https://www.clarin.com/mundo/rostros-crisis-remece-peru_0_7VCc7ray9N.html

A first glance at the grotesque crisis that has rocked Peru would indicate that it constitutes a new example of teenage weakness experimenting with democracy in that country and in much of the region where, with a few exceptions, everything seems to exude disorder and fragility. But in this episode another dimension appears which should not be overlooked.

Pedro Castillo’s coup against Congress and the Constitution frayed from the first moments of silliness. The new dictator was immediately abandoned by his ministers, by his vice president Dina Boluarte, by the Armed Forces, by the police and by the Legislative, which promptly removed him accusing him of insurrection. The humiliating end was his arrest while he sought refuge in an embassy.

The conclusion, at least one of them, is that in the midst of the chronic political nightmare surrounding Peru, exacerbated by the establishment of this government, the institutions ended up imposing themselves.

The problem to be solved is that the legislative structure that saves the system is no better than those who have tried demolish it with their coup offensive. Congress moved quickly, but also to take advantage of Castillo’s wrong move that gave him the tools he had been looking for to bring him down.

However, from a broader and regional perspective, it is a positive fact that a coup attempt, even in these contexts, has not been successful. The former would have been lethal in a space where democracy and the system of representation are experiencing multiple crises and challenges.

This dimension reaches a higher hierarchy if we note that in a few days this outcome constituted a second positive datum on the preservation of republican structures with the trial and conviction for corruption in Argentina against the vice president Cristina Kirchner.

Castillo’s political suicide sent remittances to the whole hemisphere, but above all to the regional political colony which since the beginning of his administration has placed the controversial Peruvian president as one of their own. The Casa Rosada, let us remember, congratulated him even before the judges consecrated his victory in the elections of June 6 last year, blocked by opaque judicial complaints.

In the midst of Wednesday’s alarming news, except for the case of Evo Morales who, as always, accused imperialism, there was no direct defense of the Peruvian leader from those sectors, also accused of a cluster of causes of corruption that would fit the creative narrative of law.

Almost everything communicated by that axis during the day of the crisis was in defense of democracy, and with confused considerations that Castillo would act with his back against the wall. But the Colombian Gustavo Petro who had some consideration with his fallen colleague, marked him definitively “anti-democracy cannot be fought with anti-democracy” by violating the Constitution.

Even the television of a country neither democratic nor republican like Venezuela has tried not to appear associated with such a couple he kicked the institutional structure in an authoritative way.

imitation of fujimorazo​

What is perceived as the regional left was mostly struggling in the face of this event. It is indisputable that Castillo closed Parliament and announced an emergency government by decreeing a national curfew. An authoritative step that he imitated the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori and that it didn’t work because the alignment that that tyrant had of the military was missing.

The one who most clearly grasped the challenge and its enormous seriousness was the Brazilian president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He argued that “Castillo’s firing was adhered to the law within the constitutional framework “ and asked the new government to pacify the country.

The fallen president is a teacher from the interior, without a clear ideology who was both a regional candidate for a right-wing party in the past and then, on his way to the presidency, a short-term ally of a far-left fundamentalist force, Free Peruembraced by a primitive communism that hasn’t yet registered the fall of the wall or the changes in the world.

But the central thing is that Castillo governed awkwardly, without leadership skills, changing his ministers up to 17 times and embroiled in corruption allegations involving his family and closest friends. All cases to which in one way or another they would lead him dismissal or suspensionwhich he would try to prevent with his authoritarian coup.

For the conservative parties, especially the far right led by Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the dictator and herself embroiled in serious court-verified allegations of corruption related to negotiations with the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, the president was a target to shoot down.

Castillo was harassed not only for his own mistakes and delusions, but also for a staunch dissident who sought consume what was not achieved in the election in which the fiery leader of the right ended up defeated by a minimal difference.

Those polls were the extreme of the collapse of public faith in the power of democracy and politics to resolve the historic social crisis in Peru that emerges from the concentration of income in a minority, fundamental but equally denied key to understanding the chronic instability of the Andean country.

The Peruvian problem is now ahead. Since the fall of the Fujimori regime, crises of increasing severity have intensified with a cumbersome list of leaders who have ended up prosecuted and in prison, in some cases the opposition abusing the lawsuit power.

This precedent puts i in a cone of doubt fate of the new government who took office on Wednesday led by centre-left Boluarte.

The president, former vice president of Castillo, is a lawyer initially linked to Peru Libre, but who broke with that strength based on two important axes that define his political post: Boluarte rejects general nationalization of the economy or intervention e independent press control.

In this way he would join the weakly circulating current in the region of a social democratic format with flashes of classic liberalism, in a republican, non-economic sense, as in the case of the PT leader or the Chilean Gustavo Boric who is usually simplified as left.

It is unlikely that he will be able to govern until the end of his mandate in 2026, but pay attention to the serenity and coherence of his speech after the oath in which called a truce and promised to form a full-spectrum cabinet, maybe he will be able to consolidate and organize the country.

Even if he faces the same forces that tormented Castillo, will have a central difference in its favor: the fall of the president left those adversaries deprived of the exclusive element that kept them allies.

United States and Brazil

There is one more angle to this episode that should be noted. The familiar notion of the need to an adult in the room is an assessment of leadership often cited in US political analysis.

It happened in the face of improvisation with the pandemic or with the putsch chaos of the end of the Donald Trump government. The concept means this someone responsible has to take charge and prevent or contain disasters. The remarkable closeness that the Democratic White House now expresses with Lula da Silva seems to orbit with that idea with respect to the region.

Joe Biden, who on Monday sent a top-level delegation to interview the president-elect of the PT and commit him to an urgent appointment in Washington –it will only be after the swearing-in on January 1st–, is betting on the Brazilian regional leadership anticipate crises like the one that has just rocked Peru.

Also to solicit changes in the area that ensure democracy and thus contribute to reducing the raids of migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti or Cuba that hit the borders of the United States. A front of misery that would amplify if a generalized institutional deterioration were to deepen in these regions.

It’s not the only argument. There is also the seduction of competing with Chinese influence in the region. The United States looks to history. In their previous governments Lula took care of these tasks.

He did it with his army, commanding the peacekeeping mission in Haiti for more than a decade and, more secretly, intervening in Peruvian politics at the time of the candidacy and mandate of Ollanta Humala who was planted by a councilor, incidentally from Argentina, to put him clearly in the centre.

He also did it more directly at other levels, proposing to Hugo Chávez or the Colombian Álvaro Uribe that “any politician considered essential or irreplaceable becomes a dictator… Democracy is alternation”.

Lula himself recalled this a few weeks ago in a long interview with The Economista central window to the world to the north.
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