Pedro Castillo's foreign minister resigns in Peru after 19 days in office

Peru's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Héctor Béjar, has resigned from his post without having served even a month in office.

Béjar, an 85-year-old ex-guerrilla, presented his “irrevocable” departure to President Pedro Castillo after the criticism he received for accusing the Navy of the initiation of terrorism in Peru, instead of the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso.

Castillo has not yet announced a replacement for the Foreign Ministry.

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Béjar faced censorship in Congress for some controversial statements made before being chancellor, in which he said that "terrorism in Peru was started by the Navy."

The broadcast of the statements on Sunday by the television program

Panorama

was considered "a manipulation" by the Foreign Ministry and an "affront" by the military.

Béjar's most controversial phrase was that "terrorism in Peru was started by the Navy, and that can be demonstrated historically, and they have been trained for that by the CIA."

This sociologist and ex-guerrilla, founder in the 1960s of the ephemeral Peruvian Army of National Liberation (ELN), was also "convinced that the Shining Path has been largely the work of the CIA and the intelligence services."

These assertions contradict the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) on the internal armed conflict (1980-2000), unleashed by the Shining Path and the Marxist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in their uprising to come to power. through weapons. The final balance of victims of that conflict is around 69,000 deceased, the majority at the hands of the Shining Path.

Before the resignation of the minister, the Peruvian Navy issued a statement to reject Béjar's expression as “completely lacking in veracity, which constitutes an affront against the men and women who fought and continue to fight against terrorist crime.

For the Foreign Ministry, Béjar's statements were “manipulated, edited, cut and taken out of context with the purpose of discrediting him and obtaining the censure” of the minister.

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In the statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Béjar “categorically” rejected that he had intended to harm the Armed Forces and expressed “his full will to work with all the institutions on a foreign policy agenda for the benefit of the country”.

Before these statements came to light, the foreign minister was already the subject of an interpellation by Congress to question him about his guerrilla past.

The chancellor was one of the ministers that the opposition demanded that Castillo change to give the government a vote of confidence, considering that they represent a radical left, close to Vladimir Cerrón, the leader and founder of the ruling party, the Marxist Peru Libre.

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