Five years, six presidents: In Peru, resilience is exhausting

Last Wednesday around noon, Nicol Sarmiento was working at her office job in Lima when a co-worker told her the president was closing Congress.

The move by Pedro Castillo, a leftist former schoolteacher who took office just 16 months earlier, was widely condemned as an attempted coup. By the time Ms. Sarmiento took her lunch break, Mr. Castillo had been impeached and arrested, and an hour later, his vice president took office to replace him.

“It happened so fast,” says Ms. Sarmiento. “We were all in shock.”

But it wasn’t an entirely new sensation. Over the past five years, Peru has had three Congresses and six presidents, including its newest leader and first female president, Dina Boluarte, an attorney and former civil servant whose government is looking to be short-lived. There have been seven impeachment attempts since 2016. A flood of corruption scandals have tainted the political class, landing three former presidents in pretrial detention, leading a fourth to kill himself to avoid arrest, and fueling endless power struggles between the legislative and executive branches.

Ms. Sarmiento, who is 21 years old, says she has no memory of a politician inspiring hope in Peru: “I’ve only read about it because of history.”

Celebrated early this century for ending the dictatorship of former rightwing strongman Alberto Fujimori, Peru has more recently lurched from crisis to crisis, testing the limits of its young democracy. The latest drama raises big questions: Is the repeated political and constitutional upheaval a sign that Peru’s system of governance needs a major overhaul – or is it somehow evidence of a healthy democracy? For now Peru’s democratic institutions have withstood the pressures, but citizens and analysts vent frustration at a political system and the leaders it engenders who could undermine stability in the future.

“This means a democracy, for sure, but a democracy of a very low level,” says Eduardo Dargent, a political scientist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “You don’t see any political capacity in the state to help address a series of problems, so I think it is little consolation to say that we’re fine.”

The system “needs a transformation, of course, but a transformation whose diagnosis is complicated.”

“Fragile” democracy

In many ways, Peru is a microcosm of the problems dogging democracies around the world: entrenched corruption and inequality have deepened distrust in institutions, growing tribalism has led to gridlock, historic social divisions have resurfaced, conspiracy theories have created confusion, and amid the chaos, politicians with authoritarian tendencies try to get an edge.

The closest Peru has come to a blatant break with democracy since it was restored in 2000 was last week during Mr. Castillo’s attempted self-coup. He made a televised address to the nation, outlining plans to rule by decree until new legislators could be elected to write a new constitution, a nighttime curfew, and the “reorganization” of the judiciary and prosecutor’s office, where he is a suspect in multiple criminal probes. His announcement on Dec. 7 was strikingly similar to one delivered by Mr. Fujimori 30 years earlier, marking the start of his autocratic rule.

Mr. Castillo had, ironically, beat Mr. Fujimori’s daughter Keiko Fujimori in last year’s runoff election by capitalizing on fierce opposition to the Fujimori political dynasty. A union activist and farmer from a poor Andean village, Mr. Castillo unexpectedly surged ahead in the first-round election after promising radical change to empower poor, working-class, and Indigenous Peruvians.

Instead, Mr. Castillo failed to propose any significant reforms and faced a constant wave of corruption allegations, leading to a third impeachment motion that was scheduled for a vote hours before his failed power grab. “Castillo’s presidency was a sad spectacle of corruption and political incompetence,” says Julio Carrión, a Peruvian political scientist at the University of Delaware. “His ineptitude extended to trying to be an authoritarian president.”

Unlike Mr. Fujimori’s self-coup of 1992, Mr. Castillo was met with opposition from every institution in Peru, most crucially the armed forces. As ministers in his cabinet resigned en masse and he tried to reach the Mexican Embassy to seek asylum, Mr. Castillo was arrested by officers in his own security detail. Prosecutors promptly charged him with rebellion, and he is now detained at the same prison where Mr. Fujimori is serving a 25-year-sentence for human rights violations and corruption.

“Few will dispute that Peru’s democracy is fragile, but recent events show that institutions can still pose a barrier to open authoritarianism,” says Mr. Carrión.

But many political analysts wonder if history would have played out differently if Mr. Castillo had been more popular or politically connected. Peru has one of the highest levels of tolerance for radical measures to address deep-seated problems in Latin America, such as a military coup or the dissolution of Congress to control corruption, or an end to elections in exchange for a basic income and services, according to surveys by the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University.

Peru’s electoral institutions this century have proved to be strong, says Adriana Urrutia, a political scientist who heads the pro-democracy Peruvian organization Transparencia. For example, they withstood Ms. Fujimori’s attempt to overturn last year’s election based on unfounded claims of electoral fraud. But elected officials themselves continue to disappoint, focusing narrowly on their own gains while neglecting the country’s most pressing problems. 

“There are no political actors on the horizon capable of building a slightly more solid system,” says Mr. Dargent, the political scientist, who sees that as the chief obstacle to sorely needed reforms. 

“The rules of the game in place favor dynamics of private and not collective interests,” Ms. Urrutia says. Electoral laws lead to weak party discipline and a prohibition of the immediate reelection of officials, removing healthy incentives, she says. “A national debate over reforms to change the rules of the game is urgent.” 

Unattended demands

It is unclear however, if Peru will get the chance for such a debate. On her sixth day in office, President Boluarte continued to struggle to contain a wave of protests that have grown larger and increasingly violent. Protesters have demanded immediate new general elections and the closure of Congress, and some want a new constitution and the release of Mr. Castillo from jail. Police crackdowns on protesters have been criticized by human rights groups as disproportionate and abusive, and only seem to energize demonstrators more. 

After two teenagers were killed in clashes with police in a highland city on Sunday, Ms. Boluarte announced she was sending Congress a law to create a legal path for elections in 2024, two years before her term ends. On Monday, a dozen road blocks by protesters were in place and a second regional airport was taken by demonstrators. Several groups of protesters declared themselves in a state of insurgency.

While Mr. Castillo was unpopular, with an approval rating that ranged from 19% to 31% this year, just 8% of Peruvians thought the opposition-run Congress was doing a good job, according to polls by the Institute of Peruvian Studies. Ms. Boluarte’s Cabinet picks, announced on Saturday, appear aimed at pleasing centrist and right-wing lawmakers, not angry protesters. 

In the meantime, far-left politicians have portrayed Mr. Castillo not as an attempted coup-monger but as the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. A lawmaker who served as his first prime minister claims Mr. Castillo was drugged into reading his message to the country, with no evidence other than his shaky delivery.

Some who voted for Mr. Castillo find the conspiracy theory credible. “They never wanted to let him work,” says Julio Fernandez, a farmer from Mr. Castillo’s home region of Cajamarca. “The Congress and the media and economic powers never accepted him.”

“Right now what’s most worrisome is this escalation of violence,” says Ms. Urrutia. President Boluarte, she says, needs to quickly find a way to “channel different demands and tend to the crisis.”

As presidents have come and gone over the years, calls for change have been repeatedly ignored, especially in rural Peru, says Ms. Urrutia, where the poverty rate is twice as high as in cities and access to basic public services is limited.

“The demands are still there, unattended. They’re still growing,” she says.

But Victor Salinas, a young motorcycle deliveryman who migrated here from Venezuela in 2018, says at least Peru still has the opportunity to elect better leaders in the future.

“From as long as I can remember our president was [Hugo] Chávez,” says Mr. Salinas. “People voted for him, and then when they looked again he’d turned into a dictator.”

Mr. Castillo “wanted to stage a coup to turn into a dictator here, but thank God it didn’t happen,” he says. 

“Viva el Peru!”