Candidates attack Humala after surge

While a leftist former army officer has grabbed a comfortable lead ahead of Sunday's presidential elections in Peru, his competitors have gone on the attack, questioning what his real intentions will be should he win the race.

Polls released over the weekend show that Ollanta Humala, 48, has surged past his two closest rivals - Keiko Fujimori and former President Alejandro Toledo - by as much as six to eight percentage points. A week ago the same surveys projected a close three-way race with no virtual winner to succeed President Alan García during a first round of voting.

In attempts to instill fear among voters, Humala's critics have linked the nationalist leader to Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez.

"I am proud to be the daughter of Alberto Fujimori and Susana Higuchi"

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former economy minister running on the liberal platform Alliance for a Great Change, said the day after his participation in the presidential debates that he was concerned to hear Humala say that "the media need better supervision, because those were the words Hugo Chávez used before he began shutting down media outlets in Venezuela."

During the debates on Sunday night, Humala declined to answer a battery of questions put to him by his opponents, including whether he had any role in planning a 2005 rebellion led by his brother Antauro and known as the Andahuaylazo, in which four police officers were killed. "Mr Humala, are you going to resolve social conflicts with the same criteria used in the Andahuaylazo?" asked Luis Castañeda, the conservative candidate for the Alliance for National Solidarity and former mayor of Lima.

In recent days, a video has surfaced on the internet of an interview Antauro gave in the midst of the rebellion in which he tells reporters he was awaiting orders from his brother.

Last week, Humala, who lost the 2006 election to García and has since then been less radical in his speeches, declined to comment "on speculation" about his ties to Chávez. "I only comment on facts," he said. During a visit to Uruguay, Chávez said that Humala's rightwing critics were out "to hurt him."

Fujimori, the 35-year-old daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori, was also put on the defensive during the debates. Toledo, 65, who is running on the Peru Possible alliance, told the daughter that when he assumed the presidency in 2001 "we received an economy that was in recession - that is what your daddy left us."

"I am Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Alberto Fujimori and Susana Higuchi. And I am very proud to say so," she said.

Toledo also used subtle references to attack his other opponents. He addressed both Kuczynski as "Mister Kuczynski" in English in reference to the recent barrage of questions as to why the Alliance for a Great Change candidate holds dual US-Peruvian national.