I’ll tell you about the political tragedy of Peru
Left to itself by a policy that has largely betrayed it, Peru seeks a way out of the impasse in which its institutions have ended up. The in-depth study by Livio Zanotti
The dissolution of the rule of law can become an unstoppable vertigo, in which corruption and inefficiency, despair and blood reproduce themselves as amoebas that tirelessly engulf its institutions. An effervescent economic spring, such as the one that has recently benefited Peru, is not enough to stop this more hidden and lethal pandemic than Covid, which is also incessant slaughter of lives. Without a strategic nucleus capable of conceiving a truly renewing action, even the largest and most explosive protest, however courageous and persistent it may be, is not conclusive. This is confirmed by yet another tragic crisis that has flared up in Peru, after having smoldered under the ashes of political transformation in recent months and years and decades.
Now yet another head of state has resigned, Manuel Merino, 59, a questionable and much discussed former Speaker of the Chamber. The riots in the square that for a week, incessant, have traveled the streets of Lima and Callao, with two young people killed by the secret police and hundreds of injured, forced him to give up which is actually an escape. He had replaced with a parliamentary coup (Peru has a single-chamber system) the controversial and nevertheless legitimate head of state, Martin Vizcarra , 57, shortly after his mandate expired and with the date of the more than next elections already called. A politically transversal government is formed, with displaced persons of opposite origins. The transparent transformation of the operation sparked popular indignation that overflowed in the squares of the major urban centers of the coast, from Arequipa and Nazca, up to Chimbote and Chiclayo, on the border with Ecuador.
"In Peru it is easier to eliminate a President than to condemn a murderer", is the comment most repeated in these hours. Vizcarra had in turn succeeded the centrist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in March 2018, pursued by persistent and consistent allegations of embezzlement. Then he too, although for episodes however unproven and referring to times when he administered a province of the Andean country, ended up being skewered by the same poisonous darts. Precisely the repetition of similar situations, which almost without political distinctions and solution of continuity have decimated the highest hierarchies of the Republic in the last 30 years at least, has led to a progressive reduction of the guarantees granted to the head of state. And to a considerably increased power of control and interdiction of Parliament, perhaps ill conceived, for a country of 35 million inhabitants and only 130 deputies, however, divided into a myriad of parties and factions as unstable as they are changeable in their respective compositions and political lines .
Vizcarra had opposed the attempts periodically renewed by the extreme right hegemonized by the Japanese-Peruvian clan of Fujimori, to free the former president Alberto, who is serving 25 years in prison for crimes of harm to humanity and embezzlement (crimes committed during his mandate of President: 1990-2000). As well as his daughter Keiko, genius as brilliant as evil of the large family, in turn imprisoned for corruption (she is one of the numerous South American politicians convicted, for having received illicit funding, in exchange for public contracts from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht ). This magnificent country is now the scene of unbridled ambitions and the most atrocious crimes, betrayals and usurpations, rivalries fought with intrigues that touch sectors of the armed forces and stage Shakespearean passions.
A Parliament split into three trends leaves the country left to itself in these hours, in a power vacuum poisoned by interests and manifest hatreds, although not all of them can be said. Yesterday, after Merino's resignation, there was an agreement to provisionally replace him with a center-left candidate, Rocio Silva Santisteban, 57, a renowned poet and active journalist. But the vote overturned it: it received only 42 votes in favor, 52 against, 25 abstentions. During the night negotiations and clashes resumed, especially in the popular Callao.
Basically, squeezed between Fujimorists and center-left, the democratic system is now playing its chances of getting out of the impasse it has found itself in, on what the Christian Democrat centrists will decide, which largely correspond to the abstainers. I'm the tip of the scale. While in the streets there are shouts against the Constitutional Court to decide quickly on the appeal presented by former president Martin Vizcarra.
Livio Zanotti
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-la-tragedia-politica-del-peru/ on Mon, 16 Nov 2020 06:40:11 +0000.