A Tough Talker Woos Peru's Poor

Front-Runner for President Scorns 'Dictatorship of the Rich'

Ollanta Humala is the front-runner in polls leading up to Peru's April 9 presidential election. (By Mariana Bazo -- Reuters)

UQUIA, Peru -- On April 9, every adult who lives in a cluster of adobe huts clinging to the Andean mountainside here will rise before the sun, walk miles down a rocky path to a larger village and stand in line for hours to vote for a new president.

If they don't, they will face a fine of about $40 -- an enormous sum in a country where half the population lives on $1.25 a day or less, and in a community where securing one's property often means tying the family pig to a 10-pound rock.

But their votes will be valuable for another reason -- poor Peruvians are helping make a front-runner out of Ollanta Humala, an authoritarian, nationalistic ex-military commander who promises to redistribute wealth like a 21st-century Robin Hood.

"A president must be strong and strict," said Estelita Celmi, 35, a mother of three who sat under a thatch shelter knitting a blanket last week. A sweeping vista of green valleys spread out before her. "And it's better when they are from the military, because they work harder, earn less and suffer more. They understand our lives."

Humala's support in villages like this one in the Ancash region has helped him climb to the top of a presidential ballot with 20 names on it. Surveys show he has a six-point lead over Lourdes Flores Nano, a former congresswoman who is trying to follow Chile's Michelle Bachelet and become Latin America's second female president elected this year.

If no candidate gets at least 50 percent of the vote, a second round pitting the top two finishers will be scheduled within a month.

Foreign critics often compare Humala to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The two are friends who share a penchant for tough talk, revolutionary rhetoric and a deep distrust of the free-market policies that many economists say have helped Peru achieve record economic growth . That growth, Humala contends, hasn't translated into new jobs, relieved the poverty and illiteracy plaguing the countryside or increased social services.

"We are living a dictatorship of the rich," Humala, 43, said last week while campaigning in the southern city of Tacna. "I am happy that the rich and powerful call me anti-system if it is their system that keeps Peru in poverty and misery."

Although his words echo neighboring Latin American leftists like Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, the crooked sign hand-painted on an adobe wall near the village suggests a source of inspiration far closer to home: "Humala -- Velasco Lives!"

Gen. Juan Velasco, a populist army officer, oversaw a military coup in 1968 and ruled Peru with an iron hand until 1975. The era was marked by the nationalization of private industries, attempts to redistribute land from the wealthy to the poor, and the state takeover of the print and broadcast media.

Humala's admiration of Velasco -- as well as his plans to take more control of the mining and energy sectors and impose a windfall tax on highly profitable companies -- has earned him enemies among the Peruvian elite in Lima, the capital, where most newspapers are full of critical stories about his outspoken family and volatile campaign.

His mother has said she would shoot homosexuals to set an example if she were in power. His father said his son should release the leaders of the Shining Path, a guerrilla group that terrorized the countryside in the 1980s and early 1990s with calls for a Marxist revolution. His brother is in jail for trying to force President Alejandro Toledo to resign last year after he and 120 army reservists seized a southern town; he has now called for the execution of Toledo and all 120 members of congress for selling Peru to foreign interests.