This was the fifth impeachment motion against a Peruvian president in the last four years.
Rural teacher Pedro Castillo, who raised hopes for reforms when he came to power in Peru four months ago, was saved this Tuesday from impeachment in Congress.
After a bitter parliamentary debate, the motion of presidential vacancy for “moral incapacity” promoted by three right-wing parties did not get the necessary votes to seat him on the bench next week and eventually remove him.
The initiative was promoted by the same right-wing parties – Fujimori among them – that questioned his victory in June alleging fraud, despite the fact that the election was endorsed by observers from the OAS and the European Union.
The impeachment request was prompted after Castillo, 52, was splattered by a scandal of alleged government interference in military promotions for which he was also summoned to testify on December 14 before the nation’s prosecutor, Zoraida Ávalos. .
A similar motion led to the fall of the presidents Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, in 2018, and Martín Vizcarra, in 2020.
Castillo came out of anonymity four years ago by leading a teachers’ strike. Now he is the first president of Peru without ties to the political, economic and cultural elites.
“No more poor in a rich country”, the standard-bearer of Peru Libre, a minority Marxist-Leninist party, repeated as a mantra during his campaign.
In this way, she conquered the feelings of indignation of millions of Peruvians and narrowly surpassed the right-wing Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).
“For the first time, our country will be governed by a peasant, a person who belongs to the oppressed sectors,” he stressed then with emotion.
He was born in Puña, a town in the Chota district, in the northern Cajamarca region, where he had been a rural school teacher for 24 years. He is the third of nine siblings and his parents are illiterate peasants.
Castillo is “the first poor president of Peru,” political analyst Hugo Otero told AFP.
His wife is evangelical, but he is Catholic, and in the courtyard of his house there is a painting of Jesus surrounded by sheep with the legend in English “Jehovah is my shepherd” (Jehovah is my shepherd).
He is used to citing biblical passages when he appeals to his conservative morals to justify his rejection of abortion, homosexual marriage and euthanasia.
Wearing a white high-top hat typical of Cajamarca, he toured Peru, sometimes on horseback, to get votes. As a child, he had to walk several kilometers to go to school.
With 76 votes against, 46 in favor and 4 abstentions, the #PlenoDelCongreso rejected the admission of Motion 1222, which proposes to declare the permanent moral incapacity of the President of the Republic, Pedro Castillo. pic.twitter.com/k2mkeELHEM
– Congress of Peru (@congresoperu) December 8, 2021
During the electoral campaign, Castillo promised “changes, not patches or reforms.” He based his proposal on a triad: health, education and agriculture, the priority sectors to promote national development.
He also promised to convene a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution to replace the one promulgated in 1993 by President Fujimori, which favors the free market economy.
His first economic proposals disturbed multinationals and investors because of his promises of nationalization and a more active role for the State in the market, which earned him comparisons with the “Bolivarian socialism” of Venezuela.
Castillo has tried to calm the waters: “We are not Chavistas, we are not communists, no one has come to destabilize this country, we are workers, we are fighters, we are entrepreneurs,” he declared to a crowd on June 15 in Lima.
Its Minister of Economy, Pedro Francke, assured AFP that the changes they promote have “nothing to do with the Venezuelan proposal.”
Peru Libre is one of the few left-wing Peruvian parties that defends the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro.
In 2017, during the teachers ‘strike that it led and in an attempt to delegitimize the measure, the government linked the teachers’ leaders with the Movadef, the political arm of the defeated Maoist guerilla Sendero Luminoso, an illegal group considered “terrorist” in Peru.
“I categorically reject the complaints,” replied Castillo, who had integrated in Cajamarca the armed “peasant patrols” that resisted incursions by Sendero during the internal conflict (1980-2000). (I)
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