A Peruvian flag flies from the roof of a local soup kitchen in the Villa María neighborhood of Lima, Peru. Martin Mejia (AP)
Our dear Julio Ramón Ribeyro wrote in an essay about the great short story writer Guy de Maupassant that “the importance of a teacher is measured not only by the number of disciples who imitate him, but also by the quality of those who turn away from him after having frequented him. ”.
For this reason, when in recent months the Government of Master Pedro Castillo has begun to surround itself with increasingly sinister and incompetent characters, and many of those who previously frequented and defended it as courageous field squires, moved away by slamming the door, only It has revealed to us, brazenly and irreverently, that its importance and legacy will be as insignificant as it is harmful for Peru.
During the campaign, Pedro Castillo lost an advantage of more than 12 points that almost cost him the election in the second round against Keiko Fujimori.
Only anti-Fujimorism saved
him
militant, that disciplinedly hostile regiment that activates the most decisive cleavage of the Peruvian second rounds in recent times and that appeared in the last two days of the campaign to come back by a very tight margin against the most unpopular policy in Peru.
At that time, Pedro Castillo was beginning to reveal that he had neither the will nor the capacity to organize an orderly and thorough campaign.
In the team debate, theirs was certainly decimated by the Fujimori battalion, who, with the sole exception of the health sector, came out with a better countenance and convinced that the victory of Peru's official defender of the system would prevail again in the face of the chaos that reigned in Pedro Castillo's team.
But none of that happened.
Castle won.
Has Peru become something that it was not before the government of President Pedro Castillo?
Peru was not the country that the technocratic myth had sold with great enthusiasm.
We came from a cruel pandemic that had hit the most defenseless, worryingly increasing our poverty and unemployment.
The months prior to the election of Castillo redoubled the distrust of citizens in the cast of traditional politicians, even the archetype of the modern Peruvian populist, Martín Vizcarra, had been deposed, revealing a network of officials and experts who had taken advantage of their positions to get vaccinated unduly, skipping the queue and ignoring thousands of health professionals who took daily risks without protection.
We had one of the worst public efforts to face the pandemic,
many citizens were condemned to sink into misery because in a country where informality is commonplace, prohibiting work is condemning thousands to hunger.
And his government condemned them.
The corruption, the ring and the chaos existed before Castillo.
But neither all the anarchy that reigned in the final hours of Martín Vizcarra, nor the derision that the repression meant during the Government of Manuel Merino were enough for the system to understand the message.
But neither can the emergence of Pedro Castillo be understood without the previous deterioration that gave birth to the continuous political confrontation that emerged from the 2016 presidential elections. In that war without quarter between the Government of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and the Popular Force bench, he only lost more the
establishment
.
It was his opportunity to show the revolutionary forces that were taking over the squares and highways that a country could be built that fulfilled the democratic promise for all, under the terms and arrangements that the
establishment
had preached.
The great sin of the
establishment
was wasting those years on petty squabbles that were broadcast live on the Congressional channel.
They would have had 5 years to build the foundations of progress, but they opted for their guerrilla preaching.
The Peruvian citizen saw daily how his representatives, who ideologically did not seem to have many disagreements, bit their throats over trifles.
The collapse of their political credit was earned with force and popular honor.
The citizen unease, aggravated by the pandemic, was waiting for a minimal excuse to take the leap and got it.
The narrow victory of the radical left cannot be explained without the portentous disaster that the coexistence of the congressmen and the right-wing Executive meant.
That is what the current president of Congress, María del Carmen Alva, seems to ignore.
However, after the election of Pedro Castillo, the country has only continued to dig.
Peru is that country that does not stop sinking.
Unlike submarines that regulate the amount of water that enters to control the immersion, here the doors are open and the water uncontrollably floods the ship.
As in Dante's circles of hell, the more one penetrates, the greater the degree of perversion and evil that is revealed.
President Castillo is a politician who tells his interlocutors the things they want to hear in order to mislead them.
Even Cardinal Barreto, who announced several weeks ago that the president was thinking of a new cabinet, has been left out of line.
In a matter of months,
Serious allegations of corruption are being investigated by the Public Ministry and have undermined Castillo's credibility (if such a thing still exists).
Characters from his closest environment parade today surrounded by lawyers from emblematic cases of corruption.
And the Government continues to descend deeper, as if unforgivably allowing vaccines against the coronavirus to expire, after having suffered the resignation of the team that led the planning of the successful vaccination campaign and appointing servile sycophants of the party leader as Ministers of Health. Government, Vladimir Cerron.
The management of social conflicts has worsened (especially in the mining areas, where it had the greatest political support) and in an attempt to return to a polarized state where it wins politically everything it has lost, it has introduced the request for consultation into the public debate popular to make a new Constitution.
He wants to manufacture a constituent moment that should have as a necessary condition a political centripetal force that tends to programmatic unity, when the only thing that exists in the country is a permanent and increasingly consistent centrifugal force of misgovernment.
President Castillo's management is chaotic and, in the midst of the chaos, they want to make a new social order emerge, metaphysically challenging the moment.
These, on the contrary, are the years in which the representation of chaotic and reactionary Peru has emerged with greater vigor to destroy reforms that cost so much, such as the reform of the Peruvian university system, where congressmen of all persuasions have voted a new law to weaken it in recent days.
That university precariousness, which they want to reign with impunity again, allowed the president and his wife to graduate from a master's degree with a thesis with serious signs of plagiarism and intellectual dishonesty.
The president's lawyer has almost reproached the whole society that his client may be dishonest: he once again puts President Castillo as the man before the Rousseauian social contract.
The president has announced that he is going to observe the approval of this law that his own caucus has supported.
A ridicule that portrays the grotesque national scene and the abyss in which we are submerged.
A president who does not govern with his caucus, or, if we are more cynical, who governs knowing the position of his caucus and supporting it, while he publicly denies it.
A bench that loves to flirt with the right, not to agree for the good of society but for the defense of their businesses.
This is how the bathyscaphe of this Peruvian abyss advances.
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