Peru has emerged from one crisis to enter another.
If Pedro Castillo's self-coup attempt was resolved in less than three hours with his dismissal by Congress and subsequent arrest, the management of what has come after has plunged the Andean country into a stage of accelerated instability that has already gone through episodes as critical as the dismissal by the new president Dina Boluarte of the head of the Executive that she had appointed just a few days ago.
The protests that broke out in the rural areas of the south and the roadblocks have already left 26 dead in just over a week, a good part of them due to police actions.
The mobilizations have managed to force the call for elections to be brought forward, but not the objective they sought to close Congress and hold them immediately.
Once the initiative to convene them for December 2023 failed, Parliament has approved that they be held in April 2024, against the criteria of Boluarte herself and 83% of Peruvians who wanted the advance, according to the latest survey by the Peruvian Institute of Economy.
The context continues to be dramatic and the repression by the police and the Armed Forces has awakened the ghosts of the recent past, bringing to mind even the worst abuses by Alberto Fujimori.
The president who replaced Castillo, Dina Boluarte, heads a government that did not come out of the polls and her priority cannot be other than to pilot a transition, as she herself has come to recognize.
Boluarte is a senior Registry official who has served as vice president for the past year and a half, with a very low profile.
She initially swore her office until 2026, but after the electoral advance she will have less time to govern.
While the new Cabinet and Congress, without a fundamental project, are submerged in technical and legalistic debates about the next elections, protesters die daily in the provinces.
The president's disconnection with that tragic reality, despite declaring a state of national emergency, is a reflection of the abysmal distance that exists between Lima and rural Peru.
Pedro Castillo's coup attempt was the worst possible way out of the situation of the last year and a half in which the president has experienced a chronic and sterile confrontation between his legislative will and Parliament itself.
The former president, accused of rebellion and conspiracy, will remain in pretrial detention for at least 18 months.
But his mere trial, which must be held with all the guarantees, will not provide a solution to the serious problems that Peru is going through.
The new government urgently needs to put a stop to the chaos into which the country is sinking and prevent abuses against the civilian population.
It is necessary that the Executive try to deploy a progressive project in accordance with the wishes of the electorate expressed in the past elections, and avoid reinforcing, by making new mistakes,
disturbing populist and far-right alternatives.
Only through dialogue and agreements, Peru will be able to face the way out of the crisis, having lost the opportunity to urgently accelerate the electoral call without too clear reasons.