Peru, six years of political, economic and social crisis: They keep beating us down

Since the 2016 general elections when Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) was elected president of the Republic, defeating the leader of the Popular Force, Keiko Fujimori in the second round - daughter of dictator Alberto Fujimori - everything went downhill in the country: there was a political, economic and social crisis that reached the present days of Pedro Castillo's government.

After the presidency of PPK, which lasted only two years after his resignation on March 23, 2018, came Martín Vizcarra, who was vacated by the Congress of the Republic for “moral incapacity” and is now being investigated for the alleged crimes of bribery, collusion and unlawful association for to offend.

Later, Manuel Merino would take the post, but it would last less than five days when he resigned due to social protests where they lost the young people Inti Sotelo and Bryan Pintado, which until now has not been resolved by the authorities.

By constitutional succession, Francisco Sagasti was president of Peru from November 2020 to July 2021 when Pedro Castillo assumed command in elections in which Keiko Fujimori did not accept them as legitimate despite the fact that international organizations - such as the OAS - reported that the vote count had been clean, that there were no serious irregularities and that the trade union leader was elected head of State.

Today, Monday, March 28, 2022, six years after this political, economic and social crisis began, is the vote on the motion to request vacancy against the president of the Republic, Pedro Castillo. The application, promoted by Congressman Jorge Montoya of Popular Renewal, had 50 signatures and to continue the impeachment process, at least 52 signatures are needed. In the document, the Peruvian ruler was accused of “contradictions and lies of President Castillo in tax investigations, the questionable designation of the ministries of the State, as well as his statements about his intention to grant an exit to the sea to Bolivia.”

HISTORIANS SPEAK

To understand why we reached this point of ungovernability, Infobae spoke with historians José Carlos Agüero, author of How the Dead Vote, and Guillermo Nugent, writer of the book Inequality is a paper flag. Antimanual of Peruvian sociology.

“The presidential vacancy has been trivialized. This is taking the seriousness out of politics. Faced with the mistakes that the Executive has, since Congress does not help much either. All this begins many years earlier when Keiko Fujimori uses it to empty PPK. This generated a fracture that has not yet been closed. PPK's vacancy happened as a personal whim of Mrs. Fujimori and then became standard opposition strategy,” said Nugent, who is also a sociologist.

And he considered that there are other ways to make a more critical control over the Pedro Castillo government “without the need to use vacancies” and assured that the population discredits Congress because it is not dedicated to legislating “but is obsessed with vacancy and this contributes to a weariness of the population; it is wear and tear and Castillo nor does he have any special political skill.”

Agüero replied that “there is a problem of diagnosis, all the time we are trying to outline what is happening to us, describing superficially, drowning ourselves in the successive crises of governance.”

The author of Los Rendidos also explained that it is a more societal issue that has to do with all our institutions. “It's a very deep situation in the long term and no one really wants to face the problem like that,” he said.

“There are several important issues that have not allowed us to consolidate a democracy. Perhaps the oldest is not being able to accept what political violence left behind. Peru did not have the capacity to build itself as a country of post-war or post-violence and avoided the consequences that this left on all orders of social life: political, institutional, economic, respect for authority, civic, etc. All this was very deep because no one kills each other so much without leaving a consequence in a country. Although there was an effort by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that was dismissed because those power groups that were able to achieve it denied that there was a conflict and reduced it to a language that was anti-terrorist war and salvage of the homeland. They basically denied the problem and the problem lasted; and the consequences were to destroy the political party system,” he said.

Institutionality, the state apparatus and the social bond were also destroyed and, unfortunately, everything is affected and nothing has been recovered, said Aguero, who also works as a researcher of political violence and historical memory.

“Each crisis deepened because after the period of violence there came a period of authoritarianism that systematized corruption, that is, it was part of the different national, regional and municipal governments. This leap in corruption deepened the smear of authority and the separation between citizens and their institutional or political system,” he said.

The writer of How the Dead Vote stated that we are not living in a democratic society, but that it is related to political interest groups that are consolidated as organized mafias.

“They are the complete opposite of political parties: they have no purpose and are not interested in public affairs; they are only interested in their pockets and assault the management of spaces of authority to manage the arc of economic resources from public investment to drug trafficking. Those are the political parties' that exist in Peru and we Peruvians have to submit to this fiction, pretend that they are political parties and commit collective suicide to vote for the next interest group that is not going to do anything. It's not a question of crisis right now, it's a long-term issue,” he said.

In the same vein goes Nugent who recalled that President Pedro Castillo had a series of meetings at the house in the Sarratea passage, for which he has not yet given explanations, but he does not think that vacarlo is the solution to clarify this issue.

“We are wearing out in politics. This generates a smear. Citizens will believe less in politics and then the doors are open for authoritarian authorities. There are conditions for the political cycle of the last 30 years to close and start again,” he said.

Agüero explained that although Fujimorism is one of the most destructive political forces in the country, this political trend cannot be entirely blamed either, although Alberto Fujimori's dictatorship “destroyed what little had survived political violence and incorporated corruption as an almost legitimate tool of the government, and this did not has generated a critical suspension on the part of our society.”

For his part, Nugent replied that the Fujimorist cycle must always be viewed with attention because there is a popular support that is not negligible that will not disappear. “There is a climate of anxiety, which was widely used by Fujimorism to say that there was an imminent threat of terrorism,” he said.

The sociologist concluded that the only way to change the country's course is when better government alternatives are identified that offer a horizon for the next five years, but so far that “does not exist either on the Executive or the Legislative side.”

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