Vladimiro Montesinos secretly recorded apparently suggesting bribes be paid to secure election for Keiko Fujimori

He was known as the Peruvian Rasputin, the spymaster of one of the country’s most corrupt and brutal regimes.

Vladimiro Montesinos masterminded a network of political espionage, mining state coffers to control the military top brass, the courts, and the media, until he was brought down by one of his own videotapes, which showed him bribing politicians.

Claims of rightwing candidate, trailing Pedro Castillo in the polls, emboldens far right, who have vowed not to accept result

The prospect of the son of illiterate Andean peasants becoming president as his rival cries fraud has shaken Peru’s entrenched class system and its fragile democracy, letting loose a torrent of racism in the bicentennial year of the country’s independence.

With 100% of the official vote counted, leftist Pedro Castillo had 50.12% – and advantage of about 44,000 votes over his far-right rival Keiko Fujimori. But Fujimori has claimed fraud, challenging about 500,000 votes, calling for half to be annulled, and obliging officials at Peru’s electoral board to reexamine ballots – despite the lack of evidence of wrongdoing.

Pedro Castillo is about 0.2% ahead of his far-right opponent, Keiko Fujimori, with more than 94% of the vote counted

The scion of a jailed autocrat and the son of illiterate peasant farmers are fighting vote by vote for the presidency of Peru, in an election which has thrown into sharp relief the Andean country’s deep fault lines of class and geography.

Related: Peru faces poll dilemma: a leftist firebrand or the dictator’s daughter?

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”.