REUTERS

When Luceli Banda Medina, 21, the first woman in her family to read and write, left the poor, isolated northern Peruvian village of Puna to study nursing, she always dreamed what her life would have been like had she been born in a city.

"Why do the people of the countryside not have the same ability to study as people in the cities, who have practically everything they need?," Banda Medina, her father and mother's family names, told Reuters from her adobe house in Puna.

Three generations of the Medina family - daughter, mother and grandfather - live together in the house without running water, plumbing or a hard floor. Outside low clouds hug the dark-green hills dotted with roaming chickens and horses.

Family elder, grandfather Segundo Medina, has been a subsistence farmer all his life and wears a broad-rimmed chotano hat, just like another local son, socialist presidential candidate Pedro Castillo who is now stirring up the Andean country's politics.

Outside the yellow-bricked house hangs a banner for Castillo, who taught at the nearby primary school and tutored Banda Medina to read. He is now neck-and-neck with conservative opponent Keiko Fujimori ahead of Sunday's election run-off, his abrupt and unexpected rise driven by poor, rural voters angry at being left behind.

Win or lose, Castillo has galvanized the rural vote like never before, raising a challenge to any new government as it tries to unify a nation that has been roiled by political scandals and five presidents in the last five years.

Fujimori has already moved to address concerns of poverty, including pledging to distribute some mining profits straight to local communities and offering payouts for families who have lost members to COVID-19.

The coronavirus pandemic, which has left Peru with the world's highest death toll per capita, forced Banda Medina to move back to Puna last year, where she now struggles to keep up with her classes due to spotty internet service.