Peru is a labyrinth.
The left brought
Pedro Castillo
to power with
Dina Boluarte
as vice president;
fallen that one, assumed the second, following the Constitution.
Who is behind the protests?
That same match.
Legally, he should govern until 2026. Given his lack of legitimacy, he had to back down, with Congress agreeing (in the first vote) to advance the elections to 2024. With tempers tense and sixty dead later, to calm the waters, he recently proposed in Congress advance the elections to October, but it resists.
There are those who do not want to leave their comfortable seats and others who prefer to continue sharpening the contradictions and
promoting chaos
.
The recipe, with Caribbean flavor, includes calling a Constituent Assembly, without anyone -vagues apart- saying what needs to be changed.
A speech seems to have finally penetrated a majority:
poverty ends up changing the Constitution
.
From Congress, with an image on the ground, there are those who demand the resignation of Boluarte, backed by absurd allegations of "genocide", in the face of what seems to have been lack of skill, lack of strategy and punishable excesses.
There are those who go in good faith to the protests against the status quo, others march carrying claims of decades, but there are also vandals and recycled hikers.
It is no coincidence that they seized airports, set fire to police stations and courts, and burned a policeman alive.
Castillo made a coup.
Congress got him out and today he is in jail legally.
But a sector of the left has been able to insert a narrative in some popular sectors that see it not as the culprit but as a victim.
Knowing the complaints against him, if he wanted to flee the country helped by AMLO, if he wanted to knock down democracy, if the Comptroller has revealed that in 2022 25,000 million soles were lost due to corruption of authorities, how are there popular sectors that advocate for him?
The answer lies not in what he is but in what
Castillo represents as a schoolteacher, peasant, trade unionist, and provincial.
Castillo's anti-Limeñism reaps its fruits;
Inland cities demand from Lima what they should demand from their local authorities, which today receive more money for the canon (166% more than in 2021).
Many Peruvians wondered how
someone so incapable of governing came to power
.
The problem is that those same Peruvians have done little or nothing to change things.
Faced with congressional reluctance, Boluarte announced a project to advance elections for October and that the next Congress would have the power to make a new Constitution.
Thus, Boluarte would end up submitting to violent protests, evidencing
the absence of the character
that the times demand or perhaps demonstrating his true face.
Michael Reid affirms that there is a left in the region that cares more about power than about principles.
And as MA O'Grady has said in The Wall Street Journal, the goal is to destroy democratic capitalism for socialist authoritarianism.
Elections won't fix the mess;
with rushed elections the necessary changes will not be made, the same parties will compete and there will be a president without a parliamentary majority to repeat history.
And the doors are opened for dangerous extremisms.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
There is no light, not even a tunnel;
just a country of bewildered people, walking in darkness in midsummer.
Professor at the University of Lima, UNIFE and ESAN
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