Surprise: Peru's García could lead anti-Chávez camp

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER

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Here's one of the biggest ironies of Latin America's current history: Alan García, the populist-leftist former Peruvian president who suspended his country's foreign debt payments and nationalized the banking industry in the mid-1980s, may become the leading regional critic of Venezuela's firebrand socialist, President Hugo Chávez.

If somebody had forecast this only a few months ago, it would have been seen by most political analysts as a joke.

Indeed, García, the leading candidate for Peru's June 4 runoff elections, is a persuasive speaker -- his critics call him a snake-oil salesman -- who has long been seen as the quintessential Latin American populist.

At the beginning of his 1985-90 term, he lashed out against the Peruvian oligarchy and the International Monetary Fund, gaining wild applause at home. But investors fled the country, the economy collapsed, inflation rose to 7,500 percent a year and unemployment soared. When García left office, he had a 5 percent approval rate, and had to flee the country amid a barrage of corruption charges.

When I interviewed García for an hour last week for a soon-to-be-televised interview, I could barely believe what I was hearing: García is not only trying to bring about a political resurrection as a moderate who cites Chile's pro-free market leftist government as one of his top role models, but is using his extraordinary oratory skills to lash out against what he calls the ''Chávez imperialism'' in Latin America.

Chávez has an ''obsessive'' compulsion for the limelight and a habit ''of meddling and imposing his outdated model on us, a model that is only supported by the amount of money he has,'' García told me. ``Without the millions of dollars in oil revenues that he has, I don't think he could talk the way he does.''

`DOMINO STRATEGY'

According to the Peruvian candidate, Chávez is using his oil revenues to carry out a geopolitical ''domino strategy'' in Latin America, aimed at encircling U.S.-backed Colombia with ``Chavista republics.''

Once Chávez realized that Bolivia has a near monopoly on natural-gas sales to Brazil, ''he promoted Bolivia's nationalization of the gas industry, to put Brazil, and by extension Argentina, against the ropes,'' García said, referring to Chávez-backed Bolivian President Evo Morales' May 1 nationalization of the gas industry.

''Now, the domino is headed toward Peru,'' García continued. ``If Peru falls under the influx of the Chavista republics, the next step will be Ecuador, which is economically weaker and thus more vulnerable. And, finally, Mr. Chávez will be able to isolate Colombia, which is the ultimate goal of this entire plan.''

CALCULATED MOVE

Granted, García's criticism of Chávez is probably a calculated move to win centrist and right-of-center votes in the June 4 election. And it was also partly motivated by the Venezuelan president's repeated public endorsements of García's rival in Peru's upcoming election, Ollanta Humala, a leftist-nationalist former lieutenant colonel who -- much like Chávez -- first gained national attention by heading a military rebellion and later ran for office.

And there are other reasons to wonder whether García's political resurrection as a moderate is sincere.

As recently as a March 27 speech, García said that his party, known by its acronym APRA, ``stands for anti-imperialism, stands for anti-colonialism, stands for the struggle against [free market] neo-liberalism. Therefore, we will try to change the economic model, to put it at the service of the majority of the people.''

Isn't that old-style, Chávez-like populism? I asked him. García answered with characteristic slickness, ``Not at all. I am anti-imperialist because I don't like the American presence in Iraq and because I don't like Chávez's presence with his oil and his money in Peru. That's being anti-imperialist.''

My conclusion: The bad news is that, as weird as it sounds, Peruvians decided in the April 9 election that García -- rather than other candidates with a less questionable past -- will be Humala's challenger in the runoff vote.

The good news is that, if García wins, he may lead a Latin American reaction against Chávez's ''imperialism.'' If there is one Latin American politician with the rhetorical skills to challenge Chávez's daily verbal salvos, it's Peru's García.