José Pedro Castillo Terrones
The leftist Pedro Castillo was proclaimed president-elect of Peru 19 July 2021, a month and a half after the elections in which the right-wing Keiko Fujimori was imposed, who delayed the appointment with more than a thousand challenges in which he denounced without reliable evidence an alleged "fraud". Castillo, whose supporters included Peru’s poor and rural citizens, defeated right-wing politician Keiko Fujimori by just 44,000 votes. After declaring the latest legal remedies presented by Fujimori unfounded, the National Elections Jury (JNE) endorsed the results of the June 6 vote, where Castillo obtained 50.12% of the valid votes, a narrow victory by just 44,263 votes of advantage over Fujimori.
Castillo's proclamation came eight days before the presidential change, scheduled for July 28, the day on which Peru will celebrate 200 years of its independence and the current interim president, Francisco Sagasti, will hand over the head of state to Castillo, a professor rural, originally from the northern Andean region of Cajamarca. Castillo called on "the broadest unity of the Peruvian people" so that the management that he will exercise from July 28 allows his country to be "fairer, more sovereign, more dignified and more humane."
"At this moment I am calling the broadest unit of the Peruvian people, to forge and open the door of the next bicentennial, sealing this bicentennial with all its differences, with all its problems and with everything we have experienced," Castill emphasized before hundreds of his followers who came to his local partisan in Lima.
In the plenary session of the JNE held through a videoconference, the official Dina Boluarte was also proclaimed vice president. Unlike his predecessors, Castillo will begin his term with only one vice president, as Vladimir Cerrón, the leader and founder of the Marxist Peru Libre party, was invalidated as a candidate after having a firm conviction for corruption, during his tenure as governor of the central region Andean of Junín.
Castillo, 51, a radical left outsider who no one — apparently including the candidate himself — expected to win, ran a chaotic campaign, frequently contradicting himself and delaying for weeks revealing whether he even had a policy team, claiming that he did not want his expert advisers to be “stigmatised” by the media. Even many of those who voted for the village school teacher and union leader from the impoverished Cajamarca region, in the northern Andes, question whether he is ready for the historic challenges of leading Peru out of the twin public health and economic crises once he is sworn in on July 28, the 200th anniversary of Peruvian independence.
Castillo would assume the Presidency for the period 2021-2026 with a profoundly reformist discourse that includes a new Constitution considering that the current one, which emerged from the Fujimori state "self-coup" in 1992, had promoted a neoliberal economy whose economic progress has not solved the problems of deep inequalities.
Castillo promised to use the revenues from the mining sector to improve public services, including education and health, whose inadequacies were highlighted by the pandemic. “Those who do not have a car should have at least one bicycle,” Castillo, 51, told The Associated Press in mid-April at his adobe house in Anguía, Peru’s third poorest district.
He initially campaigned on the far-left platform of his party, Free Peru, which repeatedly cited Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Fidel Castro, and proposed nationalising large chunks of the national economy. “No more poor people in a rich country,” was his campaign slogan. Flagship promises included renegotiating contracts with foreign mining companies to force them to leave 70 percent of their profits in the country and dedicating 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to healthcare and education — a promise no economist takes seriously.
Since surprising Peruvians and observers by advancing to the presidential runoff election, Castillo has softened his first proposals on nationalising multinational mining and natural gas companies. Instead, his campaign has said he is considering raising taxes on profits due to high copper prices, which exceed $10,000 per ton.
Historians say he is the first peasant to become president of Peru, where until now, Indigenous people almost always have received the worst of the deficient public services even though the nation boasted of being the economic star of Latin America in the first two decades of the century. “There are no cases of a person unrelated to the professional, military or economic elites who reaches the presidency,” Cecilia Méndez, a Peruvian historian and professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, told a radio station. Fujimori, a former congresswoman, ran for a third time for president with the support of the business elites. She is the daughter of imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori.
Many do not belong to Castillo’s party, but they trust the professor because “he will not be like the other politicians who have not kept their promises and do not defend the poor,” said Maruja Inquilla, an environmental activist who arrived from a town near Titicaca, the mythical lake of the Incas.
Castillo’s meteoric rise from unknown to president elect has divided the Andean nation deeply. Author Mario Vargas Llosa, a holder of a Nobel Prize for literature, has said Castillo “represents the disappearance of democracy and freedom in Peru.” Meanwhile, retired soldiers sent a letter to the commander of the armed forces asking him not to respect Castillo’s victory.
On the campaign trail, Castillo had made a series of policy promises that rattled large investors and ordinary Peruvians alike, including nationalising Peru’s huge mining sector and banning imports, but which he now appears to have abandoned. “You don’t know what Castillo’s going to do because he doesn’t know,” said Pablo Secada, an economist and prominent member of the Popular Christian Party (PPC), a center-right political party. “The uncertainty’s very damaging.”
He continues to push for a referendum to set up a constituent assembly, however, arguing that Peru’s current constitution, approved in 1993 under the hard-right and fiercely free market President Alberto Fujimori, who is now in jail for human rights abuses, limits the state’s ability to provide public services such as healthcare and education. Yet Castillo has yet to clearly articulate what specific policies are blocked by the current Magna Carta.
The congressman elected by Avanza País, Alejandro Cavero, said the reason why "the professor" is not clear in his constitutional reforms is because he "hides his true intentions." “Because he doesn't dare to say that one of the things he wants to change about the Constitution is presidential reelection; because he does not dare to say that he wants to change article 62 to allow the president to expropriate (…) and since he does not dare to say that, he says that he wants to change education, health. But the truth is that he wants to change the locks that the Constitution puts on him to become Cuba, Venezuela," he said.
Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, told a radio station that Castillo is arriving to the presidency “very weak,” and in some sense in a “very similar” position to Salvador Allende when he came to power in Chile in 1970 and to Joao Goulart, who became president of Brazil in 1962. “He has almost the entire establishment of Lima against him,” said Levitsky, an expert on Latin American politics. He added that if Castillo tried to change the constitution of Peru — enacted in 1993 during the tenure of Alberto Fujimori — “without building a consensus, (without) alliances with center games, it would be very dangerous because it would be a justification for a coup.”
The president-elect had never held office. He worked as an elementary school teacher for the last 25 years in his native San Luis de Puna, a remote village in Cajamarca, a northern region. He campaigned wearing rubber sandals and a wide-brimmed hat, like the peasants in his community, where 40% of children are chronically malnourished. In 2017, he led the largest teacher strike in 30 years in search of better pay and, although he did not achieve substantial improvements, he sat down to talk with Cabinet ministers, legislators and bureaucrats.
Over the past two decades, Peruvians had seen that the previous political experience and university degrees of their five former presidents did not help fight corruption. All former Peruvian presidents who governed since 1985 have been ensnared in corruption allegations, some imprisoned or arrested in their mansions. One died by suicide before police could take him into custody. The South American country cycled through three presidents in November 2020.
Castillo said his life was marked by the work he did as a child with his eight siblings, but also by the memory of the treatment that his illiterate parents received from the owner of the land where they lived. He cried when he remembered that if the rent was not paid, the landowner kept the best crops. “You kept looking at what you had sown, you clutched your stomach, and I will not forget that, I will not forgive it either,” he said.
Peru Libre proposed a broad-based government that brings together all democratic political forces and all social sectors, said Jorge Spelucín, political spokesman and regional leader of the political organization in Cajamarca. He stressed that at this time there is the great task of rebuilding the country socially after the electoral process and for this, he said, it is necessary to agree on the different agendas that exist from different political perspectives. In this context, he called to "put on the shirt of the country." "We can all contribute to national development from the left, center or right without exception. That is why we propose a government with a broad, broad base," Spelucín told RPP. He argued that the country expects the closing of gaps and that spaces for agreement be opened. In this regard, he considered that it would be an important gesture to reach agreements for the election of the Board of Directors of Congress. He emphasized that it is necessary to agree to have a united Parliament that faces the country's problems, especially to face together the problem of the covid-19 pandemic.
Free Peru members and other Castillo allies had been fighting over how far left his government should go. The debate is being led by party founder Vladimir Cerron, a Marxist former regional governor barred from public office by a corruption conviction and with a record of xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic comments. He is pushing for Castillo to keep the radical posture he maintained on the campaign trail.
Cerron’s pressure came despite the fact that the incoming 130-member, single-chamber Congress will be divided between 10 parties but likely controlled by right-wing opposition groups. That includes the Fujimoristas with 24 lawmakers and another ultra-conservative grouping, Popular Renewal, with 13, whose leader has even called for Castillo’s “death”. That will leave Castillo with little room to maneuver. He could potentially even face a fast-track impeachment like the one that brought down President Martin Vizcarra in November 2020.
On 28 February 2022, the Subcommittee on Constitutional Accusations decreed as valid a constitutional complaint issued against President Castillo. The motion was approved by a group of lawyers and lawmaker Norma Yarrow, with nine votes in favor and eight against. Castillo's legal defense requested the insertion of a habeas corpus, claiming violation of the right to individual liberty due process and due to adequate procedural protection in Parliament. The violation of the presumption of innocence and freedom of conscience and the breach of the principle of legality and inapplicability by the analogy of criminal law were mentioned among the reasons to insert the habeas corpus.
Castillo faced a powerful right-wing resistance to his administration since even before taking office in July 2021, having narrowly averted defeat by rival Keiko Fujimori. The Peruvian government was thrown into chaos after the most recent attempt by the opposition-controlled Congress to impeach Castillo succeeded. On 14 March 2022, the Senate moved to begin the proceedings, with Castillo slated to defend himself on March 28.
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