In accordance with AtomicFlea's LawFollow

Leftist candidate Ollanta Humala, who was taunted by residents of his district when he voted Sunday, was barely ahead in Peru's presidential election, and a runoff election became inevitable when none of the top candidates received a majority of the vote.

A candidate needed at least 50 percent to claim victory. The runoff election is to be held within a month after final results are tallied.

With 67.3 percent of the ballots counted, Humala, a 43-year-old former army officer, had 28.7 percent of the vote in a field of 20 candidates Monday, according to the national elections office.

Conservative Lourdes Flores, 46, had 25.8 percent of the vote, and Alan Garcia, 55, a socialist who led Peru from 1985 to 1990, had 25.1 percent.
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Like Chavez, Humala is a former army colonel who led a failed military coup in 2000. The candidate has said he would forge closer ties with Venezuela, if elected.
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Humala is the latest in a line of self-styled champions of the poor who have come to power recently in South America. He opposes trade globalization and has called for a review of Peru's contracts with overseas companies, particularly the multinational mining companies digging for Peru's natural resources.

He has campaigned on promises to legalize coca leaves, the raw material used to make cocaine, and to forge close ties with Chavez.

And like President Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia, Humala says he would put the interests of Peru's mostly poor Andean indians first.

Flores is a commercial attorney and former congresswoman vying to become the first woman president in the nation's history. In a recent interview with CNN, she said Humala's message is dangerous.

"Peru can't go down into the abyss with Humala," said Flores, who favors close ties with the United States.

Under current President Alejandro Toledo, another leftist, Peru's economy showed healthy growth and exports boomed. But the benefits never trickled down to the poor: Government statistics show that about two-thirds of the 28 million Peruvians still live in poverty.

There were 16.5 million Peruvians eligible to vote. Another 400,000 Peruvians voted from outside the country. Votes cast in some remote areas of the country where there have been mudslides could take longer to collect, officials said.

Humala says he would put the interests of Peru's mostly poor Andean indians first.

I won't pretend to know enough about South America to form an opinion

Then again, the Marion Barry thing was also a shock.

t is not every day that South American politics penetrates the Chicago City Council chambers. Aldermen, like most people in the United States, barely know what is down there, let alone who is in charge.

The other day Ald. Edward Burke (14th) raised the possibility that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez might be planning to influence U.S. elections through a company that makes voting machines. Burke had a point about Chavez wanting to swing elections; he simply had the wrong geography.

The sneeringly anti-American Venezuelan president, who is squeezing the opposition and the news media at home, is also relentlessly extending his reach in countries of the northern Andes. And the United States, despite its concern about him, is helping.

In Peru, Chavez backed presidential candidate Ollanta Humala (like himself a leader of a failed military coup and a strident populist). Humala leads the returns from Sunday's election and will be the front-runner in a runoff.

In Bolivia, Chavez's tool is President Evo Morales. Like Humala, Morales gained his political edge by appealing to the pride and resentment of the indigenous people, descendents of the Incas, who for so long have been treated not much more generously by the leaders of the country than their ancestors were by the Spanish conquistadors.

A movement of indigenous people in Ecuador has been disrupting transportation by blocking roads (a technique used by Morales in the run-up to his election) in an effort to keep the country's lame-duck president from signing a free-trade agreement with the U.S. It will be a miracle if someone like Morales and Humala, backed by Chavez, does not come to the fore in the next Ecuadorian election.
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Meanwhile, as in Cuba, the U.S. has made it easier for the very forces it most resists. The invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein touches painful chords of memory in Latin America, with its long history of U.S. intervention. Chavez has played these like a virtuoso, warning that the U.S. government is out to overthrow or assassinate him, that his opposition consists of clandestine U.S. agents, and so forth. Idiocy like evangelist and Republican activist Pat Robertson's call for Chavez's violent removal is a lovely gift to the Venezuelan.

The single-minded U.S. drive to eradicate coca production (the plant from which cocaine is extracted) also helps Chavez in his drive to realize his dream of consolidating power among his neighbors. This most clearly showed itself in Bolivia, where Morales, a former coca grower himself, attacked United States anti-coca policy (a position from which he has more recently been leaning away).
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Eradication has been a costly failure. It has not and cannot cure addiction. It makes the illegal trade more lucrative and corrupting. And it infuriates many people, who feel the United States is dealing with its own inability to control its people's habit by intervening in their countries. This resentment connects again with the intervention in Iraq, the United States' history in Latin America, and Chavez's sinister suggestions of U.S. plots.
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I hope they are wrong about the consequences. But I am sure that until political, economic and cultural leaders in South America begin to rectify the virulent racism and the enormous disparities of power and well-being within their own borders, the Chavezes, the Moraleses and the Humalas will always be there, just waiting for their moment.