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Humala, a former army officer who fought against the Maoist Shining Path rebels, first came to national prominence in 2000 when he led a short-lived military rebellion against then-President Alberto Fujimori.

His approach proved successful and he defeated his right-wing rival, Keiko Fujimori.

Running in a crowded field, Vargas Llosa emerged as a favorite in early polls, which catapulted him to a runoff against agronomist Alberto Fujimori in 1990.

“With just a slight touch of makeup,” he noted, Fujimori’s regime had returned to a “very old Latin American tradition: that of caudillos, that of military power over civilian society, that of force and the intrigues of a coterie over institutions and the law.”

In 1992, Fujimori, seized additional power via an autogolpe — a self-coup — that dissolved Congress.