As the date of the first round of elections approaches, desperation grips candidates and voters. Of the first, because their chances of moving to the second do not take flight or stagnate; and the latter, because they do not distinguish options to which they can endorse their support with optimism and hope.
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As the date of the first round of elections approaches, desperation grips candidates and voters. Of the first, because their chances of moving to the second do not take flight or stagnate; and the latter, because they do not distinguish options to which they can endorse their support with optimism and hope.
In the case of the candidates, such desperation materializes in the sudden offer of crazy and populist measures. Or, to be precise, more crazy and populist than what they had already been doing throughout the campaign. A good example of this is the recent promise of the presidential candidate of Ahora Nación, Alfonso López Chau, to pardon the coup plotter Pedro Castillo if he came to power. While he was playing at being the “reasonable” alternative of the left, he did not say it. But now that, according to the latest legally disseminated polls, his voting intention is shrinking while those of other openly Castilian candidates grow, he has no qualms about embracing that cause, no matter how at odds with democracy. Something similar, moreover, has happened with his willingness to change the current Constitution. Anything to win the vote of the deluded would seem to be the motto.
Even more serious, however, is the desperation of young people who, in their eagerness to avoid giving their support to parties whose poor performance they have seen in recent years, focus on politicians from the past who are equally dangerous, but old enough to be off their radar. The paradigm of this type of candidate is Ricardo Belmont, the two-time mayor of Lima who now competes for the Obras party. The polls last weekend detected a certain increase in the intention to vote for him, and that would suggest that there is a sector of the population that does not know his history or his ideological identity. Do these young people know that during their municipal administrations Lima was a pasture for street vendors? Do you know that, in 2018, he ran for metropolitan mayor again, but this time for Perú Libertario – the name that the party of the fugitive Vladimir Cerrón had then – and that he carried out a xenophobic and sexist campaign? Do you know that, in 2021, he went from being a fierce critic of Pedro Castillo to being on the verge of being his advisor in just one week? Probably not, and that’s why we remember him here today.
And if the figure of Belmont were not enough to set off the alarm, just look at who is with him in the presidential ticket of the Civic Works Party. Its first vice president, Daniel Hugo Barragán Coloma, has documented ties with Antauro Humala, the ethnocacerista convicted of the murder of four police officers during the ‘andahuaylazo’ of January 2005; He was also appointed by Pedro Castillo as Minister of Defense. Its second vice president, Dina Irene Hancco Hancco, is serving a sentence for the crime of smuggling. In a country that in recent years has suffered firsthand the consequences of not carefully reviewing the background of those who aspire to power, ignoring who accompanies a candidate in the formula is a negligence that we cannot allow. Voting for Belmont is not just voting for him: it is voting for that entire company.
