Pedro Castillo’s bungled coup was, in a sense, on brand for him, DanielGAlarcon writes: a fitting end to his year and a half of improvisation and incompetence.
On Wednesday, December 7th, moments after President Pedro Castillo of Peru announced that he was dissolving Congress and instituting a nationwide curfew, and would be ruling by edict until a new legislature could be elected, a Peruvian friend texted me what I thought would be news from Lima, an up-to-the-minute report on the very latest from the streets of the capital.
The first coup of my generation, of course, took place thirty years ago, in 1992, when then President Alberto Fujimori surrounded Congress with tanks, censored newspapers and television stations, and arrested journalists and opposition leaders, launching a dictatorship that would last for almost a decade.In fact, it happened so fast, we almost did miss it. Within a few hours, Castillo’s big adventure in illegal executive actions was over.
It was, even by the standards of Peruvian politics, a breathtaking, head-spinning farce: Castillo’s shock announcement came just before noon local time, broadcast live to the country, the printed pages of his speech shaking visibly in his hands.
“It’s fortunate that yesterday’s events were so self-evidently illegal,” Vega Franco told me. A pratfall like this one was, in a sense, on brand for Castillo, a fitting end to his year and a half of improvisation and incompetence. An inexperienced outsider, with waning support outside Lima and deep unpopularity in the capital, he won the Presidency in July of 2021 by a razor-thin margin, and never did much to consolidate his power. By any measure, his Presidency was calamitous.
Castillo’s Presidency may be over, but its failure only underscores the gravity of the political crisis of the past decade. Boluarte is the country’s seventh President in as many years. The economy continues to struggle in its post--19 recovery, a catastrophic drought is threatening crops in the highlands, and corruption, clearly, remains endemic. Removing Castillo does nothing to address any of those problems. “It was like a season finale,” Vega Franco said.
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