Peru's fight for democracy

摘要

Outsiders should help to ensure that the second vote in the presidential election is cleaner than the first. For all the imperfections of Latin American democracy, much progress has been made in the past two decades in the conduct of elections. Nowadays, these are normally fraud-free in voting and vote-counting. And, despite concerns about unequal financing, they are, in broad terms, fair. Neither of those claims holds true for last Sunday's presidential election in Peru. In its lack of fairness and openness, it marked a big step backwards for the region, comparable only to the chaotic contest in the Dominican Republic in 1994 and the notorious presidential election in Mexico in 1988.