As more and more women are elected president in Latin America, one would think that, when running for office, female candidates would advocate for gender equality. Yet female candidates have so far refrained from invoking women's rights to win elections. In fact, it was a man who first used a feminist argument against his female opponent. Peruvian president Ollanta Humala won a tight runoff race against Keiko Fujimori by focusing his campaign on women's right to decide over their bodies.

The presidential race between Humala and Keiko was tight until the very end. In the weeks preceding the election, five out of six election polls predicted victory by a small margin for Keiko. Things turned around during a presidential debate on May 29, when Humala brought up Alberto Fujimori's record of forced sterilisations in the 1990s. Forcing Keiko to take a stand on her father's policies that violated women's bodies, Humala catapulted gender issues to the forefront of the presidential race.

Legally, each of Peru's 25 administrative regions must have a plan for promoting equal opportunities for women. But over the last year, only 10 regions have actually allocated resources to the task of overcoming gender inequity, while another 10 have not even drawn up the compulsory equal opportunities plan. The Ombudsman's Office (Defensoría del Pueblo, DDP) issued a report in March that analyses this information and states that only 15 regional governments have approved gender equality plans, and of these, five have not earmarked any funds to put them into effect.

Peru has been boosting the political participation of women since it passed its gender quota law in 1997, establishing that 30 percent of the spots on candidate lists must be reserved for women. This was complemented a decade later with the 2007 Equal Opportunities Act.

But "there's still no law that stipulates male-female alternation on candidate lists for parliament and municipal and regional governments, which would prevent women from being relegated to the last positions," Anel Townsend, former Women and Social Development Minister, said to IPS. Townsend was the most-voted female candidate elected to congress in 2001, and in her parliamentary activity she has promoted several gender-related initiatives.

Party leadership positions in Peru are still predominantly occupied by men, who are very reluctant to relinquish any of their power, so they place women far down on the slates of candidate where they have little chance of being elected, she added.