LIMA: Few people take kindly to being compared to a pig but the portly, balding ex-mayor of Peru’s capital Lima, who resigned on Monday to run for president, has embraced his “Porky” epithet.
The 64-year-old ultra-conservative mayor announced his second bid for the top office days after Congress impeached then-president Dina Boluarte over a wave of extortion rackets that have rocked the country.
Rafael Lopez Aliaga, nicknamed Porky over his perceived resemblance to the Looney Tunes character Porky Pig, is the poll favorite to win the April 2026 elections.
But his jowly face is where the similarity with his shy cartoon alter ego ends.
The millionaire businessman, a member of the ultra-conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei who was elected mayor of Lima in 2022, is an admirer of US President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s iron-fisted President Nayib Bukele.
He has vowed to bring back military tribunals to try the extortion gangs that shake down entire communities -- as well as the hitmen employed to kill those who do not pay so-called protection money.
“There have been military tribunals before. Let’s have them again because we’re at war,“ Lopez Aliaga said in September, referring to the state’s war with far-left Shining Path guerrillas between 1980 and 2000.
He also proposes sending violent criminals, or “urban terrorists” as he calls them, to Bukele’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.
His tough talk has gone down well with many Peruvians who are clamoring for radical solutions to the extortion epidemic.
On Monday, the right-winger, who also ran for president in 2021, said he aimed to safeguard the livelihoods of Peruvians and to “dispel people’s fears.”
Boluarte was impeached in a lightning-fast trial for her failure to curb violent crime, following a gun attack on a group of cumbia musicians performing on stage in Lima.
The attack, which left five injured, was the last straw after a seemingly endless spate of extortion-related shootings, including the killing of a popular cumbia singer and at least 47 bus drivers.
Parliament speaker Jose Jeri took over as interim leader, becoming Peru’s seventh president in a decade.
The deeply unpopular Boluarte widened the chasm between citizens and a political class seen as broken.
“He’s the only one confronting corruption at a time of huge insecurity, when nobody is doing anything for Peru,“ Isabel Silva, a 38-year-old street vendor, told AFP of Lopez Aliaga.
- From ‘Porky’ to ‘Worky’ -
The leader of the Popular Renewal party, known to have a sense of humor, has turned his nickname into a powerful political symbol.
Porky “makes him attractive to people,“ political analyst and author Mirko Lauer told AFP, noting the comic character’s ability “to be forgiven for a lot of things.”
In June this year, during his inauguration of a new road in Lima, a supporter presented him with a live pig, dressed in a red superhero cape.
Lopez Aliaga named his pet “Worky,“ to highlight what he describes as his “love of work.”
A trained engineer, he made a fortune in the hotel and railway sectors before entering politics late in life as a Lima city councilor.
He is being investigated on suspicion of involvement in money laundering schemes dating to 2012 and 2014, before he became mayor.
Lopez Aliaga has confessed to leading a celibate life since the age of 20 and in 2021 declared he engaged in daily mortification of the flesh to suppress sexual desire.
He is vehemently opposed to abortion, which is permitted in only very limited circumstances in Peru.
Lopez Aliaga has taken a leaf out of Trump’s playbook by assailing journalists critical of his administration as corrupt members of the “gutter press.”
Outside the capital, his methods are widely seen as authoritarian.
Yovana Mendoza, 49, who heads a group of victims of state repression in the south-central Ayacucho region, wanted to hold a march in the capital last year but was banned from doing so.
“Mr. Porky, or Puerky as we call him, issued a decree prohibiting us rural dwellers from entering the city of Lima,“ she told AFP by phone, slamming him as “racist and classist.” - AFP
