Peru’s free-market candidate for president, Lourdes Flores, is sliding in the polls ahead of Peru’s first-round presidential election on Sunday, but apparently has taken a strong cue from Felipe Calderon’s successful Hugo Chavez ads against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico.

Aggressively, she’s lashed out against the dictator in Caracas. She’s hammering him as “a danger in the shadows to all Latin America.”

Will this win her back votes? We don’t know. But suddenly, Peru’s election is exciting again and it’s only got a couple more days until April 9’s first round.

El Universal has the new item, so far only in Spanish, here.