Better the devil you know...?

I'm sitting in my friend's apartment in Lima, where it's about five in the morning, looking out at a string of orange street lights and listening to the ocean. The horrendous screeching of dilapidated vehicles and the constant whine and bang of construction hasn't yet begun. It's the quietest time of day and really pleasant, so I don't really mind the fact that someone from the BBC called me at 3am, with the age-old expression 'I haven't woken you up, have I?' When will people learn that the world doesn't revolve around London. Ho hum.... Anyway, I have just filed a report on the Peruvian elections. The first round took place yesterday and, as with many things in Peru, the results are deeply uncertain. With just over half the vote counted, nobody knows who the next president will be and the only likelihood is that people here are going to have to do it all again and vote in a second round in the next few weeks, because no candidate got the majority in the first round.
This is bad enough in a country with the infrastructure and relative wealth of somewhere like Britain, but imagine having to travel for days from your home deep in the Amazon or high in the Andes to vote in an election you don't understand, for candidates who don't understand you, only to be waste your ballot because you've been denied basic education and are illiterate, but voting is compulsory?
The man most likely to get the most votes is someone who reflects quite how divided this country is. He's a nationalist former army officer, who has found favour among the fifty percent or so of Peruvians who live below the poverty line. His rhetoric has terrified the business classes here, because he's pledged to increase state control of Peru's vast natural resources and has aligned himself with fellow military-type Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela.
But, the other two frontrunners in these elections aren't much better, according to most Peruvians: an upper class conservative woman, the darling of the rich and someone who has marginalised the poor with her 'establishment' buddies and a former leader who left the country in the grip of economic turmoil and terrorised by the Shining Path rebels. As I wrote in my report, it may come down to 'better the devil you know, than the devil you don't'.
All I know is that I'm getting sleepy and feeling a little sick, which tends to happen when I haven't eaten for a few hours. I'm sixteen weeks' pregnant today and I have covered two elections and reported on another (Chile, Peru, Bolivia) and travelled to various countries in the past four months, so this baby already has a firm foundation in international politics. As the BBC likes to put it, there is a leftwards anti-Washington trend in Latin America....If we're to believe that, will I give birth to a socialist subversive firebrand? Hmmm, it's a good thing journalists simplify things sometimes, isn't it?
Buenas noches y amor a todos xxx