The elections in Peru this past April showed a surprising, if modest, resurgence of the radical Left. The poll was supposed to be about either propelling into power Keiko Fujimori – the daughter of a disgraced former president with authoritarian leanings – or keeping her out at all costs. As it turned out, Fujimori went down in flames and another conservative candidate scraped in a coalition of Left forces led by Veronika Mendoza. Meanwhile, Marco Arana came out of nowhere to finish a close third in the first presidential round, and his party Frente Amplio ended up with 20 seats in the Peruvian Congress.
Arana, a 52-year-old former priest, hails from Peru’s environmental and anti-mining movements, where he has often been a target for big extractive companies and their political acolytes. He has won awards for his environmental activism (including the Aachen Peace Prize in 2010) and founded organizations such as Ecovida and Tierra Y Libertad that focus on both ecological and social justice. Unlike some others among the Latin American Left, Arana and his compatriots have made environmental protection a centrepiece of their politics, with calls for ‘a market based on an economics that serves people and is in harmony with ecology. Not a system of exploitation.’
