Peru continues with its judicial festival of convictions of heads of state. Hours ago, former interim president Martín Vizcarra received a 14-year prison sentence for acts of corruption. This Thursday it was the turn of the former president, Pedro Castillo: 11 years, five months and 15 days in prison for his attempt to dissolve Congress on December 7, 2022. The legislature won him over and dismissed him. “This court, in majority, considers that the facts presented in the accusation constitute the crime of conspiracy to rebel,” the judges noted. In his sentence, the president recalled by Congress “was arrested in flagrante delicto for committing the crime of rebellion by having attacked the powers of the State and the constitutional order.”
The rural teacher who in 2021 won the second round Keiko Fujimori He conspired almost alone. “Although it is true that it is indisputably proven that Pedro Castillo, in his capacity as president, resolved to attack the constitutional order, however, from the proven facts, the minimum organization of an uprising in arms is not seen to have been fully established,” the court noted. The court considered that Premier Betssy Chávez, currently holed up in the Mexican embassy, was a participant in the self-coup.
The Castillo case did nothing more than remind Peruvians of the institutional fragility of a country that believed it had recovered democracy after the flight of autocrat Alberto Fujimori. Presidents Alejandro Toledo and Ollanta Humala are imprisoned for corruption crimes. Alan García committed suicide before being arrested. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Dinal Boluarte dismissed by Congress.
In this context, the unpopular legislature decided to disqualify Willy Huerta Olivas for 10 years, who served as Castillo’s Minister of the Interior in December 2022.
Castillo’s electoral victory in 2021 surprised everyone and everyone. He had played a minimal role in a teachers’ conflict. He was a candidate for a minor party, Perú Libre, which, due to the enormous political fragmentation of that country, finished in the second round with 20% of the votes. He entered the Pizarro Palace on behalf of a nationalist left, but his management was so erratic that not only did he change ministers almost 80 times, but he ended up associating with conservative sectors to guarantee survival in the Executive that turned out to be impossible. In his brief mandate, the rural teacher was never able to govern and jumped into the void by promoting a self-coup as Fujimori had done in 1992.
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