The only unquestionable thing he did peter castle since he became president, it was to stop wearing that hat that was embedded. The traditional hats of Cajamarca are beautiful but, due to their large size, the fact that a president does not take them off in any venue, not even when he speaks in the chamber of Congress, gives press conferences or chairs cabinet meetings, makes him look ridiculous.
Such a hat, crowning his short stature, gave Pedro Castillo a air of “Speedy González”. But in addition to his speed, the Warner Brothers animated character was characterized by his intelligence and cunning. And those do not seem distinctive attributes of the Peruvian president.
Since he became president, Castillo did nothing but make mistakes and utter unfortunate phrases. Everything he did or said generated waves of questioning. But no one questioned him for having stopped wearing the huge white hat as if it were part of his head.
Since then, the image of the president looked more serious. But the measures he took continued to show negligence and ignorance. For this reason, when the economic and sociopolitical quagmire that put Peru in a catatonic state was unleashed, they were not betting on Castillo’s continuation in office. Even his prime minister questioned the continuity of the president. Aníbal Torres limited himself to responding “anything can happen” when asked at a press conference if it was possible for the president to leave office.
At that point, he had already survived two vacancy trials, the Peruvian version of impeachment. With those parliamentary coup riots, Keiko Fujimori made it clear that his is a savage opposition. Strictly speaking, a prolongation of the post-election attempt to prevent Castillo from assuming the presidency despite the fact that all the revisions of the votes verified his victory.
But not only the Fujimori Popular Force party wanted to overthrow the teacher from Cajamarca who defeated the daughter of the last Peruvian dictator in the presidential election. Also Avanza País, the right-wing party led by Hernando de Soto; a political force that was born in the center left and ended up becoming ultraconservative and neoliberal as its last leader, Fujimori’s Minister of Economy who designed and applied the “fujishock”.
It is paradoxical that the two parliamentary impeachment attempts have had the impeaching legislators as villains and the president as an innocent victim, whom they intended to overthrow in the same way that they had overthrown the presidents. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Martin Vizcarra.
For this reason, the street protests that showed the fed up of society with the characters that it votes for, were divided among those who they wanted Castillo to resign, those who wanted the closure of Congress and those who wanted everyone to leave; absolutely everyone.
The political chaos was seen in the mobilizations themselves, triggered by the conjunction between a resounding rise in the price of fuel, pushing an inflationary spiral with rates that Peru had not seen for 26 years, with the consequences of the blockade of routes carried out by the carriers, making the ccities will be virtually besieged and out of stock.
Adding folly, the Castillo government decreed a state of emergency and curfew. The drop that overflowed the glass was the curfew, a disproportionate measure that acted like gasoline on the flames. At that point, the question is how such a weak president could stay in office.
Weak for having broken records in changing cabinets of ministers, and because each one he put together was worse than the previous one. Weak for publicly saying things that let him down, because they showed ignorance or negligence, or both. Weak because in addition to having in Keiko Fujimori a powerful enemy and without scruples who did not accept that he beat her at the polls, supported by the desire to overthrow him by the authoritarian right led by De Soto, the president has arch-enemies in the party that nominated him for the presidency: Peru Libre.
That Marxist party elevated him because its leader, Vladimir Cerrón, had convictions for corruption as governor of the Junín Department. Castillo had risen to prominence as a teacher unionist in a long strike against the Kuczynski government. To that notoriety was added the peasant and humble air of him. The addition of a party charged with ideologies with a candidate like Castillo, resulted in a anti-system formula that Peruvian society, eternally disappointed by the corruption and ineptitude of its politicians, was tempting.
But before that, Castillo had been a “rondero” (which are the armed peasants who protect their rural properties against leftist guerrillas) and a candidate for mayor in Cajamarca for the center-right party in which he was a member: Peru Possible, which he founded and led. Alexander Toledo. That is why many were not surprised that shortly after having appointed his first cabinet, he fired Prime Minister Guido Bellido, one of the most left-wing leaders of Free Peru, along with other ministers from the most clinging Marxist wing of that party.
The decision to replace Bellido with center-leftist Mirtha Vázquez was a good one. The only case where the replacement was better than the replaced. But Vázquez’s short circuits with several disreputable ministers caused another cabinet change. And this time he caused astonishment by appointing Héctor Valer to the presidency of the Council of Ministers, a leader who in his journey through different parties went through the hard right.
Valer did not last a week in office because he did not pass the vote of confidence. His replacement in the new cabinet, the fourth since the start of the mandate last year, was the controversial Anibal Torres.
The political-institutional crisis; the removal of presidents and the trials for corruption of those who have headed governments for a long time are the rule and not the exception in Peru. But since the Fujimori dictatorship they have never shaken the economic course. The model that democratized but kept in its main guidelines the presidency of Alejandro Toledo; was consolidated upon being ratified by a recycled Alán García in his second stint as head of state. For the same reason, the economic course was strengthened by keeping it on its feet by the government headed by the former national-populist Ollanta Humala. And he survived the falls of Kuczynski, Merino and Vizcarra.
Will it also survive the conjunction of the pandemic effect, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Pedro Castillo’s passage to the presidency? “Anything can happen.”
