By Carmen Parejo Rendón, Resumen Latinoamericano, December 7, 2023
Pedro Castillo before the coup
On December 7, 2022, the Peruvian Congress debated a new motion of vacancy against President Pedro Castillo. Subsequently, Castillo, in a televised message, decreed the dissolution of Parliament, the establishment of a government of national concentration and called for new parliamentary elections within nine months.
Following this announcement, several government ministers resigned, in particular the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Labor and the Minister of Justice. In turn, Vice-Minister Dina Boluarte also expressed her opposition to the President’s announcement. The Constitutional Court and the Armed Forces pronounced themselves aligned against the popularly elect president.
Dina Boularte, assassin
The Peruvian Congress, with 101 votes in favor, approved the dismissal of Pedro Castillo under the argument of “moral incapacity”, and he was subsequently detained by the Police, a situation in which he remains.
Dina Boluarte, Vice President of the Republic, assumed the interim presidency of the country, and throughout the following months massive demonstrations in support of Castillo took place, which were strongly repressed by the new government, leaving half a hundred dead and many wounded.
Pedro Castillo’s electoral victory in the general elections of 2021 took place in a context in which, on the one hand, the deep political crisis of the country was manifesting itself, and on the other hand, the aggravation of a polarization that combines deeper conjunctures and structural elements.
Mafalda
Mafalda, the iconic character of the Argentine cartoonist Quino, used to say that sometimes what is urgent does not leave time for what is important. In this sense, although the dimensions of Peru’s political crisis extend to structural dynamics and problems that span several decades of the country’s history, there are some recent data that summarize this critical scenario and are fundamental to understand Peru’s urgencies.
From November 8 to 19, 2020, Peru changed president three times. Since July 2016 and prior to Castillo’s inauguration, the country had four presidents, three of them removed from office using the tool of “vacancy motion”, i.e., by impeachment through a majority of Congress without going through a citizen vote.
The use and abuse of this tool, which is also the one used against Pedro Castillo, generated controversy outside and inside the country. The demonstrations against the role of the Congress and in favor of the elaboration of a new Constitution were growing during the years prior to Castillo’s victory. Thus, after winning in the second round, the new president had a clear mandate: to solve the urgency that the country was going through and that directly questioned the role that the Parliament was playing and that made it impossible to govern and, in turn, the drafting of a new magna carta.
The Castillo scenario
The political reality experienced by the brief government of Pedro Castillo did not differ greatly from this previous scenario, but rather increased. The president faced up to three vacancy processes that did not obtain a sufficient majority in the chamber; and he had serious problems to legislate due to the continuous boycott of the Congress, where he did not have a majority; and at the same time, he faced internal confrontations within the political party Perú Libre, to which he belonged. Although the president tried, on several occasions, to ingratiate himself with the other political groups, in the end he did not obtain the support of either the others or his own.
In the first round of April 11, 2021, no candidate managed to obtain more than 20% of the votes. Castillo came the closest with 18.9 % of support. In second place was Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, with 13.4 % of the votes. For many analysts, this scenario showed the evidence of an ever deeper rupture between the capital oligarchic power represented in Lima, which overcame the fujimorismo vs. anti-fujimorismo antagonism; and the rest of Peru, understood as the rural, peasant, indigenous and neglected majority -using the term of the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto C. Sandino- in their social, economic and political rights, who saw in the rural teacher the representative of their interests. Since these rural communities, especially the indigenous ones, were in turn the main victims of Fujimorism, it is not surprising that they represented and continue to represent the most solid popular forces of support for Peru Libre and Pedro Castillo.
Antagonistic visions
This surprise victory revealed two antagonistic positions: the hope of those who demanded change versus the fear of the others, of those who felt that a change could take away the privileged position they held.
Beyond the urgent, this victory also opened the way to initiate a debate on the important: inequality in the country, the divorce between the rural world and the urban capital world, between the peasant and indigenous societies and the big families of the country, on the control of natural resources or on the fair redistribution of the profits from the export of the multiple raw materials they possess. Among many other issues that the urgent had been eclipsing or leaving in the background.
Beyond whether or not Pedro Castillo knew how to carry out the mandate entrusted to him, what is certain is that his brief stint as President and the way in which he was deposed has served to broaden the field of vision on the Peruvian reality and conflict.
The present in Peru
Alberto Fujimori
On this anniversary of the events that led to the imprisonment of Pedro Castillo, the country’s current political situation is marked by the release of former President Fujimori on “humanitarian” grounds, which has an even greater impact on the symbolic aspect of the social rupture in the country. On the other hand, the two sectors allied to Castillo’s dismissal appear to be at loggerheads due to the crossed accusations between the interim president Dina Boluarte, investigated for her responsibility in the repression during the protests, and Patricia Benavides, prosecutor of the Nation, investigated for a corruption network.
The government of Dina Boluarte, who refuses any kind of electoral advance, is also questioned for its lack of legitimacy for the position inside and outside the country, but also for its responsibility for crimes that may be subject to consideration as crimes against humanity, as pointed out by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in its report entitled ‘Situation of Human Rights in Peru in the context of social protests’, published last May.
For his part, Castillo defended his release from prison before Peru’s Constitutional Court on Monday, December 4, assuring that he never intended to stage a coup d’état, but rather to express a message “of an unenforceable political nature”, assuring that it was others who had “a coup prepared for some time” and pointing to Congress, the Attorney General’s Office and other power groups that, according to the former president, were responsible for making the country’s governability unfeasible. Even with several pending cases, Castillo is immersed in a complex judicial process that may take time, and even if he is finally acquitted, the political consequences are already irreversible.
The same people who suffered the forced sterilizations of Fujimori, the theft of babies, the continued plundering of their wealth, the constant humiliation of institutions they do not trust, repression and violence, hope and despair, remembered this anniversary by demanding in the streets of Lima “that they all go away”; or in Tacna and Moquegua, their rights to water. Finally, the urgent and the important go hand in hand in the midst of the current Peruvian crossroads.