PERU: Old Pro’s Comeback

Manuel Prado, the scholarly, conservative patriarch of a wealthy and powerful family, last week won the presidency of Peru with the help of the country’s big, left-wing APRA party. In a five-day unofficial vote count, former President (1939-45) Prado inched steadily ahead of Architect Fernando Belaunde Terry, a young amateur politician whose campaign had suddenly caught fire two weeks before election day; both of them left the government’s official candidate, Hernando de Lavalle, far behind. Totals at week’s end:* Prado 445,000, Belaunde 404,000, Lavalle 128,000.

Winner Prado, 67, a spirited bantam of a man who skillfully combines a patrician manner with the common touch, doubtless got some support from voters nostalgic for his prosperous earlier regime. But the winning edge almost certainly came from a courageous promise that was a political master stroke as well. Two days before the election, Prado announced that “one of the first acts of my government will be to declare a general political amnesty and put an end to the proscription of political parties.” In Peru the only significant proscribed party is APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), which was thrown out of power and outlawed in 1948 by the present President, Military Strongman Manuel Odría.

Fast Switch. Surviving underground, APRA still controlled at least one-third of the vote. Party Chief Ramiro Prialé two months ago tried to persuade the government to restore APRA’s legal status in exchange for a pledge to support the government candidate. Odría liked the idea, but his military Cabinet refused to go along with the deal. For his part, Candidate Belaunde angered Prialé by appealing for the votes of rank-and-file Apristas over Prialé’s head. When he heard Prado’s timely promise of amnesty, Prialé sent out the order to back Prado.

Outlawed APRA could not run its own men for Congress, but pro-APRA candidates under the labels of lesser parties apparently won a majority of seats. As he claimed victory, Prado announced that he would submit to this Congress a bill to legalize APRA. Once the bill passes, he told interviewers, he supposed the APRA’s famed founder, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, could return from foreign exile.

With the West. For General Odría, the defeat of his hand-picked candidate came in a painful week. Two days before the election, he slipped on a slickly waxed floor in his seaside house and cracked a thighbone. Protesting that “these confounded elections are being held,” he resisted treatment for a day, finally let surgeons operate and peg the break with a metal pin. But in spite of his troubles, Odría came out of the election fairly well.

Already credited with a successful administration based on encouragement of local and foreign private enterprise, free currency exchange and a big public-works program, he could now take full pride in having brought off a fair and free election. President-elect Prado, as a conservative banker and industrialist, promptly announced that he would carry on Odría’s economic policies. In foreign policy, Prado—whose greatest pride is that as President in 1942 he made Peru the first of the South American nations to declare war on the Axis—can be expected to side firmly with the U.S.

*By the count of the respected newspaper La Prensa. Certifying the official count will take two more weeks.