Pedro Castillo, the rural teacher who destroyed the ambitions of Fujimori

Peru’s electoral authority has yet to confirm victory, but most observers and some regional left-wing leaders, including those from Argentina and Bolivia, have proclaimed Castillo the winner.

“Different presidents of the world salute the victory of Pedro Castillo, that is, he has solid international legitimacy,” the leader of the Peru Libre party, Vladimir Cerrón, wrote on Twitter.

Fujimori has yet to acknowledge defeat in the election, with fewer than 100,000 votes left to count, and his supporters have called protests as a result.

He has insisted on unsubstantiated fraud accusations, and his party members have said they will not concede victory to his rival until all votes and appeals are counted, which could still take days.

If the results are confirmed, this will be the third time that Fujimori, daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, loses in a second round of elections. In 2011, she lost to Ollanta Humala and in 2016, she was defeated by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. In both cases, he became the main voice of the opposition.

Mix of conservative morals and social demands

He was born in Puña, a town in the Chota district, in the northern Cajamarca region, where he has lived and worked as a teacher in a rural school for 24 years. His name began to sound in 2017, when he led a prolonged national strike by teachers.

He is married and has three children. His wife is evangelical, but he is Catholic. The mix of conservative morals and social demands for change has tuned in well in a country where religion is often an electoral factor.

He is used to citing biblical passages when he appeals to morality to justify his rejection of abortion, homosexual marriage and euthanasia.

Wearing a white high-top hat typical of Cajamarca, he patiently traveled the regions of Peru, even on horseback, to get votes.

“Castillo is a kind of Lula from the countryside, without the union skills of the former Brazilian president, but he proves to be a good communicator,” journalist and analyst Sonia Goldenberg told AFP.

“He is a much better candidate than Keiko Fujimori to convey emotions,” he adds.

He promises to create a million jobs in a year and denies that he intends to confiscate workers’ pension funds, as his critics claim.

“The people feel identified with a person who is born from the same town,” said the candidate when he went on horseback to vote in the first round in Tacabamba, Cajamarca, the traditional means of transport in that rural area.

Roots in the Peruvian countryside

Poor and illiterate, Ireño Castillo, a devout Christian who knows like the back of his hand the secrets of the Andean countryside, would never have believed anyone who had predicted that the third of his nine children would be on the verge of becoming president of Peru today .

Ireño, 81, and his wife Mavila Terrones, 75, also illiterate, were for years landless peasants on a farm in San Luis de Puña, a community in the Chotano district of Tacabamba, where their humble home of stone, adobe rests. and corrugated roof.

There, in the northern region of Cajamarca, the second poorest in Peru, the leftist candidate grew up with his eight siblings.

“I was a poor boy and I did not have enough money to pay the rent (of the land) and educate my children,” the candidate’s father, wearing a machete, sandals made with used tires and a traditional “chotano” straw hat with a large brim.

According to the old man’s account, his son’s education sought to bring Pedro closer to the values of the Catholic faith, the peasant patrols and the arduous work of agriculture: “He took him through various areas since he was a child and taught him to work,” he said. .

When he was 12 years old, father and son walked once a year for more than two days about 140 kilometers to an Amazon area to work for a month as day laborers in the coffee harvest.

“We would go with cold cuts and two or three days on the road, with a saddlebag on our shoulders and we would come and bring little money to buy their notebooks and their school uniform,” explained the father.

The candidate, the only one of all the brothers to go to university, made strenuous efforts to combine field work with studies.

“The day he didn’t have classes, (Pedro) worked all day on the farm, growing corn, potatoes and watching cattle,” the eldest of the Castillo brothers, José Mercedes, explained to the Spanish agency.

“We had food because we all worked since we were children as if we had been adults on the farm,” added the 55-year-old man, from the house he built with his own hands a few meters from his parents’ home, where he lives with his wife and five children.

Mercedes and Pedro completed the third grade of primary school in their community of San Luis de Puña. But later, the first one dropped out and the candidate continued at another school in the Anguía district, the third poorest in Peru.

There he met his wife, Lilia Paredes, also a rural teacher and with whom he has two children. Paredes’ little sister also lives next to them, who is the age of the couple’s youngest son and whom they have raised as just another daughter.

While finishing elementary school, every day, without exception, Pedro would undertake a two-hour journey on foot through the mud at five in the morning, laden with the cold cuts that his mother prepared for him and protected by the typical sheep’s wool poncho. and chotano hat.

“He never failed,” insisted the father.

Pedro’s kilometers, cold cuts and morning ritual remained almost intact even as a teacher, a vocation he exercised for more than a quarter of a century in three remote villages in the region, with poverty rates exceeding 60%.

Union work

Living in his own flesh the poorly paid effort of Peruvian rural school teachers, a position of enormous influence and social respect in the communities in which they work, led him to union work.

Castillo grew in this work until he ended in 2017 as the leader of a teachers’ strike, which placed him in the eye of the media hurricane.

The 2017 national strike lasted almost 80 days, demanding a salary increase and the elimination of a questioned teacher evaluation system.

The strike left 3.5 million students in public schools in the country without classes and cornered then-president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. He initially refused to dialogue with the strikers until he relented and accepted most of the demands, except to end the evaluation system.

In fact, at that time, he held friendly meetings with the leaders of Fujimori – today his great enemies – who supported his protest, because of their interest in weakening the Kuczynski government.

In an attempt to delegitimize the strike, the Minister of the Interior at the time, Carlos Basombrío, said that the teachers’ leaders were linked to Movadef, the political arm of the defeated Maoist guerrilla of the Shining Path, an illegal group considered “terrorist” in Peru. .

“I categorically reject the complaints,” replied Castillo, who had integrated in Cajamarca the armed “peasant patrols” that resisted the incursions of Sendero in the harsh days of the internal conflict (1980-2000).

Without having more political experience than that, on April 11 he was surprisingly the most voted candidate in the first round of the presidential elections.

“He has always had great ambitions, but we did not think that he would suddenly be in this situation. Now the hope of all the people is Pedro and I am proud to have such a brother,” said José Mercedes, who acknowledged that, everything , “seems to be a dream.”

A vote built in rural and mining Peru

While the vote in large Peruvian cities, such as Lima, favored Keiko Fujimori, the majority of voters in rural and mining areas of Peru favored Castillo. The union leader has pledged to dramatically increase taxes on companies in the sector in the world’s second largest copper producer.

The high support in the districts where the key mines are located underscores how tensions have flared after years of conflict between mining firms and local communities, who often demand higher benefits for resources.

In mining provinces like Cotabambas, Espinar and Chumbivilcas, more than nine out of 10 people voted for Castillo, electoral data show, propelling him to a narrow but sustained lead ahead of his rival, the right-wing Keiko Fujimori.

Those regions are home to huge mines such as Las Bambas copper mines, operated by China’s MMG, Glencore’s Antapaccay and Canada’s Constancia de Hudbay Minerals. In Chumbivilcas, Castillo obtained 96.5% of the votes.

“The people have awakened,” Castillo told supporters Thursday night. Previously, he had criticized mining companies for “looting” the country’s wealth and has said that taxes on mineral profits will have to be raised considerably to raise funds.

Overall, election data showed Castillo received more than 65% support in at least 10 provinces where key gold, copper, silver and zinc mines are located, giving him a strong mandate in those areas to push through reforms.

“Changes, not reforms”

Fujimori, a market-friendly candidate, had sought to attract support from mining regions by promising to deliver cash to the people living in those areas, with funds from the rent paid by this industry, but the offer appears to have not been enough for the voters.

Meanwhile, Castillo promised a much more widespread reform: withholding up to 70% of mining profits, to invest in health and education programs, especially in mineral-rich areas that have high poverty rates.

The candidate has announced that if he comes to power, the country will regain control of its energy and mineral wealth, such as gas, lithium and gold, now under the control of multinationals. However, it has not specified how it will do it.

“We plan changes, not patches or reforms like other leftist candidates,” Castillo said during the campaign.

The Peruvian left came to the elections divided with four candidates, among them Verónika Mendoza and the former Catholic priest Marco Arana, as well as Castillo.

Peru Libre’s electoral proposal was based on a triad: health, education and agriculture, the priority sectors to promote national development, according to Castillo.

It also plans to convene a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution in six months to replace the current one, which favors the free market economy.

The 1993 Constitution is a legacy of the right-wing populist government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), Keiko’s father. Castillo’s rival is opposed to changing the Magna Carta.

The candidate also promises to expel foreigners who commit crimes, in tacit allusion to the Venezuelan migrants who arrived since 2017 and who exceed one million.

“[We will give] a 72-hour period for illegal foreigners to leave the country, those who have come to commit crimes,” said Castillo, who in order to combat insecurity proposes that Peru withdraw from the Pact of San José to restore the penalty. death to criminals.

Peru Libre is one of the few left-wing Peruvian parties that defends the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

With information from AFP, EFE and Reuters