Pedro Castillo challenges Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the disgraced 1990s autocrat, in Sunday’s runoff election

Peruvians must choose between the son of illiterate peasant farmers who pledges to upend the country’s free-market economy and the unpopular daughter of a 1990s autocrat, who faces jail on corruption allegations, when they vote on Sunday in the most polarised election in living memory.

Amid surging poverty, one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks, months of political crisis and rampant anti-left scaremongering, Peruvians will choose the fifth president in as many years.

• Two children among dead in remote hamlet
• Leaflets threaten voters for rightwing candidate Keiko Fujimori

At least 14 people, including two children, have been killed by a splinter group of the Shining Path rebel group, in a brutal attack on a remote jungle hamlet, according to Peru’s military.

Leaflets reportedly scattered at the site of Sunday’s massacre warned locals to boycott upcoming presidential elections next month and said anyone who voted for the rightwing candidate Keiko Fujimori would be considered a “traitor”.

Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa says Fujimori’s opponent Pedro Castillo would undermine democracy

The Nobel prize-winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has called on his compatriots to support Keiko Fujimori’s bid to become president, despite once running against her now jailed and disgraced father, Alberto, and spending years savaging the dynasty for its corrosive effects on Peru and its politics.

Vargas Llosa said the rightwing Fujimori – who faces Pedro Castillo, a far-left but socially conservative union leader and teacher in June’s presidential runoff – was “the lesser of two evils”. Castillo won 19.1% of the vote in last week’s first round, while Fujimori took 13.4%.

Pedro Castillo will face Keiko Fujimori, the far-right heiress to one of the country’s enduring and controversial political dynasties

Peru faces a polarizing presidential runoff vote, in which a hard-left schoolteacher – who caught a wave of popular discontent over the coronavirus and a cratering economy – will face the far-right heiress to one of the country’s most enduring and controversial political dynasties.

Pedro Castillo, a veteran teachers’ union leader, took pollsters and voters by surprise in Sunday’s first-round vote winning 18.47%, with 84% of the official vote counted. In second place, Keiko Fujimori – daughter of the jailed former leader Alberto Fujimori – polled 13.12%, closely followed by two more far-right candidates.