The harassment and demolition of the president has become Peru's national sport for five years. It all started at the end of 2016, when the Peruvian derivative of the Odebrecht case was uncovered, which affected all the elected leaders after the autocrat Alberto Fujimori. Last year's election of far-left populist outsider Pedro Castillo was a consequence of the discrediting of traditional politicians.
But Castillo, a rural teacher and trade unionist who generated enthusiasm in the neglected poor, peasant and indigenous population, has already assumed power like a lame duck, generating panic in the Lima elite with his Marxist postulates and in the framework of a polarized country after winning by just 42,000 votes the far-right Keiko Fujimori, the candidate of the establishment and Mario Vargas Llosa.
In this sense, the protests on Saturday, when thousands of people demonstrated in Lima and other cities calling for Castillo's resignation or dismissal, are not the first nor will they be the last, but they mark a turn of the screw. Especially in the capital, the police harshly repressed protesters who already dream of Castillo abruptly leaving power, as happened with Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2018, or Martín Vizcarra and Manuel Merino in 2020.
"They will have me until the last day of my mandate because the people have decided so," Castillo said yesterday, ruling out resigning. The progressive leader once again denounced a "plot" by the right, the press and the judiciary to "bend him with misinformation, false accusations and slander."
Already accused of corruption – like all his predecessors – the truth is that Castillo has not yet carried out any of his communist campaign proposals, except launching a timid agrarian reform. He has not implemented any radical measures and, in fact, a few months later he distanced himself from his mentor, the Marxist Vladimir Cerrón, leader of the Free Peru party, who promoted the outsider as a presidential candidate.
Political instability has marked the fifteen months of Castillo's government. Since he took office in July 2021, the cabinet changes have not stopped. Of the first 17 ministers, the president has already appointed more than 70 portfolio holders, including four prime ministers. In addition, he has six open criminal investigations on suspicion of corruption and has overcome two parliamentary impeachment attempts.
In October, in an unprecedented decision, the state attorney general, Patricia Benavides, filed a “constitutional complaint” with Congress against Castillo, accusing him of leading a criminal organization and committing influence peddling and fraud. The complaint may lead to the third impeachment attempt against the president in Congress, where although he does not have a majority, the opposition does not manage to gather the two-thirds required for impeachment either. The procedure must be approved before in committee.
And meanwhile, the opposition uses its parliamentary majority to block any initiative by Castillo and does not even grant him the mandatory authorization from the legislature to be able to travel outside Peru, so, for example, the president will not be able to attend this November the APEC summit in Thailand.
After the action of the Prosecutor's Office, Castillo denounced "the execution of a type of coup d'état", referring to a new case of lawfare or judicial persecution. And then he requested protection from the OAS, asking for the activation of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, a mechanism of the organization to react to a coup or threat of democratic involution. For this reason, an OAS mission will arrive in Peru on November 20.
The leftist leader has just 26% popular approval, according to polls. Although it should be clarified that no pollster predicted Castillo's meteoric rise in the electoral campaign because generally the measurements focus on the urban population and not on the rural one, where the president obtained his great support.
Vladimir Cerrón recently gave an interview to the Argentine newspaper Página12 where he explained his theory as to why Castillo was harassed and brought down by the establishment: “The war against Castillo is an Andean, peasant-based racial war of discrimination, because the main issue , which is the economic one, the right-wing opposition has already resolved it, because there has been no change to say that this is a left-wing government, or at least a progressive one. With that, those on the right should be calm, but they want to overthrow him not because Castillo can make policies for change, but because it bothers them that a cholo (indigenous) is in government.
