Peru: President at Last

After a year of military rule, Peru finally has constitutionally elected a President. He is Fernando Belaúnde Terry, 50, a onetime architect and aristocrat turned crowd-rousing politician. Of the three candidates, he was considered the least likely to succeed. Yet on election day, he won votes from the Christian Democrats on one hand, the far leftists on the other, and from Peruvians in the middle who regarded him as a sensible compromise between Haya de la Torre, a weary ex-revolutionary, and Manuel Odria, a tired ex-dictator. With the count nearly complete, Belaúnde got 693,000 votes, or 39% of the total, compared with 34% for Haya and 26% for Odria.

Escape to the Sea. Educated in France and the U.S. (University of Texas), Belaúnde was one of Lima’s most successful architects when he decided to enter politics in 1944, immediately won a seat in the federal assembly, and soon set his sights on the presidency. With fiery speeches and expansive promises, he came within 110,000 votes of beating Manuel Prado in 1956, and he has been campaigning ever since. In 1957, he fought a saber duel with a Congressman who called him a “demagogue and a conscious liar” (both men were slightly wounded). Two years later, he was imprisoned on an offshore island for defying a presidential ban on political rallies during a general strike, and staged an exciting prison break, attempting to swim to an escape boat. The break failed (he swam to the wrong boat), but Peruvians thrilled to the story. In last year’s abortive election, he lost by a bare 12,867 votes to Haya de la Torre, and then, crying fraud, attempted to lead his supporters in rebellion. At that point, the military stepped in to settle the issue.

To the East. In this year’s campaign, Belaúnde promised Peruvians land reform based on expropriation of the big estates, worker-controlled industrial cooperatives, housing, food, jobs, easy loans. He talked of opening up the lush jungles to the east beyond the Andes—and went there himself by canoe and muleback. He opposed U.S.-owned oil companies, but denied that he was anti-Yankee and called for more foreign investment. When Peru’s Communists offered their support, he said, “I am against international Communism.” Yet he did not reject their votes.

Though Belaúnde’s tactics won him more than the one-third plurality set by the Peruvian constitution as a minimum for the presidency, he faces a tough period of horse trading to form a workable majority in Congress. Together his defeated opponents control two-thirds of Congress, and unless they can be persuaded to join a coalition, Belaúnde, scheduled to take office July 28, may find it easier to become a President than to be one.