The Latin American Report # 720

Peru: The victory of weariness

Blank and null votes in Peru (3,142,121) exceed by 17% the total votes obtained by Keiko Fujimori—the eldest daughter of the late, former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori—who has already secured one of the two spots for the second round of elections to be held in June. In a country weighed down and sunk by corruption and the rise of (organized) crime, which since 2016 has seen eight presidents pass through the House of Pizarro—generally the nerve center of the entire cancer—, people increasingly trust less that democracy—as practiced there—holds the answers to the nation's great problems. It is symptomatic of the social anomie that, for the moment, the electorate has not seen a "better" option than Keiko, who, at the same time, was the only one who managed to obtain more valid votes than blank votes in total, while null votes exceeded the number obtained by 29 of the 35 presidential candidates. A left-leaning candidate and an ultra-conservative one are vying for the second spot in the second round.

The IMF returns to Caracas

With national sovereignty extraordinarily curtailed—to say the least—, the truth is that Venezuela has received two pieces of news this week that should—potentially —positively impact its chances of getting ahead economically. First, the Treasury Department removed the sanctions that since 2019 had weighed on the Central Bank of Venezuela and other critical entities of the oil-rich country's financial system, while the IMF announced that it would restart its relations with Caracas, something that had been under consideration since January following the violent extraction of then de facto president Nicolás Maduro. "We will act with great speed, because what we have observed is encouraging in two aspects," said the managing director of the global lender, Bulgarian Kristalina Georgieva, today. "Very likely, we will have to implement a financial support program for Venezuela, as long as we can agree on the way forward," she added.

You are not invited to the "party"

Meanwhile, displaced María Corina Machado speaks in Madrid: "If Delcy Rodríguez has begun to take actions that allow for some opening, it is because she has [US] pressure and force on top of her." That is true; the sad thing for her is that the United States does not seem very rushed or interested in her returning, let alone talking about elections.

Honduras

"I will not humiliate myself before murderers. All I have left is my life, and I place the lives of my children and my wife in the hands of God, the Libre (Free) Party, and the people," said the now former councilor to the National Electoral Council of Honduras, removed by Parliament, who left the country alleging political persecution after having denounced—in my opinion with great transparency—the electoral disaster of last year.