Peru Election: Keiko Fujimori lives down her (in)famous name

Fujimori's family name is both her strength and weakness. Analysts say her presidential hopes rest mainly on support from the working class, who will remember her father as the man who curbed hyperinflation, successfully fought the Shining Path and made Peru prosperous. While she's made some mistakes in the past, observers say she will have learned the lessons of her last presidential campaign, which she narrowly lost in the second round to now outgoing President Ollanta Humala. She suggested then that she might pardon her father, which mobilized those opposed to the jailed former president to support Humala.

The U.S.-educated Fujimori, now 40, became Peru's effective First Lady at age 19 after her parents divorced, the youngest in the history of Latin America. All she says now about that period was that the April 10 results showed "clearly that Peru wants reconciliation, not fights."

She insists this time that she will not pardon her father, will maintain the current government's economic model and fight crime. We should also bear in mind that Fujimori partly owes her top position to the fact that the country's electoral arbiter disqualified two aspirants considered to be close rivals because of evidence of campaign irregularities.

http://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/in-peru-the-many-meanings-of-the-fujimori-name/c7s21008/