When Pedro Castillo made the decision to announce the provisional closure of the Peruvian Congress, on the morning of this Wednesday, December 7, he did not imagine that his coup attempt would end in a matter of hours with him detained, pensive behind his blue jacket, while leafing through a magazine. quite brashly, after being questioned by Peruvian prosecutors and with Dina Boluarte being sworn in as the first female president in republican history. The speed of the Peruvian crises means that the headlines of minutes ago are yesterday’s newspapers. Few times had power shown to be so fleeting as on that morning. Castillo did not anticipate that Lima’s chaotic traffic would delay a likely escape route while Congress rushed the votes to vacate it—anyone who has faced Lima’s traffic knows that it is a metaphysical impossibility to overcome it, even for presidents—and that his own presidential escort would he would end up turning him in to the authorities, dismantling any authoritarian pretensions.
Perhaps, that morning, Castillo had pondered the outcome, sharing his anxieties with his most faithful squire: Aníbal Torres. What would happen if the military did not follow them, how would they escape safe arrest, which embassy would they choose to shelter in or what route would they take to quickly leave the palace and avoid confinement. But, the autocrat Pedro Castillo had not plotted anything. It was a coup attempt without allies or strategy, the most grotesque coup attempt in our republican history. Some autocrats fall because they run out of resources to corrupt their cabal of sycophants and are handed over to the highest bidder, others because they are betrayed by their most intimate circle of power when the evidence unequivocally indicates them and they must change loyalties, but Pedro Castillo was not even betrayed nor did he run out of resources to continue corrupting, but instead decided to trigger a coup without having any ally to ensure his survival when there were not even enough votes to vacate him.
The humorist Sofocleto maintained that, in Peru, everything is welcome and, of course, even the coups d’état of a corrupt politician like Pedro Castillo. A failed coup in a country where coups used to be popular had failed without ever having a chance of success. In the country of the Fujimori, Odría and Velasco Alvarado, there is a predictable historical course if you do not have the support of the armed forces: failure. The level of incompetence needed to have designed such a flimsy plan devoid of any intelligence surprised thinkers like Francis Fukuyama; however, for us it was completely compatible with the character. Pedro Castillo had already rehearsed serious untidiness, but the most recent one was an invitation to be destroyed in a hurry and that’s where he headed like a meek lamb going to the slaughterhouse.
After the failed coup, no one accompanied him more than Torres in his delirium. Resignations rained down in droves. He resigned his Chancellor, his eternal defenders, ministers Salas and Chero, his ambassadors to international organizations such as Forsyth and Rodríguez Cuadros, and even his defense attorney in corruption cases, Benji Espinoza. Within minutes he experienced the terrible loneliness of power. Castillo’s populist government was faltering while his family was forced to pack in plastic bags. The Congress of the Republic managed to largely exceed the 87 votes needed to vacate it without much effort. Various sources agree that Pedro Castillo did not consult the arbitrary measure with anyone other than perhaps three advisors. He exposed his family to the dishonor and shame of leaving the Palace in the midst of scandal, with all the cameras trained on them.
The end of an autocrat is never pleasant, but exposing your family to such public grievance is unequivocal proof of how lost Castillo was. Dina Boluarte, the vice president, was immediately called by Congress. She had moved away from Pedro Castillo’s environment just days ago, perhaps remembering that Martín Vizcarra did the same when Pedro Pablo Kuczynski began to flirt with the presidential vacancy. She became the first president of republican Peru. Our gnawed democracy, so tampered with, without parties, with political actors who only defend a patrimonial agenda, she had resisted. We have vilified Peruvian democracy so much, but it resists, as we have said on other occasions, it is the elephant that continues to balance on the spider’s web.
Many countries would like their procedures for the constitutional removal of a president to be as swift and implacable as the Peruvian processes, but we have little reason to celebrate, six presidents, in less than the duration of a complete constitutional term, speak of a country that survives to its politicians or, in spite of them, that digests its political crises with permanent gagging gestures and that – in the absence of anything resembling a pact of stable political actors – processes its disappointments by resetting the system whenever possible, without having improved their weak situation.
The Peruvian crisis has not ended, it has only entered another phase. “Do not be fooled by thinking that what you expect will last longer than what you saw” recites Manrique’s copla, and we want to see what will happen to President Boluarte, not what we hope is utopia at this time. Dina Boluarte, the new president, the bureaucrat who has had disagreements with the government party, with its leader Vladimir Cerrón and with a large part of the Perú Libre bench, faces a crossroads. She knows that no president who has tried to govern has done so without a congressional bench. She has announced a broad-based cabinet and has invoked the spirit of José María Arguedas in a message that may resonate with some regions of the country that may lose patience with Congress – if they haven’t already.
Part of what remains of the pro-government bench will demand that she return to the original plan of Peru Libre –an ideological nonsense that would sow the country with confusion–, but the president knows that doing so will precipitate another confrontation with Congress and another crisis will break out again. . A few months ago, many international media wondered if Peru was an ungovernable country; perhaps it is not ungovernable, perhaps it is a country that is governed in chaos and confusion as long as the economy allows it to resist them, it is our way of accepting the failure of political parties and projects that have passed, it is in no way advisable or healthy, it is not sustainable as academic evidence shows, it throws us into confusion and randomness with increasing frequency and less patience.
But at some point our fortune will run out, increasingly disenchanted citizens will demand new elections or more radical responses, let no one be fooled into thinking that a vote in Congress will calm the spirits of anti-system Peru, and even more so after the childish attitudes of the opposition when problems pile up on us. We have a serious problem with the system of political representation that we have been kicking around with astonishing frivolity, the Congress that has failed so many times has a very small window of opportunity to think about the future and bet on minimal political reforms that mitigate the confusion, but since that is quite improbable, in a few years we will play our political game again and who knows what this terrible disenchantment will give birth to.
#crisis #Peru