In an election judged free and fair (even by the US State Department), the 51-year-old Pedro Castillo emerged as the unlikely winner of Peru’s presidential race on 6 June. The former elementary school teacher from a small village in the northern region of Cajamarca narrowly edged out Keiko Fujimori in a runoff second ballot. Fujimori is the daughter of the notorious and corrupt former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, who is currently in prison for embezzlement. Keiko, with a much higher national profile than Castillo, is a perpetual candidate of the Right, which consistently claims electoral fraud (with little or no evidence) when she fails to gain the presidency. This was her third kick at the can.
Pedro Castillo’s roots are decidedly modest. For 24 years he taught at, and then became principal of, the village elementary school that he attended as a child, taking on a range of tasks including cleaning and cooking. Disheartened by the neglect of rural communities like his native Puna, particularly when it came to education, Castillo became a union activist and helped lead a national teachers’ strike in 2017.
