The BBC did a very interesting Newsnight last night (and will do so for the rest of the week) from Lima in Peru, looking at the Peruvian elections, (possibly trying to trump John Snow's Channel 4 News Series from Tehran) with a good interview with Ollanta Humala. A good blog on the elections seems to be Peru Election 2006, run out of the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Ollanta is smart, articulate, handsome, and has lot's of good catchphrases like 'the globalised versus the globaliser', and is generally peddling an anti-American line, though he is loathe to admit as much. The comparison with Chavez is made (he even tried his own coup before resorting to more conventional methods, as did Chavez), but Ollanta rejects the extremeties of Chavez. He is against, he says, being globalised by neo-liberal economic policies of the likes of America, and is for the redistribution of the country's admittedly vast natural resources.
On the same show, Greg Palast explores the implications of Venezuela becoming the largest source of oil in the world (alongside Canada) in a permanently high oil price landscape. The Canadians and the Venezuelans sound much more appealing than the Saudi's and the Iranians, dontcha think...what price a hispanic president of the US in the next twenty years?
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There's also a good article in the FT on Ollanta, here: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/07b567e8-c2ae-11da-ac03-0000779e2340.html
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