With 100% of votes counted, Bloomberg news, AP, Reuters, the New York Times, and Diario de Lima Gay are reporting that former Peruvian president Alan Garcia has won today's presidential election against a populist left-wing candidate, Ollanta Humala.Tomorrow's international newspapers will say that the leftist tide in Latin America is turning back to the center (following Colombia's re-election of President Alvaro Uribe last week) which will probably elicit a collective sigh of relief from international economic powerhouses. This will be a facile way of looking at the complexity of modern Latin American politics.
Diario de Lima Gay, while not necessarily rejoicing about the electorate results, also runs an OpEd piece by self-described "left-wing" commentator Ho Amat León taking Raiz Diversidad Sexual to task for endorsing Humala over the weekend. He writes (excerpts):
The feeling among many activists, that candidate Ollanta Humala represented a violent option, was backed by the candidate's own campaign, which throughout his electorate stops did not cease to call for hatefulness between [segments] of the population... [this led to] many of us activists accepting the possibility of backing Alan Garcia.Previous post:
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But if many of us activists feel dissapointment for what it means to vote for Alan Garcia, it is a little less than incomprehensible that an organization such as Raiz Diversidad Sexual would have declared itself... in support of Ollanta Humala.
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...what is left is the bad sensation that the bet made by this last LGBT collective, Raiz Diversidad Sexual, is based on interest, since their political interests have trumped their concern for the LGBT cause.
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1 comment:
Peru had two bad choices. My politics are leftist, but I could never support any candidate that has even a whiff of anti-gay sentiment.
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