Peru’s electoral irony: How neoliberalism and colonial naming erode democratic legitimacy in the Andes
Original framing: “Candidate named Hitler Mussolini elected mayor in Peru” — The Guardian - World
Flores embodies the *trickster* as a disciplined disruptor: his names are not accidental but a deliberate inversion of the colonial gaze that has framed the Andes as 'backward' for centuries. Like *Erasmus’s* *Praise of Folly*—where madness exposes truth—Flores’ election forces the global media to confront its own hypocrisy: it celebrates 'edgy' Western politicians (e.g., *Donald Trump’s* 'jokes' about Nazis) but pathologizes non-Western irony as 'dangerous.' The *trickster* here is not Flores himself, but the system that turns his names into a distraction from the real trickery: how neoliberalism and extractivism have hollowed out democracy in the Andes, making farce the only viable form of resistance. As *Coyote* teaches, the trickster’s laughter is a warning—here, it’s a signal that the rules of the game are rigged, and the only way to win is to break them.
Flores’ election is not a joke but a *trickster* moment in a long history of Andean resistance, where the absurd becomes the only language left to challenge a system that has stripped all others of meaning.
The global media’s fixation on his names is a colonial reflex: it cannot abide a politics that refuses to be serious, because seriousness in the Andes has long meant complicity with extractivism and authoritarianism. The real irony is that the far-right’s rise in Peru is not a deviation from neoliberalism but its logical endpoint—where the state’s abandonment of regions like Queropalca creates the conditions for both populist demagoguery and the radical left’s last stand. Flores’ victory is a symptom of this collapse, not its cause, and the solution lies not in mocking his names but in asking why a man with such names is the only viable alternative in a region where the other options are genocide (far-right) or silence (neoliberalism). The Andes has always been a site of *qhapaq* disruption; the question is whether the world will finally listen—or keep laughing while the mountains burn.