Peru currently holds several records: of presidents who have followed one another (three in a month, in November 2020), of deaths caused by the coronavirus (six thousand for every million inhabitants) and of the president from younger appearance (seen from a distance, under his characteristic gigantic straw hat, he looks like a thirteen-year-old boy). But appearances are deceiving.
Pedro Castillo, who inaugurated his term on July 28, is actually 51 years old. The death toll from the coronavirus is so high because Peruvians are telling the truth about what happened: the real numbers from countries like India or Brazil are likely to be worse. And the Peruvian elections were actually quite fair. Politics is dirty.
So dirty that since 1985 every president has been indicted or imprisoned for corruption and other crimes, while one is still awaiting trial, another is under house arrest and one awaiting extradition from the states United (this however indicates a certain survival of the rule of law in Peru).
Eyes on the elections
Even Keiko Fujimori, the far-right presidential candidate who by 40,000 votes (out of 19 million) did not beat Castillo in the June ballot, has been in prison several times in the last two years, accused of money laundering (her father, l former president Alberto Fujimori, is serving 25 years for corruption and human rights violations).
Yet, in the midst of all this, observers from the Organization of American States, the European Union and the US State Department deemed the June elections free and fair. Everyone has been waiting patiently for more than a month for the ballots to be counted and Fujimori’s court appeals dismissed. And in the end, she didn’t behave like Trump. He accepted the result.
A better outcome than some other countries could claim, but Castillo has unleashed a new wave of panic. He has little experience in politics and until 2017 he was principal of a high school in a poor town in the Andes. He then led a teachers’ strike and rose to fame across the country, but the first political advisers recruited were mostly devoted Marxists.
Disruption
The poor Peruvians, Castillo’s natural electorate, are largely left-wing, but classical Marxism is not what they prefer. Almost 70,000 people, mostly indigenous, highlanders, were killed in the long war waged by the Maoist rebels of Bright Sendero in the 1980s and 1990s, and no one wants to go back to that situation.
Therefore Castillo began to moderate the language during the election campaign. He used to say he wanted to nationalize anything, now he will just tax foreign mining companies much more. He claimed he wanted to rewrite the constitution, but has less than a third of the seats in Congress. Despite this, the elites of the business world and the entire middle class are in a panic.
“There is a candidate who represents a leap into the void and could take us back fifty years, while on the other side is the daughter of a dictator,” said Peruvian novelist Carlos Dávalos. “It is a matter of choosing between starving and dishonorable.” And the best-known writer of the previous generation, Mario Vargas Llosa, called Fujimori “the lesser evil”.
It must be said that the Peruvian middle class loves melodrama, so it went astray when Castillo chose Guido Bellido, a left-wing Marxist politician, as prime minister. Castillo, however, learns quickly: he immediately announced that his finance minister will be Pedro Francke, a former World Bank technocrat.
This all closely resembles the great turmoil created in the middle and upper classes when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the icon of the Brazilian left, won his first presidential elections in 2002. Yet in the end it all went well. He then won a second term and those were the best eight years Brazil has ever experienced.
I had interviewed Lula for the first time about 15 years earlier, when he was still a calloused worker at the helm of an auto trade union in the ABC industrial district, south of São Paulo, and he too had churned out quite a bit at the time. ‘of Marxist rhetoric. But over time he learned what really works to serve the interests of his people and by the time he became president he had left it all behind.
Castillo has to go up a much steeper learning curve, because he only had three years left. It also has to face a congress that will try to sabotage it continuously. However, he is both smart and charismatic and could learn enough, and fast enough to do well. It certainly cannot do worse than most of its predecessors.
It may not reach Lula’s standards, but it could bring benefits to the indigenous half of Peru’s population equal to those that Evo Morales allowed the indigenous Bolivians to achieve. And despite the turbulence that preceded and followed Morales’ presidential term, he ultimately did many good things for his country’s poor and oppressed indigenous majority.
(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)
.