Peru's Fujimori leads protest to annul votes as Castillo nears win (updated)
12/06/2021 20:36
(Adds Fujimori quotes)
By Marcelo Rochabrun and Marco Aquino
LIMA, June 12 (Reuters) - Peruvian right-wing presidential
candidate Keiko Fujimori, who is likely to lose a runoff
election against a socialist rival, on Saturday led a protest in
Lima, calling again for the annulment of votes that did not
favor her.
"If the (electoral) jury analyzes this, the election will be
flipped, dear friends," Fujimori told thousands of supporters,
many waving Peru's red-and-white flag. "I'm the sort of person
who never gives up."
Front-runner Pedro Castillo, a member of the left-wing Free
Peru party, is close to being named the Andean country's next
president, despite Fujimori's claims, as the count from the
second round of voting earlier this month nears an end.
But Fujimori this week has increasingly doubled down on
unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, saying supporters of
Castillo stole votes in rural areas where she got no votes.
International observers have said there is no evidence of fraud
and that the election was clean.
Castillo, an elementary school teacher who was raised in an
impoverished village, was leading the count by 50,000 votes on
Saturday evening, with only around 16,000 votes remaining to be
counted.
Fujimori says she has sought the annulment of 200,000
already-counted ballots, although the majority of those requests
were submitted after a critical deadline, meaning they are
unlikely to be considered.
"We won, teacher Pedro Castillo (is) President," his party
wrote on Twitter late on Friday.
Fujimori has also blamed the "international left" for
pushing for a Castillo victory, citing how Argentina and
Bolivia, countries led by left-wing leaders, have been quick to
recognize the socialist candidate as Peru's president-elect.
"Peru is a country that is strategically, geopolitically
speaking, crucial in Latin America, and that is why the
international left is trying this," Fujimori said in a news
conference with foreign media on Saturday morning.
Fujimori, the daughter of jailed ex-President Alberto
Fujimori, is facing legal woes of her own.
Prosecutors this week sought to jail her again on
allegations of money laundering, for which they are asking for
30 years in prison. Winning the election would halt the criminal
process against Fujimori until the end of her administration.
Even if Fujimori were to succeed in annulling some votes,
the number of votes still in play make it unlikely she would
flip the result.
The tense vote count is the culmination of a bitterly
divisive election in Peru, where low-income citizens supported
Castillo while wealthier ones voted for Fujimori.
On Friday, Peru's electoral jury, which oversees elections
in the country, tried to push back a deadline to allow Fujimori
to submit requests to disqualify up to 200,000 votes cast in
Peru's poorest regions, but said in the afternoon that it had
backtracked on that plan, paving the way for a Castillo victory.
On Saturday, Fujimori led a protest calling for the
challenges to those 200,000 votes to be heard, an effort that
Castillo has questioned.
"We call for the (electoral jury) to guarantee and support a
clean and just electoral process," Castillo tweeted on Friday
night. "The Peruvian people deserve it."
Fujimori first brought allegations of fraud on Monday, when
initial counts from Sunday's runoff vote showed she was likely
to lose by a slim margin.
A potential Castillo administration has spooked markets,
largely because his party describes itself as Marxist-Leninist.
He has recently sought to appease markets with a
moderate-left platform, but it remains unclear if his
administration will ultimately keep that tone or revert to the
party's roots as a far-left organization.
(Reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun and Marco Aquino; Additional
reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher
Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Paul Simao)
((marcelo.rochabrun@thomsonreuters.com; +55 11 5644 7768;))