The three-time presidential candidate has already spent more than a year in pre-trial detention, accused of receiving more than $17m in illegal campaign funds and heading a criminal organisation, and could face a 30-year jail term if convicted. “I repudiate hate speech and discrimination in all its forms, as it is unacceptable in any democratic society,” she said in a statement last week, as she called on Peruvians to accept the election result.Īs officials at Peru’s electoral board work overtime to reinspect the disputed ballots, social media and partisan news broadcasters have helped spread fake news stirring up the spectre of totalitarian rule, violence and even mass expropriations if Castillo is declared the winner amid rumblings of coup plots among the far-right.Īpparently inspired by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat at the US elections, Fujimori has led a string of marches against “fraud” telling supporters at one rally: “The election will be flipped, dear friends.” Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, slammed such expressions of racial hatred. But social media has given such comments a much bigger audience, he said.
They echo old “racist and classist attitudes ingrained in the national and social debate,” said Ragas. Other social media memes characterised Castillo as a donkey or said Andeans were too ignorant to be allowed to vote. In one ugly but not unusual case, the online news site Sudaca published a private text messages between middle-class white men in Lima who discussed how people from the highlands should “die of hunger” and called for the return of Alberto Fujimori’s alleged forced sterilisations which mostly targeted indigenous women. The election has unleashed expressions of racism that go beyond the discrimination against Japanese-descended Alberto Fujimori who took office in 1990 and Alejandro Toledo, a US-educated Andean, who governed Peru from 2001 to 2006. “The Lima elite is not just trying to keep power – it’s not just that they don’t want to recognise the victory of Pedro Castillo – but they are trying to cancel the rural vote.”
“The tension has reached a breaking point,” said José Ragas, a Peruvian historian at Chile’s Catholic University. In a move which illustrates the skewed playing field, Fujimori has recruited Lima’s most expensive law firms to quash 200,000 votes, almost all from poor Andean regions which voted overwhelmingly for Castillo.