54  Race & Class 51(3)

define the battle for the presidency in Peru. Finally, in 2001, Alejandro Toledo won as Peru’s first indigenous president. Toledo’s economic plan differed little from Fujimori’s neoliberal model and his political and social appeal was largely the same. Toledo, who marketed himself as a cholo and referred to his campaign van, which blared Andean style folk music, as the cholomovil, danced and sang traditional Andean music at his campaign stops, added fried fish to hand-outs of rice and beans for the poor, and walked up and down the aisle of his campaign plane serving jelly doughnuts to journalists in an effort to cultivate a common man image. On the stump, Toledo customarily wore Indian garb and espoused a populist message that promised something for everyone.25

Invoking Messianic symbolism as the foundation of his political ideology, Toledo harnessed the image of the ancient Andean leader, Pachacutec – restorer of order – as a metaphor for his recovery plan for Peru. While his aides prodded crowds to chant ‘Pachacutec! Pachacutec!’, his wife Eliane Karp, a red-haired Belgian anthropologist who speaks Quechua, the Indian language, stood by his side, summoning the mountain spirits to ‘break the curse of 500 years of oppression and herald the inevitable coming of her husband’s cholo government’.26 In one particularly telling interview, Karp said: ‘The little white people of Miraflores want to stop Cholo Toledo from winning. My cholo has integrity and is sacred.’27 Toledo eventually toned down his racially charged rhetoric after his opponent Alan García suggested that he was practising the same brand of demagoguery that helped earn Fujimori the sobriquet Emperor. ‘There was no one more powerful than Pachacutec. Hopefully we won’t switch from a Japanese emperor to a Pachacutec type emperor.’28 But unlike his less savvy predecessor, Vargas Llosa, García seemed to understand that the presidential election was ultimately a game of ethnic and racial representation and an appeal to the masses. In comparison to the melancholic tone of the Andean pan pipes in Toledo’s music, García’s radio and TV ads featured him singing an upbeat Peruvian criollo vals, a coastal waltz with Afro-Peruvian rhythms and Latin harmonic touches against the backdrop of images of Indians working in the Andean countryside and fisherman trawling near the rugged Pacific coast. But in the end, Toledo’s Indian facial features resonated most with the indigenous majority and, upon his election, he joined Fujimori’s legacy of racial populism.

Indeed, the biographical details of Peru’s first indigenous president mirrored in many ways the life of the former Japanese Peruvian leader. Like his predecessor, Toledo cultivated the image of an underdog who overcame adversity by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. He emphasised elements of his humble background as a way of garnering votes from the lower classes. And, in turn, his supporters found hope in the belief that the Andean leader could identify with their experiences on society’s margins. As a child, Toledo – one of sixteen siblings in a family of indigenous campesinos of Quechua heritage – shined shoes to help his mother, a fishmonger, and his bricklayer father, with family expenses. At the age of 16, with the guidance of members of the Peace Corps, Toledo enrolled at the University of San Francisco on a one-year scholarship. He completed his