First it was Venezuela, then Bolivia, then Ecuador, then Nicaragua. Now it’s my native Peru. One by one, largely unremarked here, Latin America’s nations are turning to the authoritarian Left.
Ollanta Humala, who won yesterday’s presidential run-off, is typical of the breed of modern caudillo. A cashiered former army officer, he had concocted an angry and aggrieved programme which mingled ethnic nationalism, hostility to private enterprise, nostalgia for pre-Columbian times and anti-Chilean revanchism. His hero is Juan Velasco, the socialist general who seized power in a putsch in 1968, and promptly set about reducing Peru to a condition of penury from which it has only recently recovered. (One of my first memories is of the land invasions and mob violence of that baleful era.)
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