Peru elected a leftist outsider as president. Now it asks, can he do the job?

Peru may have a new president, but the challenges he and his country face are decades old.

A rural schoolteacher and union leader, Pedro Castillo was inaugurated July 28 in a rushed transition after weeks of legal and political uncertainty. He’s not the first outsider to win the presidency in Peru, but he’s the only one to make the leap from the largely impoverished countryside to the country’s highest office. 

Mr. Castillo, a candidate of the left, took office after a hard-fought election that he won in early June by 44,200 votes out of nearly 19 million cast. His opponent, Keiko Fujimori, cried fraud, but her challenges were

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