Keen on showing Carnoy his old stomping grounds high in the Peruvian department (state) of Ancash, Toledo invited his professor to the city of Huaraz and the azure blue lagoons of Llanganuco, nestled high among the snow-capped Andes at 13,000 feet above sea level. When public transportation to the lagoons proved to be unavailable on that Saturday, Toledo suggested they proceed on foot. The two men embarked on what turned out to be six-hour hike that ended at a remote forest ranger’s hut where they wound up spending the chilly night until daybreak.
The rest of the weekend outing went more or less as planned-save for a stomach ache the rather urbanized Toledo suffered (in Carnoy’s presence) when he began chewing coca leaves with the traditional serving of lime chalk favored by the local peasantry. But when the tourists returned to Huaraz on that Sunday for the flight back to Lima, they discovered their failure to reconfirm their plane reservations meant they would have to take their chances as stand-by passengers.
When a seat opened up on the plane, Toledo graciously deferred to his professor, who was scheduled to teach a course in the Peruvian capital the next day. But Toledo didn’t give up even then. He loitered on the tarmac in the seemingly vain hope that one more seat might suddenly become available minutes before takeoff. And when an elderly female passenger failed to produce the required documentation from a physician authorizing her to travel by air, Toledo was poised to take her place. “Even when the plane was on the runway, I’m looking through the window and Alex wasn’t leaving, he was going to get on that plane - and by God he was on it,” recalls Carnoy, now a tenured professor at Stanford, nearly three decades later. “I saw a determination I had never seen, and his life is a story of taking on huge challenges that were just out of sight for someone in his position.”
Without that trait, the son of Andean peasants and onetime shoeshine boy would never have dreamed of becoming president of Peru, let alone devoting nearly two years of non-stop campaigning to achieve that goal. But last night the 55-year-old Toledo once again demonstrated his ability to achieve his impossible dreams by convincingly defeated former President Alan Garcia in a second-round election runoff.
In the cleanest presidential vote the country has witnessed in 16 years, Toledo garnered nearly 53 per cent of the valid ballots cast and will become the country’s first freely-elected president of mainly Indian descent when he is sworn into office on July 28. “Tonight Peruvians celebrate the triumph of democracy, and I shall be president of all Peruvians,” a beaming Alejandro Toledo told tens of thousands of supporters gathered in a downtown Lima square Sunday night. “Tonight is the beginning of the future.”
That future is fraught with uncertainty, at least in the short term. Toledo will inherit a devastated economy that is lurching through its third consecutive year of recession, and in the initial six months of his five-year term he will come under intense pressure to carry out promises to create 2.5 million new jobs. Underpaid government workers will also hold the new president to his campaign pledge to raise salaries that were effectively frozen for several years under the country’s deposed former president, Alberto Fujimori.
On another front, the centrist technocrat will have to balance the interests of the country’s discredited armed forces against the demands of human rights activists for a thorough probe of abuses and atrocities allegedly committed by the military at the behest of Fujimori and his former spymaster, Vladimiro Montesinos.
Toledo will assume the reins of power with two distinct advantages over his main rival in yesterday’s voting: a relatively benign image on Wall Street and a first-rate economic policy team. Perhaps spooked by the prospect of renewed hyperinflation under a second Alan Garcia administration, investment bankers embraced Toledo early on and largely ignored lurid press accounts of wife-beating, cocaine usage and adultery that dogged the candidate on the hustings back home. Toledo’s economic advisers will probably be headed by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a 62-year-old graduate of Oxford and Princeton who headed international operations at First Boston Corp. for ten years before striking out on his own to form a Miami-based private equity fund.
But the best and the brightest that Peru can offer won’t be sufficient for the task of governance facing the president-elect. Whether he likes it or not, Toledo will have to forge a modus vivendi of sorts with a fragmented opposition that controls 75 of the 120 seats in the national congress. In the immediate afterglow of his triumph at the polls, however, Toledo wasn’t sending out any invitations to join his cabinet just yet.
While a vanquished Garcia went out of his way to express support for Toledo and the incoming government in his Sunday evening concession speech, the victor restricted his comments to a terse greeting aimed at the former Peruvian president that drew only jeers and catcalls from the assembled throng. That doesn’t bode well for Peru’s future in the judgment of some seasoned political analysts. “He must have good relations with the opposition, and that means the Aprista party [of Garcia],” argues Enrique Zileri, the editor-in-chief of Peru’s Caretas news magazine. “He’ll have to reach some kind of agreement with the opposition [because] Toledo’s party has only about one-third of the seats in congress. In that sense, there will have to be an element of co-government.” But Alejandro Toledo seems an unlikely bet to see matters in quite the same light after so many decades of striving to attain his own impossible dream.
