Pedro Castillo greets his followers on June 10, 2021.Stringer / EFE
It is difficult to understand why certain nations end up condemned to choose between certain leaders to be governed.
The case of Peru with Pedro Castillo, virtual president, and Keiko Fujimori, is devastating.
A population after five successive changes of presidents in less than two years chose between the folkloric ignorance of a teacher with a hat as a symbol and the dark past of Alberto Fujimori's daughter.
Two populists.
It is true that this triumph that came from the regions in a centralist nation, in the name of Free Peru, can be interpreted as the revenge of the excluded. But that simplistic reading is even more troubling. Marginality and injustice cannot reward lack of coherence and preparation. The concern of the Peruvian elites I do not think is only of the elites. It is up to any thinking citizen who hears his ruler not to distinguish between a monopoly and a company or to ignore the egalitarian tax system that he demands and even less that the rights of women are denied from the left.
Pedro Castillo may be, according to experts, the puppet of Vladimir Cerrón, a former governor convicted of corruption, but he is the one who, at least until now, will govern to end Peruvian democracy. And those who voted for him thinking "he is like me" are wrong: he is not and should not be like you. It should inspire you, it should respect you, not use you, because the fact that you understand the necessity and customs of your family table, has come to her to do politics, populism of the most blatant. If it really was like the ones it says it represents, it wouldn't have used them in its ad campaigns.
For his part, Keiko Fujimori, validated by Vargas Llosa, failed to instill enough fear in society of communism. Neither could his clientelist populism. His past full of validations to the most corrupt of the presidencies such as that of his father Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) ended up passing him the collection account. Investigated for money laundering among many other alleged crimes, she is not being disqualified for crimes of blood, but for applauding the autocracy of her father, today imprisoned for crimes against humanity together with his accomplice Vladimiro Montesinos, the spy fanatic. It is always worth re-reading when you lose your memory of Gustavo Gorriti in Petroaudios or see the so-called Vladivideos with which the opposition was bought in cash.
Now Keiko wants her contender's votes to be annulled, accustomed to annulling the others by whatever means she touches.
A democratic system should prevent either of them from governing or even participating in politics when they have crossed the limits of legality and ethics, but it is not possible.
The final responsibility lies with the citizens, and therefore in education and in the homes, where it is increasingly common to hear parents repeat the extremist speeches of politicians to their children, those who will soon have a citizenship card for them. vote.
The same people who these days are seduced on social networks with a campaign to get the ID through the images of eroticized bodies as if the mind was not the true place of seduction.
At a time when Venezuela deepens its crisis and Nicaragua imprisons opponents to reach the November elections without any competition, a process in which the Central American country only validates the continuity of its dictatorship, and when Brazil and Colombia will enter into electoral contests in 2022, the neighboring reality may be ours.
Listen to a leader of the Fecode teachers union, who left so many children without education in Colombia with the excuse of the pandemic, that their protest, their demonstrations are aimed at the seizure of power in 2022 can only show us a teacher , but of the farce. And then seeing the right claim the escalation of the chaos that we have experienced after almost 50 days of protests, accusing the left of setting the country on fire, it is only the most convenient for them to promote authoritarian desire. Some and others from their ideological shores, just as mean.
Latin America is on a dangerous path to becoming a failed continent due to the economic contraction that the pandemic left us, making visible the deepest vulnerabilities of our systems and showing the face of the inequalities in which political campaigns have been endured, forcing governments finally respond with free programs and concrete aid to this population excluded from all opportunities.
But these policies are not sustainable neither fiscally nor ethically when it is demonstrated that the gap can be closed with education and work.
And it is not exactly the wide-brimmed candidates who guarantee it, and neither are the human rights violators who continue to sow blood in the territories of Colombia.
As Enrique Krauze did in his Letter to a Peruvian, I turn to Colombian citizens in whom I believe there is hope. It depends on the voters whether we become a doomed nation like Peru, or awakening and promoting candidates that guarantee a real change, a modernization of the democratic system, where argumentation and honesty are the flags. Many are the candidates putting their names at the disposal of the voters when the elections are one year away. Few are the citizens turned into scrutineers. We have a long and hard task ahead of us if we do not want to sit passively before electoral debates between the extremes that always end up preventing us from getting our heads out of the quagmire. Because fighting in the mud suits them.
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