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Judi Lynn

(160,211 posts)
Fri Jun 18, 2021, 01:30 AM Jun 2021

Peru ending second week since presidential election with no declared winner


Bill Van Auken
an hour ago

Peru is gripped by sharp political tensions, as the country is set to complete a second week since the June 6 presidential election without a winner being officially declared.

With 100 percent of the ballots counted, Pedro Castillo, the former teachers’ strike leader and candidate of the Peru Libre party, leads the right-wing Fuerza Popular candidate Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, who is imprisoned for 25 years for crimes against humanity, by a margin of 50.12 percent to 49.87. Just 43,000 votes out of the more than seventeen and a half million cast separate the two candidates, but it is clear that Castillo has won.

A declaration that Castillo has won, however, has been blocked by the Fujimori camp, which has mounted a legal offensive based on spurious claims of election fraud, seeking to overturn the results from hundreds of polling stations in the Andean highlands and Amazonian regions where Castillo won by overwhelming margins.

As of Wednesday, the National Election Board (JNE) announced that of the 942 challenges brought by the Fujimori camp, 792 have been resolved, without one of them establishing electoral fraud of any kind. Most of the claims had been brought after a June 9 cutoff for making such challenges.

While the challenges have no basis in either fact or law, they have been brought by an army of high-powered lawyers drawn from Lima’s top law firm, with the aim of delaying confirmation of the election results as long as possible. The Fujimori camp is playing for time, with the intention that its challenges and ceaseless claims of fraud will create the conditions for overturning the election by extra-constitutional means, up to and including a military coup.

More:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/18/peru-j18.html
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