Inventing the candidate

According to Peruvian regulations, the incumbent president cannot run for re-election, thus I cannot use my strategies to promote Ollanta Humala. However, given that Humala himself, as well as Fujimori before him were outsiders and were not known in politics until about a year before each of them ran for president (in 2006 and 1990, respectively), it wouldn’t be too surprising if the new candidate were an outsider as well. Big part of Humala’s image is his military career and active participation in the wars against Shining Path and against Ecuador, and the rebellion against Fujimori regime in 2000, while not being a political figure until 2005. This past allowed him to appeal to nationalistic ideas and opposition of Fujimori regime.

I want to create a candidate who is also famous for his public campaigns but remained largely out of politics until close to the presidential race.

To come up with the name, I looked up the most popular first and last men names and picked Luis Quispe. First name Luis has European origins, last name Quispe comes from Quechua and means “free”. To appeal to identifications with different groups of voters, I want to craft the candidate’s life path intertwined between the two groups who are the target audience: impoverished rural families and urban students and young professionals.

I want Luis Quispe to spend his younger years working for his country in non-political and non-military ways. Luis Quispe was born and raised in a small town on the periphery of Peru in a mestizo family. The town was largely disconnected from the public life of the country because of technical problems with the roads and communication lines, as well as unwillingness of the local corrupt government to fix that situation. Luis’s father, a non-political local craftsman, on multiple occasions appealed to the local government to request improvements of infrastructure, but never got heard.

The desire to fix the infrastructural problems, connect other smaller cities to the big networks of the country and bring systematization and standardization of infrastructure brought Luis to Lima as a student in Civil Engineering of one of the universities. Throughout his studies in early 1990s Luis faced the economic and political crisis in the capital and witnessed Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe. That further convinced him to stay away from the political sphere and physically stay away from Lima after he finished his degree. He spent the next dozen years working on infrastructural problems in distant regions of the country, designing the structures of roads, electricity, phone, TV and later Internet coverage. As he progressed through his career, he increasingly found himself dealing with the inefficient local governments, corruption and ignorance of what was claimed to be state-wide laws. New circumstances of work required him to spend less and less time solving engineering problems and more time doing policy. He returned to Lima for a few years in mid-2000s to get a Master’s in Political Science or Administration and then continued coordination of larger infrastructural projects, including not just roads and communication lines, but also schools, hospitals and other public institutions. He may have worked as a consultant for the deployment of the electronic voting system contracted by ONPE, thus using his technical and organizational insight to strengthen the democratic process in the country without being affiliated with the existing powers. His success and the number of followers allowed him to form a new political party and run for president in 2016. His intention is to become more efficient at the uniting of the country and the cleaning up of the legislation. He wants to use the high government position to have a direct effect on government policies and law projects.