There’s less than 3% of the votes to be counted and unless something really unusual happens, Alan Garcia will be the second candidate in the runoff for president of Peru, by a narrow margin. Lourdes Flores is in third place, trailing Garcia by 84,832 votes.

I hate Garcia’s guts.

But not nearly as much as Ollanta Humala’s.

The prime difference between the two men is that Garcia, leftist and irresponsible as he is, is nevertheless a democrat. When his term was up in 1990, and he’d made his big mess of the economy, he nevertheless left office. He didn’t entertain grand dreams of being Dictator For Life, the way Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez did, following his master in Havana, Fidel Castro. He came and when his time was up, he left, so that better people could be elected.

Not so, Humala. Besides being a military tinpot who’s already tried a coup, and having a crazy brother in the hoosegow who advocates armed struggle if his crummy brother is not elected by ballot box, he already has laid out a blueprint for a Chavista revolution. His first step would be to rewrite the constitution … to his advantage. One of those advantages includes being dictator for life.

The guy is no damn good.

Garcia, on the other hand, bad as he is, swears he’s learned his lesson and this time won’t bring 7000% inflation to Peru or the Shining Path guerrillas to the capitol’s gate. He may or may not keep those promises, and it would be a great thing if he did. But even if he didn’t, he promises to leave when he is done making a mess. Is that good enough? It probably will have to be. Because anything is better than Ollanta Humala.

Today, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez announced he was cutting off preferential trade relations with Peru, in a punishment response to Peru’s free trade pact with the U.S. It’s a heavy handed move and I wonder if it won’t offend Peruvians enough so that they rally behind Garcia, who fortunately, and unlike Humala, is no friend of Chavez. It’s hard to say how they will react but if Peruvians are offended by the heavy handed Chavez move, they may well go for Alan Garcia.

Meanwhile, the talk among the electoral circles is that Lourdes Flores may well be ready to throw her support behind Garcia. If so, I applaud her. ANYTHING is better than Humala.

The brilliant writer Mario Vargas Llosa has announced that Garcia and Flores have got to unite now, and mostly for the same reasons I cite. His essay, in Spanish, can be read here.

In addition, one of the Peru commentators at the University of British Columbia site, Max Cameron, was very proud of calling the election correctly and he said that the secret to it was: looking at past polls in earlier election years. It makes sense. He has a fascinating essay about this whole thing here.

Wolfy Lima at Lobo en Peru has more thoughts about what’s next here.