Until the early hours of yesterday morning, the opposition benches had not secured the 87 votes to remove Pedro Castillo from office, but the surprise message of the closure of Congress paved the way and that is evident in the final vote: 16 legislators pro-government supporters ended up tipping the balance towards vacancy, in the third and final attempt.
According to the detail of the vote, the opposition benches and congressmen added 86 votes in yesterday’s plenary session. That is the most objective figure on the impossibility of a possible vacancy. That, until before the announcement of the closure of the Congress of the Republic.
But Pedro Castillo’s message made legislators from left-wing caucuses who internally or in statements to the media had announced their vote against the vacancy, in the motion promoted by legislator Edward Málaga, change their position.
It was then the votes of 15 congressmen from the leftist benches and the vote of the resigning minister Heidy Juárez that ended up concretizing the departure of Pedro Castillo.
Heidy Juárez resigned from her position as Minister for Women and in her letter she expressed that Pedro Castillo’s decision to close Congress does not conform to his democratic principles and departs from the constitutional order.
The votes of the left
From the Peru Libre store there were six votes in favor of the vacancy: Alex Flores, María Agüero, Américo Gonza Castillo, Abel Reyes Cam, Waldemar Cerrón and Flavio Cruz Mamani. (The latter had initially announced the vote against him).
The Magisterial Bloc contributed with three votes from Alex Paredes Gonzales, Elizabeth Medina Hermosilla and Edgar Tello.
In Cambio Democrático they issued a message rejecting the closure of Congress and voted in favor of the vacancy Ruth Luque Ibarra, Sigrid Bazán Narro and Edgard Reymundo.
The latter was the delegate and responsible for the report that allowed the filing of the three constitutional complaints against Dina Boluarte for the case of the Apurímac Club and others in the Subcommittee on Constitutional Accusations.
And the other three votes from the left that helped define the vacancy were from Jorge Marticorena Mendoza and Víctor Cutipa Ccama, from Perú Bicentenario, and Luis Kamiche Morante, from Perú Democrático.
The 86 votes of the opposition bloc and some with an ambiguous position such as Luis Picón or Héctor Valer, together with these 16 votes from the ruling party, added up, in the end, 102 votes to seal Castillo’s vacancy due to permanent moral incapacity.
On the other hand, there were 6 votes against, 10 in abstention and 10 that did not respond to the call for a vote. (See details in the box).
The data
Motion to file. Although yesterday’s plenary session was convened to vote on the motion to vacate Edward Málaga, in the end Congress voted for a new resolution to vacate Castillo on the grounds of the attempted closure of the Legislature.
Infographic – The Republic
