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The weeks pass, the marches and the blockades continue. The congressmen also continue putting an entire country in the rocking chair while the dead pile up, which they blame on the current president Dina Boluarte and her prime minister, while the congressmen take their time and discuss whether it is possible to have elections this anus.
The ghost of Sendero Luminoso has returned to walk the streets of Peru. The tragedy of the past became present in everyday language. In the media, social media, and even in Congress, they qualify as terruco
(terrorist) anyone who protests or thinks differently. If they argue, think or argue, they are caviars
(left accommodated).
It serves as a message or reminder, but above all as something premonitory of what could happen if the left comes to power, although the government of Castillo and that of the current president Dina Boluarte are of left
and they were never classified as terrorists.
The government of Professor Castillo was a resounding failure in every sense and history will take its toll on the entire Peruvian left, from the most recalcitrant senderistas to the most lukewarm defenders of human rights, passing over little parties of different nominations, warlords regional, progressive people, caviar intellectuals, etc. For the right in general, not only the extreme, everything is summed up in the fact that the left is terrorist or pro-Senderista, including some bishops, priests and all NGOs. A heavy and difficult inheritance to carry for those who think that Peru requires urgent changes.
The other ghost that reappears in the dark clouds of the Peruvian coast and highlands is that of Chino Fujimori and his alter ego Vladimiro Montesinos, another protagonist of recent history who managed to defeat the Senderistas and the MRTA militarily in a war that pitted the Peruvians, with an approximate balance of 70 thousand deaths. It is true, he ended terrorism and imprisoned his leader Abimael Guzmán, but his government led to the greatest moral and institutional degradation in living memory. Everything was corrupted and degraded.
To top it off, Fujimori left another legacy: the 1993 Constitution, of an extreme neoliberal nature, which leaves the state’s hands tied to intervene and regulate; companies and public resources were privatized and squandered, monopolies were propitiated and gave way, without minimum conditions, to the rapine of transnational corporations and power groups. At this point, the failures of neoliberalism and Peruvian unicameral politics are evident. The Constitution must be adjusted to other times, not be linked to a single economic model and Congress must have a counterweight in a chamber of senators.
Another poisoned inheritance was his daughter Keiko Fujimori, who was the father’s first lady when he put his wife Susana Higuchi in the asylum and then Keiko led to the dismissal of his own brother Kenji from Congress, because he maneuvered irregularly to achieve the release of his father Alberto through a pardon, they say that at that time his father overshadowed him. Nice family.
Keiko Fujimori competed and lost three times in a row in the second electoral round. She says that she is not going to participate again, but in 2021 she had also said that she would not do it and she ended up being a candidate. She has few credentials, except that she studied English in Boston and that Montesinos’ checkbook paid her bill. However, she has extraordinary skills for palace intrigue and she more than demonstrated it by controlling Congress and making life miserable for the incumbent president. She also made Castillo’s life miserable by denouncing an electoral fraud that never existed and that through the best law firms she wanted to eliminate the votes of certain indigenous peasant communities that voted overwhelmingly for Castillo.
Behind the Fujimori’s right-wing populism hides a large group of businessmen, landowners, contractors and Peruvian middle and upper classes who are willing to vote for her in the second round.
One last ghost that haunts the population is that of Chavismo. It is said that Peru will become Venezuela. The population knows perfectly well what is happening in that country, due to the fact that close to a million Venezuelans arrived in Peru and have recounted their hardships and adventures.
The situation continues to get complicated, Congress does not want to leave and agree to set an early election for 2023, they are also going to take their summer vacations.
The only possible way out to have elections in 2023 is the resignation of Dina Boluarte, but she faces her own ghosts. First, the death of 58 protesters must be investigated and clarified, the majority by bullets from soldiers and police. If she doesn’t do it, she will be billed and we could see her accompanying Castillo and Fujimori.
