The Peruvian President peter castledenounced this Saturday an attempted coup d’état and asked to activate the Democratic Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) to reassure the country after complaints by a businesswoman that they would implicate him in acts of corruption.
“I call on the international community and the Peruvian people to activate the Inter-American Democratic Charter and remain vigilant against any destabilizing attempt and coup in the country,” Castillo said on his Twitter account.
I call on the international community and the Peruvian people to activate the Inter-American Democratic Charter and remain vigilant against any destabilizing attempt and coup in the country, perpetrated by those who still do not accept their defeat and attack the citizenry. (4/4)
– Pedro Castillo Terrones (@PedroCastilloTe)
February 26, 2022
“A series of speculations are circulating in the monopoly press that have the objective of attacking democracy. The same ones who conspired against the previous presidents now want to do it against the government of the people,” he said.
“I denounce in advance this type of actions that only insist on political maneuvers undemocratic in order to generate instability in the country,” he added.
According to the press, the businesswoman Karelim López, who is being investigated for her alleged participation in crimes of corruption, compromised the president in statements before the Prosecutor’s Office, pointing him out to activities of an alleged criminal organization entrenched in the government. In this sense, they indicated that it would be infiltrated in the government, various ministries and Congress.
The objective of this organization, assured the newspaper La República in its digital edition, would be to obtain money with public works tenders.
The money collected, according to López, would be used to pay the debts that Castillo would have contracted in the 2021 electoral campaign in which he defeated the right-wing Keiko Fujimori.
“I have to pay the businessmen who have financed my campaign,” the president reportedly told López, the newspaper reported.
“The most relevant thing about the statement is that it states that President Pedro Castillo is part of a mafia that operates in the Ministry of Transport and Communications directing tenders in the sector,” said the newspaper El Comercio after noting that the businesswoman gave her statement on the 18th. February, before the money laundering prosecutor Luz Taquire.
López appears in an investigation that also involves Castillo, for allegedly having “intervened -improperly and indirectly-” in a public bidding process for the construction of a vehicular bridge over the Huallaga River, in the San Martín region, north of Peru.
Castillo maintained that the businesswoman “has given the Prosecutor’s Office statements without legal basis or consistency with the truth that threaten the ethics and transparency of all investigation procedures.”
They want vacancy
For his part, the head of the ruling Peru Libre party, Vladimir Cerrón, said on Twitter that “the media is preparing the ground to accuse the president of leading a criminal organization and parliament presents a vacancy motion this week.”
“It is demonstrated that the approach of the lobbyist Karelin López, to the president, was always with the objective of generating grounds for vacancy,” former chief of staff Guido de Bellido said on Twitter.
“The president is not involved in any act of corruption. The Prosecutor’s Office is making a circus to find his vacancy“, said Eduardo Pachas, Castillo’s lawyer, before the press.
After describing the accusations as extremely serious, former President Martín Vizcarra (2018-2020) requested the president’s resignation.
“If (the statement) is true, President (Pedro) Castillo definitely cannot continue in office,” Vizcarra, who was removed by Congress in 2020, told reporters.
The complaints are published ten days after the presentation of the ministerial cabinet in Parliament to support the general government policy and request a vote of confidence.
Castillo, 52, won the last elections last June at the head of a small Marxist-Leninist party with 50.12% of the vote, in a close ballot against the right-wing Keiko Fujimori.
