The Humala administration has not even assumed power yet, but the operatives of the American establishment press, following Washington’s cues,  are already busy pre-emptively assassinating its character, in preparation for sterner punitive “measures”…should the new leader deviate from orthodox economics.

Editor’s Note: We have added a juicy editorial bonus at the foot of this article.  Don’t miss it.

By Stephen Lendman

Humala

On April 10, Ollanta Humala received most support among five presidential candidates, but not a majority. Eliminated were former neoliberal President Alejandro Toledo, his former economic minister and Lima mayor Luis Castaneda Lossio, and former Prime Minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.  Discredited and now imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori’s daughter Keiko proceeded to a runoff with him.

On June 6, New York Times writer Simon Romero headlined, “Ex-Officer Set to Win Narrow Victory in Peru,” saying

Incomplete returns show him heading for victory, rebuking Peru’s “economic model that has driven (its) robust growth, (but left) millions of (its) citizens….mired in poverty….”

Washington Post writer Juan Forero called it an “unhappy choice,” saying winner Humala openly admires “Venezuela’s firebrand president, Hugo Chavez,” then quoted Inter-American Dialogue head Michael Shifter claiming neither candidate is “committed to democracy.”

Reuters said “(l)eftwing former army (Lt. Col.) Ollanta Humala claimed victory” in Sunday’s elections, “strik(ing) a conciliatory tone as investors and the opposition worry he will ruin a long economic boom.”

Wall Street Journal writer Matt Moffett said his win “rais(es) a cloud of uncertainty over what has been one of the world’s most dynamic economies” by depriving Peru’s poor for its rich as well as Western business interests.

Succeeding incumbent Alan Garcia, Xinhua’s English language site said independent election monitors declared Humala the winner, getting over a 51% majority with more than 90% of ballots counted. Exit polls, in fact, had him winning with over 52%.

On July 28, he’ll be inaugurated for a five-year term until 2016. How center-left he’ll govern is very much in doubt given the record of others in the region, including Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and others pursuing corporate friendly agendas.

In fact, in his book “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire,” James Petras said former unionist leader Lula actually extended his predecessor’s privatizations and restrictive budget policies.

Instead of change, he delivered betrayal. Even before elected, he signed a letter of understanding with the IMF, promising business as usual by agreeing to full debt service, as well as pro-business neoliberal policies.

Then as president, he cut public employee pensions 30%. His agrarian policy subsidized agribusiness. He didn’t redistribute land to Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) as promised and cut spending for health and education. He also appointed right-wing bankers and other corporate executives to key posts, including economic and financial ones. As a result, Petras said he fit “the profile of a right-wing neoliberal politician,” not a populist one.

Morales also painfully disappointed by maintaining neoliberal fiscal austerity, economic stability, and other corporate-placating policies. Other regional leaders followed similar agendas, including Ecuador’s Correa and Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner, failing to deliver real change.

So why expect Humala to govern more like Chavez, combining participatory social democracy with business friendly policies. After July, Peruvians will know for sure what his call for “change” and “order” means as president, especially after he models himself after Lula, suggesting business as usual in office, not a radical shift left.

Representing the Gana Peru nationalist party, he appealed to the country’s poor, harmed by years of neoliberal harshness. In contrast, his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, openly endorsed free market privatizations, deregulation, and eliminating labor rights to attract foreign investment, much like her father in the 1990s.

So far, Peruvians believe Humala represents more populist interests than continuity. They may be very disappointed despite promises to increase taxes and royalties on mining companies to fund social programs, as well as stronger labor rights in a nation having few.

Reuters, in fact, said he’s made a concerted effort to “calm foreign investors,” saying he’ll honor the “independence of the central bank and the legal securiy of contracts signed with private enterprises.”

His Gana Peru Party, in fact, advocates joint state, domestic/foreign investment partnerships, Peruvians having majority control. As a result, he promised changes in Peru’s 1993 Constitution and reviews of previously negotiated trade agreements, whether or not, he’ll defy Western interests by softening agreed on provisions. In fact, he said:

“From the moment these were signed, they cannot be unilaterally questioned or revised, except when specific clauses allowed for in (them) or when flagrant illegality preceded (their) adoption.”

Political rhetoric aside, expect a Humala administration to continue most past policies poor Peruvians want changed. Not likely short of massive grassroots pressure forcing him. Even that won’t likely work given entrenched interests enforcing status quo harshness backed by Wall Street and Washington, the force targeting all leaders out of step with their agenda.

A Final Comment

A mid-day June 6 Reuters report headlined, “Left-winger Humala wins Peru election, markets plunge,” saying:

Humala’s vow to share Peru’s wealth with its poor sent “financial markets plummet(ing) on fears (he’ll) ruin the economy.”

Widening his slim lead, it’s expected to increase as poor rural returns come in, areas where he’s strongest. As a result, “Peru’s stock market sank about 11 percent, while the sol currency fell 1.5 percent,” prompting central bank efforts to curb it.

Addressing thousands of cheering supporters, Humala said he’ll “install a government of national unity,” adding that he wants “economic growth with social inclusion (to) build a more just Peru for everybody.”

Calming investors, Humala’s top economic advisor and possible new finance minister, Kurt Burneo, warned speculators betting against Peru would get burned, saying:

“Those speculating now are simply going to lose their money because everything is very solid,” suggesting little change from current policies.

In fact, Humala’s likely central bank head, Felix Jimenez, added:

“Our economic proposals are totally sensible: to maintain macroeconomic equilibrium, consolidate growth and create conditions for private domestic and foreign investment growth.”

If both men run Peru’s economy, expect today’s market plunge to be a buying opportunity for savvy investors seeing a chance for quick profits, not a red flag to shift funds elsewhere.

Senior Editor Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

BONUS FEATURE—An example of insidious coverage, this time by Reuters
We have bolded some of the tendentious words used throughout the text—besides the overall hostile tone of the article—to extinguish any possible sympathy the readers might harbor for Humala. We have also added some annotations in brackets [       ] as running commentary. The decoding was done by Patrice Greanville.—Eds

Analysis: Peru voters shying away from adventure

Thu, Dec 9 2010
By Terry Wade and Marco Aquino

Humala on the hustings.

LIMA (Reuters) – Peruvians will likely elect a centrist to the presidency in April rather than leftist ultranationalist Ollanta Humala as soaring economic growth turns more Latin American voters into political moderates. [<——”Moderates” we like]

In so doing, Peru would follow Brazil, Chile and Colombia, where voters this year picked presidents with long track records of being committed to orthodox policies that have lured billions of dollars in foreign investment. [<—Foreign investment always good, never mind the horrible income distribution that follows such economic expansions, or the rapacious policies implemented by the new players in cahoots with the complicit government.]

As the political climate in Peru changes, voters have been abandoning Humala, long seen as a radical, even as he tries reinventing himself as a more moderate leftist to survive. [<—Imagine the perfidy of this leftist bastard!]

The former army officer won 47 percent of the vote in the 2006 election, narrowly losing to President Alan Garcia, who cannot run for a second straight term. Humala’s popularity has plummeted since then, in some polls to single digits.

Four months before election day, Humala is languishing far behind three front-runners who favor free trade, foreign investment, low inflation and fiscal restraint. [<—The reporters clearly like these market friendly folks, especially as they promise “fiscal restraint”, code word for a Republican type administration.]

“Peruvians don’t want adventures, they don’t want to put the economic path at risk. There is no space for a candidate opposed to the current model,” said pollster Manuel Saavedra of survey firm CPI.  [<— Here Reuters uses the “obliging quote”, always easily found or procured in the precincts they comb for “a reaction comment”. The quotes sum up the main objection to the targeted victim, guaranteed to be venomous given the witnesses invariably well-off and conservative credentials. The anti-left lingo is by now well-established. It was extensively used in the ramping up to the toppling of President Allende, in neighbouring Chile, in 1973.]

Supporters of Keiko Fujimori display banner with Alberto Fujimori's image. The man was a thief and a fascist but neither fact deters Reuters from implicitly approving those who support him.

Leading the race are former Lima Mayor Luis Castaneda, former President Alejandro Toledo and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori. Each of them is at 20 percent or higher in polls.

“The person who appears to be moving farther behind the front-runners is Ollanta Humala,” said Fernando Tuesta, a political scientist at Lima’s Catholic University. [<—So much for mainstream political scientists’ predictive power.  Humala won.]

Humala has also lost ground in the country’s restive south, his traditional stronghold, where contrarian politicians have long drawn support.
Still, Erasto Almeida, a political analyst at the Eurasia Group, says it is too early to say Humala will lose in a country where the poverty rate is about 35 percent and many voters feel left behind by a booming economy forecast to grow nearly 9 percent this year. [<—A tidbit of truth, about the country’s poverty, quickly palliated by praise for the “booming economy” that apparently justifies everything.]

“The odds are 30 to 40 percent that Humala will make it to the second round, and though that is unlikely, depending on who he faces in the runoff, it could be a toss up,” he said.

If no candidate wins more than half of all votes on April 10, a runoff election will be held June 5.

TRYING TO BE LULA, SHUNNING CHAVEZ

Humala’s recent tactics to strike a moderate tone mirror what Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva did to win Brazil’s presidency in 2002 after losing three times as a strident leftist.  <—”Tactics” is a loaded word, especially when used in ref to leftists.  It suggests deviousness, among other things.]

In that race, Lula’s promises to keep orthodox economic policies in place were so persuasive that he got a crucial endorsement from Roberto Setubal, chief executive of Itau Unibanco, one of Brazil’s biggest banks.

Lula, whose center-left politics during eight years in office turned him into the most popular president in Brazilian history and a favorite of investors, will hand over power in January to his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff. [<Lula essentially betrayed the agenda he was elected on, becoming to no one’s surprise yet another social democrat.]

Though some Latin American countries may swing from center-left to center-right like in Chile’s January election of Sebastian Pinera, politicians are increasingly courting moderates [<—They mean extreme centrists, people reliably tied to the status quo benefitting the super rich.] in a region that suffered decades of military coups and leftist rebellions in the 20th century.

Last month, in a speech to business leaders, Humala made a point of criticizing his former guru, Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez, who leads a bloc of leftist leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

But Humala’s overtures to the business community have largely fallen on deaf ears.  [<—Oh, yeah. The business class is too smart to be fooled by this clown.]

He is widely distrusted by executives. To many, Humala’s plans to vigorously regulate strategic sectors like mining and energy sound similar to the interventionist policies of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez. [<—Here as almost everywhere the “journalists” betray their own biases, which clearly embrace a rigid worship of orthodox free-market economics. Words such as “regulation” are anathema to such guardians of economic purity.  Whether such abject acceptance of savage capitalist models for poor countries (which, incidentally, remain the subject of debate in the developed world, where mixed economies prevail) is due to scandalous economic illiteracy, the general brainwash –quite common among professional journalists—or plain careerism is hard to tell, probably a product of all of the above. In any case, bourgeois media rarely tolerate radical reportage for long, a rare occurrence anyhow given the extensive vetting would-be journalists go through prior to being admitted to this privileged order. ]

Despite promises that his government would not be radical, Humala’s rivals depict him as a boogeyman, playing on voters’ memories of years of instability caused by economic turmoil and a long civil war that officially ended only a decade ago.

Garcia, who became a fervent supporter of free markets after his first term in the 1980s was marred by hyperinflation, has said electing an “anti-system” candidate would be a mistake.

“If a candidate wins who wants to try to unravel everything we have done … then there would be immense chaos,” Garcia said this week in a veiled reference to Humala. [<—Second “obliging quote” to serve as closing warning to those who still retain some sympathy for Humala.]
(Reporting by Terry Wade; Editing by Eric Beech)