[News] Peru: One Year after the Coup against Pedro Castillo and the Shadow of Fujimori’s Liberation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Peru: One Year after the Coup against Pedro Castillo and the Shadow of
Fujimori’s Liberation
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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.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – Buenos Aires
<https://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2023/12/07/peru-a-un-ano-del-golpe-contra-pedro-castillo-y-la-sombra-de-la-liberacion-de-fujimori/>
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