I’ll tell you about President Castillo’s Peru
Twenty days after the vote, Peru has an elected but not yet proclaimed president. The very small advantage obtained by the winner, Pedro Castillo, supported by the left, is contested by the Fujimorista right. The study by Livio Zanotti, author of ildiavolononmuoremai.it
Arrived in Lima and resolved to stay there until the proclamation of the new President – Pedro Castillo -, whom they call the President of the excluded, they camped peacefully as they could, a few rags and a few fires. Quiet, tidy. Nevertheless, arousing dismay in the uptown neighborhoods, between the Art Nouveau buildings of Miraflores, San Isidro and the imposing Malecón. The wall that protects the beautiful coastal promenade from the waves of the Pacific Ocean, named after 28 de Julio to commemorate a national Independence to them – after 200 years – still unknown. Foreigners in a homeland more than ever worried about the electoral result that the highest state magistracy assigns to one of them, for a difference of only 40 thousand votes, denied, however, by those same losers who observe them from the half-open windows.
In the capital they had never seen so many as to constitute themselves in an impending presence, so that they had forgotten them. And suddenly they are there, by the thousands, children, women, men, wrapped in ponchos and glittering blankets, sitting or when night falls just reclining on the sidewalks, around the fountains, at a corner of the Girón de la Unión from where they look at the presidential palace without letting any emotion shine through. Their ancient fatality has become firmness. With which they intend to defend the electoral victory, their decisive and certified vote, so that it cannot be ignored or canceled. The gray, the yellowish, the black printed on their faces of Asian memory from the many intersections of history is a physiognomy that contrasts with the astonished pallor of the residents.
The limeños re-discover with concern that lost in the inaccessible vastness of inland Peru, from the Andean plateau to the tropic of the Amazon jungle, castes persist: as in India. They are sorrowful and separated peoples of the same nation, with their own thoughts, their first language is not Spanish but Quechua and Aymara: they add up to an abundant quarter of the country's 34 million inhabitants. At the bottom of this segmented anthropology, ignored but blunt, current opinion places the zambos, born to a black and an Indo-American parent; then the mulatos who have one black and one white; and those of different ethnic groups, mostly white and indigenous, who generate the mestizos. Die hard perceptions of differences; but that the experience of secular and common adversities nevertheless led to coexistence. Also through the exercise of the right to vote.
The first to catalog them, rigorously, stamping them one by one with coal, since 1538, were Francisco Pizarro, el Conquistador, and his brother Gonzalo, who needed it to put order in the slave trade. Since then they have continued to live in conditions ranging from austerity to misery. But without ever renouncing dignity and now no longer completely isolated: a minimum of administrative decentralization has gradually allowed the development of an organized local politics in recent years, which is not decisive but exerts a growing weight on the national one. With mobile phones and computers, the digital age has extended it, made it agile and fast, and in terms of communication integrated largely to the national one.
From this very distant but indomitable Peru, the rural master Pedro Castillo, the outsider of indefinite personal ideology but affiliated with the extreme left of Perú Libre, who, albeit by a whisker -40 thousand votes out of the 18 million and 700 thousand expressed in recognized legality and legitimacy, but in a split country – last June 6 he won the presidency of the Republic. In an outstanding official statement praising the exemplary transparency and order in which the consultation took place, the United States Department of State has authoritatively ratified the similar views of the United Nations international observers and those of the Organization of American States ( OSA). The Electoral Tribunal finally rejected by a majority (3 judges against 1) all 943 appeals for annulment for electoral fraud presented by the defeated candidate, the far-right deputy Keiko Fujimori.
Nonetheless, the web of legal quibbles woven by Lima's best law firms that the establishment immediately placed in Keiko's service is not yet entirely undone. The interests at stake, personal and of the large economic groups interested in mining, from oil to precious metals (Peru has the largest gold mine in the world), are enormous. “The corrupt daughter of the murderous dictator”, as Mario Vargas Llosa publicly called her before rushing to his aid to block the way of the reformer Castillo, does not give up and is seen as the last resort to override the electoral defeat. She is desperate because the possibility of avoiding the trial for corruption, money laundering and criminal association in which the prosecution has asked to punish her with 30 years in prison is disappearing; as well as to free his father with the publicly promised pardon once he assumed the presidency.
Since the electoral beginnings, 15 years ago, an impetuous ruthlessness characterizes Keiko's political action. It is the profound trait that binds her to her father, the former president Alberto (1990-2000) of whom, albeit through controversial relationships, she became the political heir before he was sentenced to the long prison sentence for injured humanity and corruption that is serving in a high security penitentiary. The electoral result, which sees it defeated by a very minimal and yet decisive difference, is significant. It shows that while its parliamentary representation is shattered into an excessive number of largely notoriously corrupt parties, the country is instead summarily divided into two blocks of opposing interests: the bourgeoisie of the urban centers that intercepts much of the wealth produced, opposed to the different classes of the province and socially peripheral ones that access it in a reduced part or are completely excluded.
Respect for republican legality and political common sense should dissuade Alberto Fujimori's daughter and the urban elites who support her from any adventurism. To make haste, much more usefully, to outline the limits that the concise electoral advantage achieved gives a glimpse of the reforming intentions of the new government, already in the future held back by the balance of power in Congress. The idea of a constituent assembly that replaces the one imposed by Alberto Fujimori in 1993 with a new democratic and propulsive Magna Carta in 1993 appears today to be projected into a future that is certainly not immediate. Just as a negotiation path seems to be the only viable one for the revision in favor of the public treasury of the mining exploitation concessions to large multinational companies. Just to mention two issues on which dissent is sparking.
The ideological summa of Pedro Castillo and the head of Peru Libre, Vladimir Cerron, although anchored – especially for the latter – to a more philosophical than political Marxism, has never been translated into a concrete government program. More coherent are their references to the socialist thought of José Carlos Mariategui, who in Italy had deepened his knowledge of Vico, Labriola and Croce. Therefore the invocation of an entrepreneur state that interacts with the market, the intention to regulate banking activity, to keep in the country greater shares of the profits derived from the exploitation of the raw materials of which it is rich, to invest in schools and professional training. All ideas that at the level of development reached by Peru, belong to the current vision of progressive populism, not to a revolutionary project.
The extreme liberalism waved by Vargas Llosa and the Darwinian idea of freedom that derives from it, like that hybridized by Fujimorist authoritarianism, compete with full rights on the political-electoral market. In the first round of these presidential elections with 18 candidates competing for the electorate, the slogans obscured the confrontation of the proposals. In the ballot, Keiko, his Fuerza Popular and allies off-screen but not out-of-game committed themselves to the fake news of identifying the contradictory populist reformism of Perú Libre with the delusional ferocity of Sendero Luminoso, the polpottist terrorism that bloodied the country in the decades 1980-90. Shaking his gloomy ghost against Pedro Castillo, who with the peasant defense patrols the raids of Sendero had opposed arms in hand, allowed Keiko to recover much of the disadvantage. Not to cancel it.
His gamble now aims to cancel the election, in any way. The latest led to the resignation of one of the 4 judges of the Electoral Court who rejected the appeals of Keiko's lawyers. The one who had voted to accept part of it. The Court decides by majority. But the law is not entirely explicit in deciding whether it must instead be complete at the time of proclaiming the elected head of state, as pertaining to it. The Fujimorists hope to buy time in this uncertainty. The American head of Human Rights Watch called those resignations an "attack on the rule of law". Meanwhile some barracks are rumbling, a general has been suspended; but the moods remain mixed. It is at this point that Washington has said aloud that it expects everyone in Lima to abide by the rules. Biden doesn't want fires on his continent and smoke signals are already alarming him. Zambos, mulatos and mestizos, silent and irreducible, await.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-il-peru-del-presidente-castillo/ on Fri, 25 Jun 2021 07:11:50 +0000.