https://www.clarin.com/mundo/crisis-peru-jodio-region-_0_5JG55bfkeJ.html

Vargas Llosa’s unforgettable question half a century ago in Conversation in the Cathedral about it When was Peru ripped off? necessarily extends like a question mark now to the entire region.

The crisis that overwhelms that country due to the failed coup d’état of Pedro Castillo reveals in an important fraction of this space a disturbing institutional decay and the consequent regression in the defense of the republican rules conquered against the dictatorships does not delay in forgetting it.

He defends something that should be condemned. Castillo, in a speech to the country on Wednesday 7, announced the closure of Congress, ordered a curfew, the arrest of the attorney general and the establishment of an “emergency government”. that is to say de facto, all this in defense of one’s personal interests. These are the objective facts.

The argument that the unicameral Peruvian Congress is indeed a den of corruption and that it has vexed this precarious president since the beginning of his administration does not validate the folly of investing institutions or the precedent it implies.

Just as Castillo, the banner held by governments defending this illegal behavior, was voted, so were MPs, although both are inefficient or much worse than that.

Those of the region, Argentina, Bolivia and in particular Colombia and Mexico, amputate the seriousness of the constitutional interruption produced by the former president, confuse an internal political reality such as the one that closes that country in a nightmare, with the procedures established by the managing directorthere and everywhere.

Castillo is right to question the opposition leadership who tried to restrict him from his oath of office, but the obvious fact is that he lacked the leadership skills to take on this outpost. This fuzzy president, never really governed And not just for the opposition.

But since the parliamentarians are corrupt, these four governments, together with other pseudo-socialist leaders of the region, justify and defend Castillo on the basis of the idea that a popular leader has been overthrown.

The scope of this concept is unclear. Because your vice-president Dina Boluarte, who comes from your own left-wing political party, with which, by the way, you shouldn’t they both broke up. What also defines a popular leader? Anti-American, anti-liberal rhetoric or coherent political action?

Castillo like Boluarte, they come from the poor interior of the country, they know what it is about. But the deposed ruler it did not display the measurements to ensure that label. It is no coincidence that under or behind the protests there is great frustration with Castillo among the country’s poor.

The argument that Parliament and the opposition are illegal due to their collusion against the government, which is what these regional leaders are suggesting, is the same thing that José María Aznar, the IMF or former president Carlos Andrés Pérez he raised in his time for justify the coup of 20 years ago against Hugo Chavez.

Unlike the current one, that insurrection was condemned by the region led in the event by a local president conspicuously to the right like the Mexican Vicente Fox and his Argentine colleague of the time, Eduardo Duhalde. The immediate reaction had a clear background: do not allow the coup to return.

In this huge mess, instead of the necessary clarity, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who like Castillo also pretends to be on the left in order to please a large part of his voters, openly states that does not recognize Boluarte’s mandate.

Worse still, he justified that stance with almost imperialist bravado, warning that “the Peruvian constitution has an anti-democratic flaw”. extraordinary audacity and lack of respect as well as the failure involved in questioning a parliamentary structure from the codes of Mexican or Argentine hyper-presidentialism.

A region in difficulty

His Colombian colleague, Gustavo Petro, who is beginning to cause some disappointment among those who believed he was making a stark positive change, accompanies the Mexican in this dissolving narrative the institutional shield of the republics.

The synthesis is that if a government clashes with a parliament with an opposition majority and therefore an obstacle, it should be closed and an authoritarian government established by decree. In that imagination, that’s what Gabriel Boric should have done in Chile after overwhelming repudiation of the new Constitution in the plebiscite of last September.

“Pinochet revived”, Let us remember what Petro said then about that result, turning the majority of Chileans into henchmen of that dictator and not what they were, sovereign voters who have decided that this model Constitution is not what they wanted.

In order for the pain in the ass to be clearly seen and with which his promoters end up resembling, this is what Jair Bolsonaro does in an even more pathetic way when, even in defense of his interests, he protects the marches in Brazil who ask a military coup which prevents the hiring of Lula da Silva.

Bolivia and Argentina ended up in that mud, which suffered brutal authoritarian regimes which would require a tiptoe movement on these issues. That’s not what happens.

There is in all this, of course, a ideological intoxication. Castillo’s characterization as leftist or progressive raises a Teflon double standard that turns the destruction of normalcy into common sense.

Had this happened in Uruguay, Paraguay or Ecuador, there would have been a candlelit procession revolutionary militants to ask for the repression of the bold president who accused the Republic. An example of this distortion also occurred recently in Mexico.

Don’t mess with Nicaragua

The Chilean Boric, on an official visit, defended the universal value of human rights in a speech to the Senate and strongly condemned the violations taking place in countries such as Nicaragua, whose dictatorship characterized harshly.

López Obrador did not accompany him. He even reacted with indignation by clinging to an opportunistic version of the principle of non-intervention contained in the Drago or, more precisely, in the Estrada doctrine. But he forgets that the international order indicates that these anti-intervention limits fall before the denunciation of those violations.

There is a further question as to why López Obrador defends non-interference in the cases of Nicaragua or Venezuela, but dares to advance in another nation’s hierarchy, to the extreme of discrediting the Peruvian constitution. as if it were the Andean country of a Mexican municipality.

The reason is the same, the dictator Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, like the Chavista experiment, abuse progressive Teflon as an ideological toll, to herd political prisoners in prisons such as ESMA, censor the press and repress.

The marriage that Nicaragua took is known to have killed more than three hundred young people in the 2018 protests that erupted against the economic crisis.

They were marches similar to those that took place the following year in Chile, Ecuador or Colombia against inequality. Or in July 2021 in Cuba to protest an economic plan that destroyed popular income, generated triple-digit inflation and ended up dollarizing the economy.

The regime punished the legitimate audacity to oppose that brutal orthodoxy with prison sentences of decades against the daredevils who took to the streets. There were no questions from AMLO, Petro or their followers.

A particularly serious fact, central to the analysis, is that with this protection Castillo now dares to say from prison that he did not say what he said on television calling for an authoritarian government. By denying such convincing evidence under the alibi of post-truth, a classic of left- and right-wing populism, among other things it encourages protests which are already bloody in Peru.

The coup that did not take place is therefore destined to be crowned with a popular rebellion that will oust the government that succeeded it. It’s not hard to imagine what a regime born in that cauldron would look like. To continue with Vargas Llosa’s anticipatory sentence, Peru really screwed with the Fujimorazo. Castillo now puts another grotesque twist on that drama.
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