He has a knack for getting on a case of beer and electrifying the people who gather around him, as he has done so many times in remote towns in Peru. The camera lens, however, intimidates him, parches his mouth. He happened to him in a debate with Keiko Fujimori when he was a candidate and he began to sweat profusely, and it happened this morning on Wednesday, December 7, when he was already president. He is in his office, sitting at a wooden desk. He is wearing the presidential sash, he resembles the portrait of a powerful man, but the trembling of the hands with which he holds some papers give him away. His defense will later say that he is drugged, that it is not him fully. Pedro Castillo announces at that precise moment the dissolution of Congress, an entity that he hates. A manual self-coup. He accuses the Chamber of not letting him govern, of making his life miserable. He should be happy to behead his enemies. But he is not, because in reality he is alone, very lonely.
There are no tanks in the street and no crowds to support him. Surfers at that time catch waves on the beaches of Lima, office workers go out for lunch. There is an amazing tranquility. Neither the military nor the police support him in his intention to rule by decree, to lock people in their homes with a curfew. In three hours, Castillo will be detained by his own escorts. Congress will remove him and his vice president, Dina Boluarte, will replace him. This is one of the shortest coup attempts in history. Pure improvisation, in tribute to the year and a half of him as president. Many imagined an unfortunate end for a ruler who came to power almost by accident, but few believed that he would end up handcuffing him and threatening a sentence of between 10 and 20 years for rebellion for having succumbed to authoritarian temptation.
“Castillo is not an accident in the history of Peru, it is the final statement that it is a failed state, without any national project,” says César Hildebrandt, one of the most important journalists and writers in the country. In the last four years there have been six different presidents. He maintains that the book The history of corruption in Peru, by Alfonso W. Quiroz, is the summary of the future of the nation. Castillo’s desperate action ties in with the Peruvian tradition of having presidents who yearn to be warlords: “Warlords eager to plunder the State. It is a constant in our 200 years of life as a country”.
After that bravado by Castillo, Peru continued on its feet. “But it’s just an illusion. Nations do not collapse like buildings. They just pretend to be there,” continues Hildebrandt. The former president was surrounded at that time by advisers who are now being investigated as possible members of a criminal organization that instigated the coup. A former prime minister, Aníbal Torres, a renowned constitutionalist who little by little became radicalized in the Government, has announced that he will go into hiding because he feels persecuted by the law. He maintains that he was simply there listening to the presidential message, without being aware of the matter.
The same is assured by Defense Minister Gustavo Bobbio, who had only been in office for a few days, which is not surprising. The Government of Castillo was the cover of a temporary work company. Dozens of ministers, advisers, prime ministers and state secretaries have paraded through the Government Palace in these 18 months. Bobbio was one of that long list when, according to his version, he locked himself in the president’s office and listened to his address to the nation. According to him, no one knew. So who wrote that speech to the president? Who encouraged him to bypass the Constitution without the slightest guarantee that he would succeed? That is the real riddle. The minister assures that Castillo did not consult anyone, not even the military, whose support he needed to sustain the autocracy, the type of support that Alberto Fujimori received in 1992 when he made the same challenge. And it did work out for him.
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Castillo’s failure reveals how little has changed since Fujimori left government in 2000 following a series of corruption scandals. He flew to Japan and faxed his resignation from there. “That is why Alejandro Toledo (he replaced Fujimori) was voted in with the hope of change, renewal. The same thing happened with Alan García, with Ollanta Humala. Those changes that were promised in the campaign were not fulfilled, the State did not care about the basic needs of the people. On the contrary, the presidents accommodated themselves to the rules of the game of neoliberalism and privatizations. Castillo is one more in that tradition”, explains Cecilia Méndez, historian and senior professor at the University of California.
Paradoxically, dictatorships have transformed the country more than democracy, he continues. General Juan Velasco Alvarado decreed an agrarian reform in 1969 that expropriated ten million hectares from large landowners and distributed the land among the peasants. Castillo’s father was a laborer with a miserable salary who was given a piece of land of his own in the Andes, in the Cajamarca region. He became a free man. At the former president’s rallies it was common to see flags with the general’s face waved. Castillo admires him. “Our democracies have not been democratic, they have been elitist. The authoritarian temptation comes from all sides. For example, the authoritarianism that Castillo has shown with the coup is also in response to the coup attempts of a congress that is formally part of a democratic system, but in practice it is not”, continues Méndez. “Castillo is the product of an authoritarian Peru and a deeply unequal and commercialized education system, where only those with money can go to the best colleges and universities.”
The traditional political parties have almost disappeared. More than a third of Peruvians, according to surveys, decide their vote two days before, even while they are queuing. “The parties are mobsters’ bellies for rent. Politics ceased to be an exercise due to the power dispute. It is rather an auction of interests, to the right and to the left”, adds Hildebrandt. The sociologist Sandro Venturo assures that people no longer expect anything from politicians. He associates them with two concepts: corruption and negligence. “Opportunists and criminals are encouraged to apply because they know that voters are not demanding or attentive. And this has been the case for two or three decades. The number of authorities sentenced or in legal proceedings is overwhelming”, adds Venturo.
Faced with this panorama, citizens are disconnected from public affairs. “Everyone tries to survive or progress outside the State. And again, this is the best scenario for gangsters. The Government of Castillo is the penultimate round of this vicious circle. In the short term, another crisis is likely to come”, the skeptic Venturo abounds. President Boluarte has just announced a new government that needs the support of Congress. No one is clear about the level of stability of that Executive, born from the resounding failure of a previous one. Thousands of people have taken to the streets in recent days to demand an advance of the elections that would take at least six months to organize.
Castillo did not even intend to be president. He was by accident. He was presented to the elections by Vladimir Cerrón, the leader of a party that could not run due to charges of corruption that he was dragging. Out of nowhere, with small rallies from town to town, he began to rise in the polls and made it to the second round by surprise. Then the cameras came and focused on him squarely. The character was burned by the spotlight. He was a president who went from one crisis to another until he committed political suicide live, in front of the entire country. The ultimate reflection of a country that cannot find solutions to its form of government.
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