The president of Peru, Martín Vizcarra, sends a message to the population this Thursday.EFE / EFE
The tension between Congress and the Executive in Peru reached its highest point Thursday night in the hemicycle with a motion to vacate President Martín Vizcarra that parliamentarians want to quickly debate this Friday.
The proposal to remove the president, due to permanent legal incapacity, arises after a congressman presented three audios of conversations -recorded without the permission of the interlocutors- about a friend of the head of state who was benefited with nine state contracts for talks and consultancies totaling nearly $ 50,000.
The parliamentarian Edgar Alarcón, who presented the audios on Thursday, was denounced in July by the prosecutor of the Nation for the crimes of illicit enrichment and willful embezzlement during his exercise as comptroller of the Republic between 2016 and 2017. The constitutional complaints presented by the head of the Public Ministry must be debated by Congress, which must also decide to lift the parliamentary immunity to be prosecuted.
Alarcón is a congressman for the Union for Peru party, led by Antauro Humala, a politician and ex-military prisoner for leading a revolt that ended with the murder of four policemen in 2005. The brother of former president Ollanta Humala, who is serving a 19-year sentence For these crimes, he is a populist and nationalist politician who proposes the death penalty, and pretends to be a presidential candidate.
The broadcast of the audios on Thursday had the approval of the president of Congress, Manuel Merino, a member of Popular Action, the majority party in the Legislative, although divided into three factions that respond to the three politicians who seek to be presidential candidates for that brand in the April 2021 elections. The Congressional Oversight Commission, chaired by Alarcón, has been investigating since June the state hiring of music producer Ricardo Cisneros, who calls himself Richard Swing in the entertainment world, a character not very visible before these complaints.
When the press consulted President Vizcarra about his link with Cisneros, he replied that he had known him since Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's electoral campaign in 2016, but that he had not influenced his hiring and was not close to him.
One of the audios broadcast by Alarcón is a conversation between the president, his personal assistant, the general secretary of the presidency, and a communications advisor, in which they agree on which version to give about Cisneros' visits to the headquarters of the Executive, within the framework of the fiscal and parliamentary inquiries of the contracts of the Ministry of Culture to the character.
He served during the Kuczynski government, but made more money in the management of Vizcarra.
The second audio is a tense conversation between the president and his secretary, about possible layoffs of personnel as a result of the investigations, and the third is a dialogue between the same official, Karem Roca, with Cisneros.
After the dissemination of the talks, congressmen from several banks - among them Podemos Peru, whose two main leaders have tax investigations for money laundering and belonging to a criminal organization - demanded the presidential vacancy.
On Thursday night, in a message broadcast live, Vizcarra rejected the congressional maneuvers.
“I am not going to deny the conversation, but they were internal coordination that takes place in any institution, a way of clarifying what was happening in the framework of the investigations.
At that meeting, I must affirm, I pointed out 'let's tell the truth,' ”said Vizcarra.
"All this is a hoax that seeks to destabilize democracy, to take control of the Government, allow the reelection of congressmen, postpone the elections, and guarantee their electoral victory," added the president.
Since last year, the previous Congress and the current one have boycotted the political reform that tries to avoid the candidacies of people who use politics to shield themselves from investigations and judicial processes or to defend the interests of corruption and the mafias.
For example, a parliamentarian from Podemos Peru, Daniel Urresti, has been facing a new oral trial since last week for the murder of journalist Hugo Bustíos, committed when the politician was an Army intelligence officer, in 1988. Since the establishment of the Parliament that replaced the one dissolved in September last year, has not stopped the confrontation between powers of the State in Peru.
In his message on Friday, the Peruvian president highlighted that on Thursday the second vote of a regulation that prevents the candidacy of people with first instance sentences was scheduled on the agenda of the plenary session of Congress.
The parliamentarians, after listening to the audios, put aside the agenda and did not debate that law or others.
Vizcarra mentioned that the request of the Prosecutor's Office to lift Alarcón's immunity is pending, "to continue pending investigations for alleged crimes of illicit enrichment, fraudulent embezzlement, omission of functions and falsification of documents."
An hour after Vizcarra's message, 31 congressmen from Acción Popular, Podemos Peru, Alianza para el Progreso, Unión por el Perú, Fuerza Popular and Somos Peru signed a motion to declare the president's vacancy due to his "permanent moral incapacity."
One of them withdrew the signature minutes later.
The president of Congress called a plenary session this Friday morning to debate the issue.
Congressman Gino Costa, from the Purple Party, one of those who did not sign the vacancy request, told EL PAÍS that the case can go to the Attorney General so that as of July 29, when Vizcarra's term ends , is investigated as required by the Constitution.
"This is not a cause of vacancy," he said.
If Parliament gets 104 votes, the impeachment debate can take place on the same day.
And the approval of the vacancy requires 87 votes.
The Peruvian Congress has 130 members representing nine political groupings, but not all of them vote uniformly.