Democracy Tom & Jerry

The former president of Peru Pedro Castillo.-- (EFE / Presidency of Peru)

The criminal feint of Pedro Castillo, the salty escape, his tumultuous arrest on the way to an embassy, ​​the morality of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his femented Estrada doctrine, the crazy story of the drug in the drink that a lawyer improvised;

All of this, while being very rude, but very entertaining, does not make one forget that our history of two centuries of independence is sadly full of outrages and assaults on Congresses.

On the contrary, the event recalls what the Catholic liturgy calls a “movable feast”: an event without a fixed but inexorable date.

Someone, this time, gave the former president a stupefying potion to drink and "others" wrote his monstrous speech.

Such is the lie that a lawyer for Castillo told when he spoke "of a certain water" that is sorcerous.

Apparently, they forgot to give the military High Command a drink of the same water and that omission would have saved the day.

The only plausible thing is the plan to dissolve the Peruvian Congress and establish a dictatorship in whose history the man with the Speedy González hat would only be an unsuspecting instrument.

There is talk of a

from the pitiful Castle, of a dark character, a stubborn communist who lasted a few days in his first cabinet.

Be that as it may, in the streets of Lima there are already fallen among those who expressed their support for the rural teacher.

The idea of ​​drafting a new Constitution, as Castillo announced when he found himself lost, takes flight in Rosendo Maqui's, as in so many other of our nations from time to time.

For now, and perhaps this is already emerging as an Andean pattern, a woman comes to the fore while everyone crosses their fingers that Dina Boluarte leads Peru to what one day can be called political normality.

In my favorite Latin American fiction, an ambitious and tyrannical greedy shuts down Congress and the collective hero is a group of valiant resisters who, after a massacre, are reduced to prison.

The smartest of them writes an enlightening and exciting book that brings together a skilled and young liberal nucleus that regenerates all of political life.

It may be a long and naive story, I know, but I think it's the only one I would be willing to hear told over and over again until it was fulfilled in real life.

We have already had too much utopia and warlords and spilled too much blood.

And poverty and hunger do not give ground.

Nothing similar to my favorite fiction is still happening in Peru, where recent experience suggests, rather, that in each deputy there is a Pedro Castilllo or his

or both trapped at the same time in the same body.

The latter has given rise to many urgent analyzes on the composition of the Peruvian political class, their mentalities, their prosopography, their feng shui, their mating habits, etc.

This interest is explained because the perennial tension between the Executive and Congress has reached the status of an endless and bloody animated cartoon of Tom and Jerry in Peru.

I confess that what happened with Castillo is the type of thing that makes me despair of our America.

It is not, however, something circumscribed only to Peru.

It happens all over the continent, all the time for too long.

And the resigned unease with which we Latin Americans helplessly witness the debasement and, one could also say, the jubilant scrapping of our institutions by right-wing and left-wing demagogues who make our democracies and our future more uninhabitable every day is heartbreaking.

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