Polls suggest a tight race between Pedro Castillo, a far-left but socially conservative union leader and teacher, and Keiko Fujimori, the rightwing, neoliberal daughter of the jailed and disgraced former president.

It’s a choice between dying of hunger and dying of indignity.

Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran unsuccessfully against Alberto Fujimori in the 1990 elections – and who has spent the past 30 years attacking the dynasty’s toxic effect on Peruvian politics – recently called on people to back Keiko Fujimori, describing her as “the lesser of two evils”. The Nobel prize-winner said Castillo would undermine democracy, ruin Peru’s economy and leave the country “with all the characteristics of a communist society”.

Lol I wish Castillo was a communist, but the fact of the matter is that a socialist union leader is always going to be infinitely better than a reactionary who wants to continues her father's legacy of murdering and sterilizing Indigenous people. Hilarious how the communism no food argument is still being used unironically by Britain's "left wing" newspapers

  • inshallah2 [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Episode 137: Thought-Terminating Enemy Epithets (Part I) | by Citations Needed | Jun, 2021 | Medium

    Nima: Sometimes we'll hear, you know, a "firebrand strongman" or a "firebrand dictator" or a "firebrand president." This is, you know, similarly applied most often to right-wing leaders like Donald-Trump, but certainly in the process generates a false equivalency, as we've also seen with the use of strawman between left and right wing leaders that, you know, really, this has to do with again, charismatic leadership style, you're not going to see 'Tony Blair, the firebrand Prime Minister,' like it's not going to happen. So the term firebrand, often sometimes linked to another term like "combative" is very racialized and is meant to be.

    Adam: A Reuters article from February 2013, headlined, "Ecuador's Correa: from boyhood leader to firebrand president." Ecuador's, you know, Correa, he can be a little bit animated sometimes, but he mostly wears a suit and he talks in a very quiet tone. But he's Latin, you know. France 24, March 2013, something we've talked about a lot now, the headline reads, quote, "Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's firebrand president, dies at 58." From Vice magazine in August 2015, "Ever the Firebrand, Ahmadinejad Seems to Want to Mount a Comeback in Iran." And so "firebrand" is a way of sort of conveying that they're, it's sort of like another word we'll get into, "hard-liner," where it's like if you oppose the US in a kind of vaguely charismatic way you're therefore a "firebrand," but if you support the US in a vaguely charismatic way, that doesn't make you a firebrand. Firebrand is a very racialized term.