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With 96% of the ballots counted, Pedro Castillo (Peru Libre party), a well-known union leader from Cajamarca who for several years led teachers in their various demands for improved working conditions, is poised to become Peru's next president. He went from having 0.1% of the vote intention at the beginning of last year to taking first place in the second round, facing Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of dictator Alberto Fujimori, in her third attempt to win the presidency as the candidate of the Fuerza Popular party.

According to official data provided by ONPE, Castillo had 50.274% of the votes –8,560,232 votes– against 49.726% –8,467,081– of his opponent.

With a total of over 18 million votes cast, there were more than a million invalid votes and the difference between the candidates is narrow, especially considering that on Monday night there were still around 3,500 precincts left to count. 

Unequal campaign

The campaign was highly uneven. Fujimorism had approximately $23 million at its disposal, which it used to attack Castillo and his supporters with racism and classism, accusing them of being terrorists. In addition to money, it had the support of right-wing politicians, the state-run press, athletes, and various television and radio programs.

The Peruvian feminist and LGBTQ+ movements found themselves at a crossroads, as none of the candidates offered any progress on the agenda for women and LGBTQ+ people . During his campaign, Castillo, a Christian with a family-oriented discourse, had spoken negatively about the rights we demand, either not prioritizing them or simply ignoring them. Even his vice-presidential candidate, Dina Ercilia Boluarte Zegarra, was accused of transphobia following a complaint of mistreatment while working as an official at the National Registry of Identification and Civil Status. These issues were amplified for several days by the official press in an attempt to damage the candidate they did not favor.

Memory of Fujimorism

But we have long memories, and we remember everything Fujimorism did during its 30 years in power. In his first term, Alberto Fujimori dismissed a group of officials and diplomats, accusing them of being homosexual . He also launched a “family planning” campaign, later known as the forced sterilization scandal, in which hundreds of impoverished Andean women were surgically altered against their will to prevent them from having children.

With Fujimori imprisoned, his children took his place and, with their parliamentary blocs, prevented LGBTI people from having even a minimum of rights by opposing bills on civil unions, equal marriage, gender identity, hate crimes, and the gender approach in education, defaming, persecuting, and sanctioning officials of the Ministry of Education for including topics of Comprehensive Sexual Education.

Neither ally nor enemy

What swayed the feminist and LGBTQ+ movement to vote for Castillo is that, while not an ally, he is not an enemy of our demands, as Fujimorism has demonstrated for so long . Furthermore, he has forged alliances with progressive left-wing parties and politicians who do defend the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people. Additionally, Castillo does not have the criminal record of Keiko Fujimori, who was accused by the Peruvian Attorney General's Office of leading a criminal organization dedicated to money laundering, which illegally funneled funds into her political party to finance her electoral campaigns. She faces a 30-year prison sentence for this charge.

Furthermore, he put the Peruvian State in check for these five years by promoting vacancies, dismissals and censures of presidents and ministers, generating enormous political instability, even promoting a short coup that left two young people killed by the police in their eagerness to repress the protests.

In that sense, five years of struggle are foreseen for the LGBTI movement, which has already called for an in-person march this Saturday, June 26, under the slogan "Our Pride is not in quarantine" to begin demanding that the new president also respect and promote our rights.