Controversial candidate provokes protests in Lima

World Today

Peruvians are preparing to elect a new president. The front-running candidate is Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the jailed former president Alberto Fujimori who governed the country in the 1990s.

CCTV America’s Dan Collyns reports from Lima.

Tens of thousands of people have come from all over Peru to the center of the capital to march. The protest marks the day, 14 years ago, when former president Alberto Fujimori mounted a coup to dissolve congress and take extraordinary powers in the country. There is an event known here as the self-coup. It’s a day many Peruvians remember as being an attack on their democracy.

Today, Fujimori, now 77 years old, is in prison, sentenced to 25 years in 2009 for human rights crimes and corruption.

Today his daughter, Keiko, is the leading candidate in the elections this Sunday, but she’s clearly not popular with everybody and her opponents have come out in force on this historic date.

Critics and her opponents said the march is in remembrance of what happened in Peru during those turbulent years in the 1990s.