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Peru's Garcia takes presidency

Peruvian presidential candidate Alan Garcia greets supporters after the presidential elections in Lima, Peru, on Sunday. PHOTO: AP

It was a remarkable political comeback: Alan Garcia's presidential runoff victory over Ollanta Humala, a populist former army lieutenant colonel endorsed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

All the more so as Garcia's legacy is a 1985-1990 presidency that left Peru nearly bankrupt and battered by the devastating Shining Path insurgency.

Still, his victory on Sunday was hardly resounding.

Seething ethnic and class resentments continue to deeply divide this Andean nation, and Garcia himself acknowledged that one of his main challenges will be to rid the political class of the very corruption against which Humala so successfully railed.

"I want our party this time to demonstrate to the Peruvian people, who have called it to the highest responsibilities, that it will not convert the state into booty," Garcia told thousands of supporters on Sunday night in a stirring speech.

He was referring to the widespread corruption that marked his first government, when tens of thousands of party members landed state jobs.

"We must think this night of all of our past errors, about all of our defects and make an act of contrition," Garcia said atop a grandstand in front of the headquarters of his American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, Peru's oldest and most disciplined party.

Garcia's lead of 55.5 percent against 44.5 percent for Ollanta Humala with 77.3 percent of the vote counted was virtually insurmountable, said the head of the electoral agency, Magdalena Chu.

The victory margin was expected to narrow as results trickled in from more remote areas where Humala was strongest.

Statistical projections based on unofficial partial ballot counts by two respected polling companies and a citizen's watchdog group all gave Garcia more than 52 percent of the vote.

Garcia won majorities in the capital, Lima, where a third of Peru's 16 million voters live, and along the more developed northern coast.

But he lost badly in almost all of Peru's southern and central highland states and in the country's jungle interior -- populated by poor Quechua-speaking Indians and mixed-race mestizos, long neglected by the nation's political elite.

"The results highlight that Peru is a remarkably torn country, along social, ethnic and regional lines," said Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington.
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