LIMA, Peru (AP) – Peru’s ousted President Pedro Castillo came to power 17 months ago as a populist outsider. But he squandered what little popularity he had when he stunned the nation by dissolving Congress in an act of political suicide that recalled some of the darkest days of the nation’s anti-democratic past.
At a court hearing on Thursday, a judge ordered Castillo held on charges of rebellion in the same Lima jail where Alberto Fujimori remains being held 30 years after dispatching tanks and soldiers in a far more vigorous attempt to shut down the legislature is.
Castillo, 53, looked dejected as he gave simple “yes” or “no” answers to the judge’s questions.
Most Peruvians took the fall in stride, and the streets of downtown Lima were quiet as residents went about their business, although late in the day a few hundred Castillo supporters peacefully marched through the capital.
Meanwhile, his successor, Dina Boluarte, began the difficult task of rallying Peruvians behind institutions ravaged by years of endemic corruption and distrust. Boluarte, a Marxist lawyer who was Castillo’s vice president, will now become the country’s sixth president in as many years. She is the first woman to lead the South American country of 33 million people and the only one to be fluent in Quechua, the indigenous language spoken by Peru’s poor.
With polls showing Peruvians despise Congress even more than Castillo, Boluarte called for a “truce” against the political feud that has been paralyzing Peru for years. As part of her efforts to realign the country, she backtracked a day earlier with comments that she would end Castillo’s five-year term, which ends in 2026, and refused to rule out the possibility of holding snap elections — something the approval of a requires constitutional amendment that is difficult to find.
“I know there are voices pointing to early elections and that’s democratically respectable,” she said.
The Biden administration condemned Castillo’s rise to power as illegal, and several left-wing allies in Latin America have refused to speak out against his ouster. A major exception was Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who described Castillo’s ouster as a “soft coup d’état” fueled by deep-seated racism against the former schoolteacher from the heavily indigenous Andean highlands.
“It is no longer a military intervention,” said López Obrador. “It happens with the oligarchs’ control of the media, who undermine the legal and legitimately installed authorities, especially when they want to do something for the benefit of suffering non-elite people.”
In just three tumultuous hours on Wednesday, Castillo went from dissolving the Peruvian Congress to being replaced by his vice president.
But threats against his government had mounted during his nearly 17-month presidency, as allegations of corruption, inexperience and incompetence forced him to seek shelter in the presidential palace and a hostile Congress made up of political elites mocked his humble roots.
Castillo won a June 2021 runoff by just 44,000 votes after fighting on promises to nationalize Peru’s main mining industry and rewrite the constitution, winning support in rural Peru.
Once in office, however, he went through dozens of cabinet decisions, some of which have been accused of wrongdoing. Congress first tried last December to indict him over a prosecutor’s investigation into illegal funding of the ruling party. Two-thirds of the 130 MPs must vote to remove the President. Only 46 did.
Lawmakers tried again in March, charging Castillo with “enduring moral incompetence,” a term written into Peru’s constitutional law that Congress has used more than half a dozen times since 2017 to try to remove presidents. The attempt failed with only 55 yes votes.
Each time, Castillo was defiant, arguing he had done nothing wrong.
“I applaud that common sense, responsibility and democracy have prevailed,” Castillo tweeted after the second attempt.
On Wednesday, Peru prepared for a third impeachment vote. The night before, in an unusual midnight address to the nation, the President said that a sector of Congress was targeting him and that he would pay for mistakes made through inexperience.
Then, just before noon on Wednesday, Castillo went on state television to announce the dissolution of Congress. He said elections would be held to elect new lawmakers and a new constitution would be written. Some cabinet ministers resigned immediately, but the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court dismissed this as an attempted coup.
The president can fire the legislature to end a political stalemate, but only under certain circumstances — after losing two votes of confidence in Congress, the last time was in 2019 when then-President Martin Vizcarra fired the lawmaker.
Despite the great political drama, there have been only minor clashes between a handful of Castillo supporters and riot police stationed outside the Lima police station where he is being held.
With a weak mandate and no party, Boluarte, 60, will have to seek reconciliation. The question of what to do with Castillo hangs over the political crisis.
López Obrador said Thursday that he had all but given Castillo’s asylum request the green light in a phone call to the Mexican president’s office on Wednesday. But he said those plans were foiled when Castillo was intercepted by police on his way to the Mexican Embassy in Lima, where a group of protesters were waiting for him. His foreign minister later said Mexico’s ambassador had met Castillo in prison and would start consultations with Peruvian authorities about his asylum request.
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro called on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to step in to guarantee Castillo’s constitutional rights, saying he could not get a fair trial because so many powerful interests were stacked against him. But Petro echoed comments made by Brazil’s new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and left no doubt that Castillo had caused the trouble himself.
“Anti-democracy cannot be fought with more anti-democracy,” he wrote on Twitter.
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Goodman reported from Miami. Associated Press writers Christopher Sherman, Mark Stevenson and María Verza in Mexico City and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.