Peru vote: Fujimori daughter or leftist ex-soldier (AP)

LIMA, Peru – Peruvians are choosing in a presidential runoff Sunday between a leftist military man who promises to more equally distribute this Andean nation's mining wealth and the daughter of imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori.

Keiko Fujimori appeals largely to the pro-business status quo and to those who consider her father a hero for vanquishing hyperinflation and fanatical Shining Path rebels during his 1990-2000 rule. She would be Peru's first female leader.

Her rival, cashiered army Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, is championed mainly by the one in three Peruvians who live in poverty, without running water, having benefited little from a mining boom that fueled economic growth averaging 7 percent annually since 2001.

Humala held a slim edge in two opinion polls released Saturday. One, by the Ipsos-Apoyo firm, gave him 52 percent to 48 percent for Keiko Fujimori. Its error margin was 1 1/2 percentage points.

Humala narrowly lost the 2006 presidential election to Alan Garcia, and got nearly a third of the vote in this election's April 10 first round. Fujimori came in second as three candidates split the centrist vote, combining for 45 percent.

Humala has the endorsement of former President Alejandro Toledo, who finished fourth. Fujimori is backed by third-place finisher Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former prime minister and investment banker.

Both Humala and Keiko Fujimori, a congresswoman, are populists who promise a raft of giveaways for the poor, including free meals for schoolchildren and free preschool care.

But Humala, unlike his opponent, also insists on taxing windfall mining profits and exporting less natural gas so it is cheaper for Peruvians.

Humala has softened his rhetoric to make it less offensive to investors, and has backed down from early calls for renegotiating free trade agreements and rewriting the constitution.

He now disavows Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who openly backed him in 2006, and swears he's a democrat. The business community is spooked, though. It fears he would follow Chavez's playbook of seeking to cling to power while nationalizing industries and expropriating land.

Such things happened in 1968-75 in Peru under the leftist military dictatorship of Gen. Juan Velasco, a Chavez hero. At stake now, for starters, are the potential for losing more than $40 billion in investment pledged over the next decade for Peru's thriving mining sector.

Opposed to Keiko Fujimori are Peruvians who fear a return of the autocratic, kleptocratic regime over which her father presided. He is serving a 25-year sentence for authorizing death squads and kidnappings as well as corruption, and his daughter shares many of his former close advisers.

"She is a 36-year-old relatively unknown woman and the main draw is dad," said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist in Peru for the election.

Human rights issues also dog Humala. He was accused but never tried for rights abuses as a counterinsurgency commander in the 1990s. And he encouraged, in a radio address from abroad, a 2005 revolt against Toledo by his now-imprisoned brother, Antauro, that claimed the lives of four policemen.

The campaign's last few weeks were marked by virulent mudslinging, insults and dirty tricks.

Humala accused Garcia of directly backing his opponent, letting her father run her campaign from his spacious detention quarters and suggesting state intelligence agents were eavesdropping on him.

Peru's largely business-friendly news media, meanwhile, made no attempt to mask its anti-Humala bias.

The Nobel-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was so angry about it that he pulled his commentary column from El Comercio, calling Peru's dominant newspaper a "propaganda machine" for Keiko Fujimori. He lost the 1990 election to her father.

While the Humala camp has indicated it could summon supporters into the streets if there were fraud, international vote monitors said Saturday they saw little possibility of serious fraud.

"The only possibilities of fraud come from what are called the voting tables, small type of fraud, but I think the institutions are in good shape here," said former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, an Organization of American States observer.

Keiko Fujimori was Peru's first lady from 1994, when her parents' marriage ended nastily, until her father resigned in disgrace six years later in a corruption scandal. She has expressed regret for abuses during her 72-year-old father's rule but still calls him Peru's best president.

She said when he was convicted in 2009 that she'd become president so she could pardon him, but has since reversed herself.

Ironically, Humala has said he would consider pardoning Alberto Fujimori, who had pre-cancerous growths removed from his tongue, if he were seriously ill.

Peru has one of Latin America's widest gulfs between rich and poor. Its mining bonanza is credited with expanding the economy 8.7 percent last year. But the wealth hardly reaches the rural highlands where most mines are, and where two in three live in poverty.

"The prosperity is fundamentally confined to the coast," said Cesar Hildebrandt, an outspoken veteran Peruvian journalist.

"Everything along the (Pacific) ocean has gotten better. Everything in the Andean part is the same or worse."

Strike leaders decided to put on hold for Sunday's election a nearly month-long road blockade in the southern highlands state of Puno by Aymara Indians demanding the cancellation of a Canadian-owned silver mine they believe will poison their water.

Their reasoning: Opinion polls give Humala better than 65 percent support in Puno. Protest leader Walter Aduviri told The Associated Press by telephone that he believed Humala would negotiate in good faith and Keiko Fujimori would exhibit the indifference his people have come to expect from faroff Lima.

"There has never been dialogue with us," Aduviri said. "They call us radicals but we're so forgotten that they only notice us when there are protests."

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Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno contributed to this report.

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Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak.

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In Peru, the Daughter Who Would Be President Too (Time.com)

Keiko Fujimori is running for President of Peru under a shadow that will never dissipate: her father. He is at once an important reason for the viability of her candidacy as well as a cautionary tale, the lessons of which she must insist she has learned.

Alberto Fujimori was President of Peru from 1990 to 2000 and was credited with, among other things, the revival of the economy and the brutal suppression of the leftist uprising that made the country a byword for terror in Latin America. As a result, the elder Fujimori is now sitting in prison, a cozy one by most standards, indeed built specifically for him, but a penitentiary nevertheless. While his case is still under appeal, he could be in jail for a quarter century. (Read "Peru Runoff: Coup Leader vs. Convict's Daughter.")

Keiko Fujimori has spent the last couple of months trying to dispel the impression that she is merely a stand-in for her father. "They are trying to say that my father is influencing the campaign, but it's not true," she says. "He is in prison. I make the decisions, I picked the campaign team and wrote the government plan, I am here talking to Peruvians, not my father." She is adamant. "If my opponents want to think otherwise, they have underestimated me. Let them continue thinking that way."

If she does win the June 5 run-off against her left-wing opponent Ollanta Humala, she will become the country's first female president, Peru's youngest head of state, if only by just two days (she turns 36 on Wednesday), and the first child of a president to be elected to the same office. She will also be the first woman of Asian descent to rule a nation in the Americas, as well as the first person with an MBA to govern Peru, having graduated from Columbia University in 2006. And while the past two presidents have also had foreign-born spouses, she will be the first with a US-born First Gentleman, Mark Villanella, a Jersey boy.

So far, she can claim virtually dramatic turnaround in her campaign. Going into the first round of voting in April, her support fluctuated around 20%, which most opponents and pundits attributed to the core support for her father. Part of that support was due to an original pledge to free her father. She has since stepped back from that, though partisans are still believe she may alleviate his imprisonment if elected. (See Fujimori's conviction for human rights abuses.)

However, the other 76% of voters in the first round, which included 11 candidates, remember the long list of crimes from her father's government. He fled Peru for Japan in November 2000, as a corruption scandal tore apart his administration. The Germany-based anti-corruption organization, Transparency International, calls his regime a "kleptocracy" and lists him among the top 10 most corrupt leaders in modern times. Some estimates put the amount of money allegedly stolen by the regime at more than $1.5 billion.

Keiko Fujimori has managed to rebrand herself partly because of a savvy campaign that focuses simply on her first name - the symbol of her Fuerza 2011 party is a "K" for Keiko, putting distance between herself and her father. She has also benefited from Humala's negative ratings, which are on a par with her own. A former Army officer, he has been plagued by memories of his failed 2006 presidential bid, when he was linked to Venezuela's Hugo ChAvez. Fear of this leftist bond lingers, even though he denies it exists. Most of Peru's media is unabashedly opposed to Humala.

Nevertheless, the first round of voting gave Humala 32% of the vote to Fujimori's 24%. She now has 43% to his 39%, according to the most respected polling firm, Ipsos Apoyo. The difference is still within the margin of error and the polls do not include many rural areas where Humala is strongest. A defining moment could be the presidential debate scheduled for May 29. (See why the issue of same-sex marriages roiled the presidential race.)

Fujimori insists she is naturally shy. But there has been no evidence of that inclination through her campaign. It was not present on May 22, as she attended meetings in jungles towns along a stretch of highway from Tarapoto to Yurimaguas, in the northern jungle. She graciously accepted flowers offered by supporters, took hats from women in the crowd - women account for the bulk of townsfolk who braved the midday jungle sun to hear her - and easily launched into a spiel tailor-made for each audience.

As she campaigns, she offers to put in running water in towns where there is none, provide school breakfast and lunch programs, free uniforms and shoes for grade-schoolers and a much more active state. Tossed into the mix are airports, hospitals, universities and a string of other major infrastructure undertakings. The promises, which sound extremely ambitious for a five-year presidential term, and her folksy style have helped erase the six-point advantage enjoyed by Humala, with just two weeks to go before the election.

Fujimori says the tide has turned. "There are huge crowds wherever we go. You get a feeling that people know that we are the winning option," she says as she tosses t-shirts from the window of her car to supporters lining the street.

Jair Rodriguez, 20, a college student who was on hand to greet Fujimori when she landed at the airport in Tarapoto, says he is voting for her because of her ideas, but also because of her father. "The president [Alberto Fujimori] saved our country from terrorism and created the foundation for today's growth. We shouldn't forget the past," he says. If she does win, she owes part of the victory to her imprisoned dad.

See people protesting Fujimori's re-election campaign in 2000.

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