President Garcia Confronts A Polarized Society

For many in Washington, the temptation to portray Peru’s recent presidential election as less a victory for Alan Garcia and more a defeat for Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez will persist. The prospect of another domino falling into the Venezuela-Cuba-Bolivia league had kept the Bush administration on its toes.
By returning to power after a gap of 16 years in a second round run-off against Ollanta Humala, a former army officer, the 57-year-old Garcia evidently feels vindicated. His first term in office, between 1985 and 1990 was a fiasco.
With corruption charges persistently hovering over him, Garcia’s rule saw Peru going bankrupt. Inflation skyrocketed as the currency nosedived exacerbating the economic pain of large segments of the population. This helped the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas to expand its influence across the country.
If Peruvians have given the social democratic leader another chance, they have done so with the primary intention of denying Humala power.
During the campaign, Garcia tried hard to show Peruvians that he had matured in the intervening years. Surely, he will be careful not to repeat the mistakes of his first term.
But his task is compounded by the fact that he has to govern a splintered society.
Garcia has acknowledged this reality by promising a broad government staffed by officials drawn from a wide spectrum of parties and political tendencies. There is a flip side to a unity government: the polarization of Peruvian society will have moved into his administration to paralyze decision making.
Although he lost, Humala carried 14 of Peru's 24 administrative regions and swept his stronghold in the southern highlands, where the country's poor and indigenous population is concentrated, receiving 80 percent of the votes. Simply put, he retains the ability to politicize Peru's disadvantaged and mobilize them into a cohesive group.
One thing going for Garcia is his pro-US policies and good neighborly attitude. Befriending Washington as well as moderate leftwing governments in Chile and Brazil would remain the principal tenet of his foreign policy.
For most Peruvians, Garcia will have to produce results closer to home. The new president needs massive investment, particularly from the United States, to harness his country’s vast natural resources and to ensure a profitable market for exports.
Garcia’s victory saved the recently negotiated Peru-US trade accord. How far Washington chooses to go toward rewarding that achievement would determine the momentum the second Garcia administration ends up acquiring in the weeks and months ahead.