When I first saw the results of Sunday's Peruvian presidential elections, I was originally quite hopeful. After a decade of Alberto Fujimori's outrageously corrupt leadership, President-elect Alejandro Toledo's victory offered the prospect of an untainted democracy blossoming in Peru. Accordingly, I greeted Toledo's win over political rival Alan Garcia with much excitement.
Unlike Garcia, whose reign as Peru's president from 1985-1990 featured hyperinflation and corruption similar to that of Fujimori's, Toledo represented the possibility of a fresh, new form of leadership. Toledo came from a working-class background; he shined shoes as a youth. Through the help of two American Peace Corps volunteers who arrived in his village in 1964, Toledo managed to attend the University of San Francisco. He would go on to attend Stanford, earning a doctorate.
In electing Toledo, the Peruvian people would have a president they could identify with, one who looked as they did. With his working-class roots, Toledo could empathize with the impoverished destitute conditions. He would better understand what it was like to be poor, and armed with an excellent education, he would have solutions for Peru's economic problems.
Yet the more stories I read concerning Toledo's presidential victory, the more skeptical I became regarding Toledo's ability to revitalize Peru. Strangely, despite Garcia's track record of a corrupt and ineffective government, Toledo bested his opponent by only a few percentage points. Furthermore, the Peruvian public's reaction revealed a complete lack of enthusiasm.
The series of personal attacks that Toledo and Garcia levied on one another during the political race may have been the reason why. Unfortunately, Toledo is no golden boy. Rather, he is embroiled in controversy surrounding both his personal life and his incredibly image-conscious public presence, which appears to border on demagoguery.
Nearly every article I read concerning Toledo's recent victory and the conclusion of the lengthy campaign introduced a new scandal unbeknownst to me. Quite simply, one cannot fit all the suspicious rumors concerning Peru's president-elect into a single article.
Here a few of the highlights:
Several newspapers quoted Toledo as having said that his mother died during one of the most devastating earthquakes in Peruvian history, and on the very same day he received a degree in economics in 1970. This is not true. Toledo has since attempted to backtrack, saying his original phrase was misinterpreted. The Peruvian newspaper Liberacion challenged Toledo's comments, which it said were used to gain pre-election sympathy on Mother's Day.
A young woman adamantly insists that she is Toledo's daughter born out of wedlock. In recent months, many Peruvians called for Toledo to address the allegation by undergoing a DNA test. Toledo refused to do so.
During the election, Garcia accused Toledo of money laundering, cocaine use and rampant sexual affairs with prostitutes. Toledo refuted these denunciations in bizarre fashion, saying that any associations with cocaine or prostitution result from a 1998 kidnapping in which Peruvian intelligence agents sought to embarrass him.
Clearly, instead of bringing hope of new leadership to Peru's citizens, Toledo carries the egregious baggage of scandal into office, a sight with which all Peruvians are familiar. The more aware I became of Toledo's many scandals and their incredible extent, my optimism gradually gave way to disillusionment.
Yet my idealism has not vanished entirely. Toledo played an instrumental role in finally ousting Fujimori after years of corruption, and his campaign pledges new economic reforms capable of creating 2.5 million jobs. Toledo is also Peru's first freely elected president of native Andean descent, an accomplishment in and of itself.
Recent news stories concerning South American governments have seldom been positive. Whether concerning Columbia's ongoing war with the rebels, which resulted in 40,000 deaths in the past decade, or the release of CIA documents revealing the extent of former Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet's heinous human rights violations, press clippings rarely harbor good news.
One can only hope that Toledo's election will aid a fledgling democracy's economic recovery and not add further to a people's disillusionment.
Nick Christie, a Trinity junior, is a member of the sports staff of The Chronicle.
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