Peru’s permanent coup
7 December, the Peruvian Congress impeached President Pedro Castillo: deputies accused him of attempting a coup and creating a state of emergency. Congress then declared the head of state guilty of the ‘crime of rebellion’ and had him imprisoned. The prosecution requested that the Constitutional Court give Castillo a pre-trial detention period of 18 months.
While the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) refers to the ‘supreme recourse ... to revolt against tyranny and oppression’, article 346 of Peru’s penal code states that revolt should be punished by an ‘exile of no less than ten years and no more than 20 years.’ Those in power are obviously anxious to condemn any rebellion as a threat to order; for social movements, meanwhile, revolt can be a means of building the new world to which they aspire. But what happens when it is power itself that revolts?
On 11 April 2021, to everyone’s surprise, an unknown politician won the first round of the Peruvian presidential election, with 18.92% of the vote. Castillo, who is of indigenous descent and comes from one of the poorest cities in the country, was the candidate for Free Peru (Perú Libre, PL), a party founded by Vladimir Cerrón, which took a line that was Marxist, Leninist and Mariategist (named after the Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui, 1894-1930).
His victory was a snub for Lima’s neoliberal, and often racist, political elite, accustomed to leading the country without having to worry about rural affairs and quick to compare any leftist project to the Shining Path guerrilla group and its abuses. Soon, the Peruvian bourgeoisie activated the levers of power to hinder the threat from Castillo, whom it considered a ‘communist hick’ who wanted to convene a Constituent Assembly and spoke of social transformation.
Media smear campaign
As usual, this started in the media, especially the two biggest daily newspapers, El Comercio and La República. The Comercio Group belongs to the Miró Quesada family, one of the richest families in Peru which controls around 80% of the country’s written press (1) and also owns tourism, mining, real estate and banking companies. The group took advantage of Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship (1990-2000). In 2011, two journalists who had worked for El Comercio, Patricia Montero and José Jara, explained that they had been fired ‘for refusing to follow the
