Pedro Castillo, President of Peru, during his address to the nation in Congress.ANDRES VALLE (AFP)
Pedro Castillo – the President of Peru whom the world knew just over a year ago through the photos of Morgana Vargas Llosa and other accounts depicting the idyll of the rural school teacher grazing his cattle and Caldo Verde with his family in Chota, with the politician who filled the hill in Juliaca, has repeatedly refused to speak when he was a candidate. Nothing remains of the figure of the innocent messiah and Promethean reformer. He has become (perhaps he always has been) a traditional politician, quick to copy the old tricks he so much denounced, but without any camouflage to hide his regime’s accelerated disintegration and without plausible alibis, um to explain his downfall.
The scandals of corruption and incompetence that have surrounded the Politburo of President Castillo’s family and friends have exploded publicly and are piling up relentlessly: the Casa del Pasaje Sarratea, former Presidential Secretary Bruno Pacheco, former Minister Juan Silva, the Puente Tarata case, the plagiarism of academics of his master’s thesis, businessman Zamir Villaverde, his sister-in-law Yenifer Paredes and many others. His cheekiness can only be overcome by the confidence and silence with which he faces the accusations.
Words, words, just words
The Citizens’ Proclamation Pedro Castillo signed in front of some civil organizations in the middle of the election campaign has become one of the many commitments he has broken, forgetting his promise to respect the investigative work of the police and prosecutors. As many of his former interior ministers have denounced, Pedro Castillo has not only meddled in the appointment and removal of police chiefs and prosecutors, but has also chosen to protect a decadent and increasingly shameless power leadership that has entrenched itself constantly, destroying every nook and cranny of the incipient meritocracy that inhabited the Peruvian state to replace them with petty villains.
the guardians of the ice
Appointment as Minister of State is the highest civil service honor, and although the professional and moral qualities of ministers have been declining in recent years, it is difficult to find a more disastrous appointment than that chosen by Castillo in his first year. From the start of his tenure, the improvisation in appointing his ministers heralded not only a chaotic government, but one riddled with clumsiness and schedules. His first cabinet was incompletely sworn in because he was late in convincing his economy and justice minister (the now indescribable and unflappable Aníbal Torres). More than 50 ministers have alternated in power and Peru has become the least stable country in the region as Minister of State. Less stability and also more informality, because there were even ministers like Juan Cadillo (former education minister) who received text messages asking him to resign. A left-wing politician who fires by text message, job insecurity, who knows you.
The most problematic was the Interior Ministry, where seven ministers have died in less than a year. It is therefore impossible to fight organized crime, perhaps because the President shows very little interest in this fight, which affects his closest family circle. The ministers of Castillo are the guardians of the ice that is melting in the middle of the country, as in José Watanabe’s poem: “One cannot love what is slipping away so quickly”. And Pedro Castillo’s ministers escape very quickly, unless Juan Silva, the deposed former Minister of Transport and Communications, who renounced a police escort to flee under the nose of the President while being mariachied by some workers at the ministry -Music was fired. A cheap comedy.
critical support
So much has happened that we have already forgotten the petty boasts of Guido Bellido, the minister who rode to Chumbivilcas on horseback and ended up under the wheels; or that there was a certain Héctor Valer, who came into Congress with the voice of the far right and only became President of the Council of Ministers for three days and was forced to resign when allegations of domestic violence from his past were exposed, and who quickly surpassed the indescribable Antero Flores Aráoz, premiere of Manuel Merino.
All ministers are fugitive and precarious incumbents, with the exception of Dina Boluarte (who would take the position if Castillo were vacated, but who has remained silent for many months), Geiner Alvarado and Roberto Sánchez. Sánchez is head of the foreign trade ministry and the only survivor of Castillo’s alliance with another movement on the Peruvian left: Together for Peru. All others were decimated. In particular, the ministers of the progressive left like Pedro Francke or Hernando Cevallos. Nothing remains of the picture in which Cevallos and Francke flanked Pedro Castillo on the left and right on the balcony after the election result but the longing for a utopian project of programmatic unity. It’s yesterday’s newspaper. The Castillo government exposed the inconsistencies and inconsistencies of Lima’s progressive left, which ended up imploding in communiqués, tantrums and resignations like that of Anahí Durand, who preferred to remain attached to the Castillo regime to the internal struggle sure to lead than to direct the embryonic movement that helped bear the name of New Peru. Marx, but Groucho. Nothing should surprise us more from those who asked to avoid a coup by staging another coup.
Discipline in the distribution, comrades
President Castillo’s ties to the legislature have survived two job postings. A constitutional accusation remains. The votes of left-leaning factions and some other congressmen from other parties accused of receiving improper benefits from the government have allowed Castillo — burned, yes — to continue serving as president. The official caucus, like any Peruvian caucus, was divided, but it has played against the wall with other caucuses in trying to thwart some successful reforms, some sense of order, such as that achieved with university reform and the National Superintendent’s regulations, or the ban of informal public transport.
The programmatic unity of the legislature and the executive is separated from the common good. You have only been involved in approving some legislative initiatives by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Some taxes could be exempted (a measure some are debating when appropriate), a measure that will impact the fiscal box of the future, perhaps pressured by the rise in food and fuel costs, but if you look at that fall in the price of copper (which provides one of Peru’s largest tax revenues), it would only embarrass future governments. Perhaps only the appointment of the board of directors of the Central Reserve Bank of Peru had escaped controversy, perhaps because there is still a collective conscience in Peru that is reactionary to the trauma of the 1980s and allows us to play with anything but macroeconomics Stability and Julio Velard.
The bouncer without a key and the populist without a city
The leader of the Peru Libre party, which was in power until Pedro Castillo resigned in June 2022, the feverish ideology agent Vladimir Cerrón, who is one of those who still whips out his umbrella when it rains in Moscow, has lost a lot of influence and his seizure of power are just unhinged Twitter rants or TV invective against Yankee imperialism. His original plan was abandoned because, although he insisted on fabricating the constituent moment, the only thing he could achieve was the split of Peru Libre to bring about the teachers’ block.
This is what happens in Peru, even the most ambitious revolutionary plans fail because of the villain’s mediocrity and stubborn incompetence. And perhaps that same mediocrity coupled with a weak citizenry has led us into these stagnant waters. A year after Pedro Castillo’s government, this remains: a president incapable of building a popular base, a nominalist populist without a people who never had the attitude of Hugo Chávez or Rafael Correa and who ended up not even reaching Fernando Lugo or Manuel zelaya A regime that was frightening because of its outdated ideological beliefs and that eventually became the pantolandia of mismanagement, improvisation and rot. Even the progressive archbishop of Lima can’t stand him any longer and has indicated that he should resign. That failure matters more.
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