Jaime Bayly’s El Francotirador

In 2009, Jaime Bayly, one of the most influential TV journalists of the country, announced that he wanted to be the first bisexual, impotent, and agnostic president of Peru. He launched an atypical and unofficial electoral campaign, fueled by his irreverent and popular TV show El Francotirador (The Sniper). Bayly’s yearlong virtual campaign increasingly gained importance and local and international media coverage, but he ultimately dropped out of the race a few months before the election. This chapter analyzes how Bayly constructed his ambiguous and contradictory media persona during his 30-year media career and how he capitalized on its political appeal in his electoral run while revealing social tensions in contemporary Peru, a deeply divided society with fragile social institutions, precarious democracy, and a discredited political class. This chapter also illuminates how massive media spectacle became a contested arena to negotiate political power both during and since President Fujimori’s authoritarian regime (1990–2000).