Francisco Sagasti removes another Minister of the Inter …

From Lima. He has held the presidency for only three weeks and has already appointed his third interior minister. President Francisco Sagasti – appointed to the post by Congress on November 15 after massive citizen protests toppled the ultra-conservative government in less than a week. Manuel Merino, product of a parliamentary coup against Martin vizcarra– He had to change interior minister again in less than a week, after the new head of the sector publicly questioned his decisions. Retired police general Cluber Aliaga only served five days as interior minister. He was replaced by José Elice, who was secretary general of the Government Palace and who has no previous experience in citizen security. He is the third Home Secretary in three weeks and the seventh so far this year.

The crisis erupted after In recent days, General Aliaga, still a minister, has appeared in the media and later in Congress shooting his own government. He initially criticized the Sagasti government’s decision to retire eighteen police generals and later justified the brutal police crackdown on the protests that led to the removal of the Merino government. Positions which went in the opposite direction to that of the government and which left President Sagasti very badly, who had repeatedly defended the purge in the police force and harshly criticized the police repression ordered by Merino. It was an open challenge from the minister to the president. After these statements, Sagasti asked General Aliaga to resign. Maintaining him would have left him as a weak president, without leadership in his own ministerial team, without clear leadership, discredited in the public eye.

Within days of assuming the presidency, Sagasti implemented a police purge that blew up the heads of eighteen generals, who held the most senior positions in the police leadership. Police crackdown on massive protests against short-lived Merino government, which left two dead and around two hundred injured, and the corruption of senior officials in the purchase of elements of protection against covid 19 for the police officers, were the explanations of this purge.

It was questioned that among the group of generals who were retired, there were some who were not involved in these events and that a general who occupied the 19th position in the ranks of the institution had been appointed chief of police. The controversy over the police purge was taken advantage of by the parliamentary groups that had deposed Vizcarra and put Merino in the presidency and that a few days later, due to popular pressure, had to back down and name Sagasti as president, and by other sectors of the right. the ultra-conservatives who lost power with the fall of Merino and those interested in boycotting police repression and corruption investigations, to seek to regain space, regroup forces and counter-attack to corner and destabilize the government. The parliamentary groups which had promoted the coup against Vizcarra threatened to deny the ministerial cabinet a vote of confidence – an essential condition for any new cabinet – if Interior Minister Rubén Vargas, who had led the police purge, was kept in office. They pressured the government until it backed down and changed Minister Vargas. Sagasti got the vote of confidence in Congress for his ministerial cabinet in return for his minister’s sacrifice, but came out of this weakened episode. He had only been in office for two weeks.

After dismissing Vargas, the president appointed General Aliaga to replace him, a former policeman who seemed closer to demobilized senior officials, his comrades in arms, than to the government. A difficult decision to understand. It was not explained how Aliaga came to government. The change was interpreted as a setback in the president’s expressed desire to investigate police repression and corruption at the top, and initiate institutional reform. Sagasti has denied that there has been a setback. But his new minister had other plans.

Last Thursday, at a conference with foreign media correspondents, including Page 12Sagasti had firmly defended the police purge and assured that there was no possibility of overturning this decision. “The removal of generals is a legitimate decision taken by the president. The changes in the font were not a mistake. There is nothing to discuss the retirement of the police, we have already turned the page. With the change of minister, nothing changes. We have the same process going on as when the government started, the only thing that has changed is who will be responsible, ”Sagasti told the foreign press. Two days later, he ratified these statements on a local radio station.

But his Home Secretary thought totally differently. He had his own agenda. And on Sunday, he came out to publicly confront the president. That day, he gave a television interview in which he spoke out against the government’s decision to change the leadership of the police. He spoke in defense of the generals sacked a few days earlier by the government of which he was now part. He called the government-ordered police purge defended by the president “hasty” and “unjust” and questioned its legality. And he left the door open to the possibility of reinstating the retired generals, something the president had ruled out shortly before.

The following day, the Minister of the Interior continued to shoot at the government. He appeared before Congress and, as if he was a minister of the ultra-conservative Merino and not of the Sagasti government, he made a closed defense of the brutal police repression against citizen protests ordered by Merino and accused the protesters of being the culprits of the violence, violence which, as the footage reveals and the government has admitted, was sparked by police repression.

After Aliaga’s statements, the government had no choice but to leave. During his brief five-day tenure, a protester was killed in a clash between police and striking farmers, causing a serious crisis for the government. Aliaga’s appointment has so far been the biggest mistake of the Sagasti government. An error that has taken its toll this week. Keeping him in office would have been suicidal.