Peru

Ollanta Humala Tasso started to tweet on 2 June 2010 announcing: “The Great Transformation is ongoing.” And describing himself as “The virtual president-elect of Peru” a year before the Peruvian general elections which saw the former army officer and left-wing politician narrowly defeat Keiko Fujimori, daughter of imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori. His Twitter activity significantly declined after being elected but he assured his voters that he wouldn’t seek a second term: “Not a day more. My oath to Peru and democracy was and is: not to seek reelection.” President Humala Tasso is not very conversational on Twitter, but he is well connected with other Latin American leaders mutually following the presidents of Argentina and Colombia.

The Peruvian presidency has an institutional account, which was set up on 12 March 2010 under Humala Tasso’s predecessor, President Alain Garcia who had been dismissive of social media sites during his administration. The presidential account is quite active with more than four tweets a day and uses mainly Twitpic to chronicle the activities of the president, including the president jogging in Central Park or meeting Roling Stones front man Mick Jagger. The most popular tweet of the presidency is the decision by President Garcia “to offer the presidential plane to bring the Peruvian football team back to Lima” after winning third place in the Copa America 2011 football championship in Argentina.

Peru’s Prime Minister Oscar Valdes is the latest Peruvian official to set up a personal Twitter account on 25 November 2011. In early June 2012 he weighed in on the mining conflicts near Cusco in the Espinar province and Cajamarca where a state of emergency was declared after violent protests against two copper mines, which left two people dead. “The promise of life in Peru has been swindled by the rotten, the frozen and incendiaries”, he tweeted adding that “The rotten want this country to be a farm, the frozen want it to be a wasteland and the arsonists want a giant bonfire."

The official account of the Council of Ministers of Peru (@pcmperu) is less passionate. The account was set up on 27 December 2011, shortly after Oscar Valdes became Prime Minister to “promote, coordinate and articulate the policies with the state bodies and society” as stated in its profile description. Not surprisingly the governmental account mentions Prime Minister @OscareValdes over 250 times and over 40% of its tweets are retweets of other Peruvian ministries and President Ollanta Humala Tasso.

A similar governmental account for the Council of Ministers (@prensapcm) was set up on 31 July 2010 under the previous Prime Minister Javier Velásquez Quesquén and is still run by the press and audiovisual department. The account uses pictures and videos to report on the activities of the government. It mentions other Twitter users in every second tweet namely Prime Minister @OscareValdes, President @Ollanta_HumalaT and the parliament @CongresoPeru. The government also tweets Follow Friday #FF to promote other Peruvian ministerial, regional and municipal Twitter accounts. Its most retweeted tweet is the announcement of a press conference of the Minister for the Environment about the environmental impact of the Conga mining project.