The Cabinet led by the president of the Council of Ministers, Mirtha Vásquez, went to Congress this Monday to ask for a vote of confidence on the general policy of the Government, but towards the end of the afternoon, the session was surprisingly suspended due to the death of the parliamentarian Fernando Herrera, representative of Peru Libre, the party with which President Pedro Castillo came to power. Vásquez is the second prime minister who attends Congress in 90 days to obtain the investiture vote, after having replaced Guido Bellido on October 6, a politician from Cusco who represented in the Government the ultra-left doctor Vladimir Cerrón, the founder of Peru Libre, who could not run for president because a corruption sentence disqualified him from holding public office.
Castillo called for Bellido’s resignation after the fellow congressman made several unconsulted announcements with the Cabinet, the last of which undermined business confidence. The final straw occurred when the man from Cerrón threatened to expropriate the main gas field operated by a private consortium.
The plenary session began this Monday shortly after 11 in the morning with Vásquez’s presentation on the Government’s guidelines, and the spokespersons of two of the large banks – Popular Action and Alliance for Progress – said they would wait to hear it before decide whether or not they trusted him. Both add 31 votes, and are usually the benches that define the decisions in the Legislative.
Therefore, the suspension of the session leaves the unknown until Thursday, November 4, about obtaining the confidence for the Castillo government to continue its march. While several congressmen from Peru Libre were heading to the home of their deceased colleague, Parliament announced on Twitter that they would resume the day on Tuesday morning, but then they changed the agenda to pay tribute to Herrera.
Party spokesman Waldemar Cerrón – Vladimir’s brother – reported that Herrera died of cardiorespiratory arrest. The local press reported that the representative for Tacna – a former school teacher – was in the morning session, but that he felt bad and did not return in the afternoon. President Castillo, who had been working since noon in the Cajamarca and Amazonas regions, conveyed his condolences to the family of parliamentarian Herrera, a professor like him. “When a teacher dies, he never dies: when a social fighter dies, he never dies. When a son of the people dies, he never dies. Fernando Herrera present ”, said the president in the city of Bagua Grande, in the Amazon region.
The unknown of the votes
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The only early votes in favor of the Cabinet were about twenty from Peru Libre (out of 37), five from the leftist Juntos por el Perú and three from the center-right Partido Morado. The right-wing benches – Popular Force, Popular Renovation and Advance Country – which add more than 40 votes announced since last week that they would not give the investiture vote to the new Cabinet if the prime minister kept the Interior and Education incumbents.
The Minister of the Interior, Luis Barranzuela, is questioned because even before being appointed to that position he was a lawyer for Cerrón and Bellido, and has been an advisor to organizations of coca growers opposed to the eradication of crops of that plant. In addition, in the past decade he was a lawyer for an arms dealer who operated in collusion with the military during the government of Alberto Fujimori.
The new Minister of Education, Carlos Gallardo, is a former union teacher who participated in the teachers’ strike led by Castillo in 2017, and who was active in at least a couple of parties on the legal left in the 1980s and 1990s. However, without evidence, the Fujimorista Fuerza Popular attributes closeness to a group founded by lawyers of the defunct terrorist group Sendero Luminoso and ex-prisoners who served time for terrorism.
During the plenary session, one of the episodes of greatest tension occurred when the Fujimori congressman Héctor Ventura said that a member of the cabinet “was related to a criminal network” and from the seats of Peru Libre they rejected the epithet. After a discussion and a wake-up call from the Parliament’s board of directors, he had to withdraw the phrase.
Given that the political scenario is not favorable to the Government, Prime Minister Vásquez stated at the beginning of her appearance in the hemicycle that the opposition benches contribute “from their ideological positions so that the State can fulfill its promise of equality and independence”, and proposed a “new social contract for stability and democracy” that allows “the changes that are demanded.”
Vásquez highlighted the advances in vaccination and did not mention the question of changing the Constitution, one of the main promises of Castillo’s campaign. However, the president said in Jaén (Cajamarca) that the reform of the Constitution “is in the hands of Congress,” just as he mentioned in his speech when he took office as head of state on July 28.
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