalist, the enemies of entrepreneurs and of all other Peruvians who have managed to build a better economic future.

Naturally, if Ollanta Humala achieves power, all the ills that now beset Peru will increase dramatically. The poor will multiply in numbers and the intensity of their misery will grow exponentially. The state, more patronage-prone than ever, will reach new heights of clumsiness and corruption.

The period of economic stability and growth achieved during the Toledo administration, one of the highest in Latin America, will come to an end. Foreign investment will screech to an instant stop. Peruvian capital will flee to wherever it cannot be confiscated. The flood of emigrants will rise. Demagoguery and populism will unleash inflation. Controls will be imposed on the communications media and the curtailment of freedoms will not be far behind. In sum: unmitigated horror.

Frankly, even though Humala leads in the surveys, the thought that he might win a runoff is scary. Is it possible that more than half of all Peruvians would elect such a character instead of Lourdes Flores, an intelligent and reasonable woman who stands in second place?

It is true that in 1990 the Peruvians chose Alberto Fujimori to Mario Vargas Llosa, but at the time, Fujimori was an unknown engineer, the former dean of an agrarian university, who did not elicit the understandable fear that Humala now arouses.

In contrast, Humala has put on the table his ideas and his vision for Peru, leaving no room for doubt: If he wins, he will plunge the country into a grievous crisis that will surely be long and distressing and from which it will be very hard to recover.

Democracy vs. unreason

Besides, Fujimori's victory in 1990 was due to the vote of the APRA (Popular Revolutionary Alliance of America), Peru's largest party. Then-President Alan García brought all the weight of his office and the APRA against Vargas Llosa, Fujimori's opponent, and kept the illustrious writer out of the Pizarro Palace.

Will García, also running for the presidency, again make that mistake, or will he -- with greater experience and sense of responsibility, if he doesn't make it to a runoff -- campaign for a vote against Humala to save democracy and civilized coexistence among Peruvians?

I would like to think that the APRA this time will align with the democrats to prevent the triumph of unreason. Peru -- which recently survived the trauma of Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos, his advisor -- does not deserve another fall into the abyss.

April 4, 2006

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