Peru: Right-wing offensive targets radical wing of Pedro Castillo government | Slander campaign against the chief of staff and the chancellor

From Lima

Before serving a month in office, the president Pedro Castillo, whose electoral victory is considered historic, faces coup plots to remove him from power. The offensive against him targets the sector furthest to the left of government. It is the flank against which it is fired to weaken the newly launched progressive regime of the rural teacher who has come to the presidency by gathering demands for change and reclaiming from excluded sectors. He seeks to divide the government between supposed radicals and moderates, to corner it. With these attacks, some would be looking to push Castillo to the center, but the goal of the right wing leading this offensive is to get him out of the way.

The elites do not accept as president this professor of Andean origin who wants to change the neoliberal model and the deep inequalities. What the right fears most is that the Castillo government succeeds, because that would mean that the changes it wants to avoid are consolidated. The Congress, controlled by the right and which with two thirds of the votes can dismiss the head of state by invoking the figure of “moral incapacity” without having to prove anything irregular, is a key space in the destabilizing plot. The media function as enthusiastic accomplices in obstructionism and the parliamentary coup.

Cerron and Bellido

The right is firing relentlessly against ministers, members of Congress and leaders of the ruling party. The prime targets of these attacks are the secretary general of the ruling Peru Libre party, Vladimir cerron, and Congressman and Ministerial Chief of Staff Guido Bellido, respectively, considered the leader and a figurehead of the so-called “radical sector” of the regime. They aim for them, but the ultimate goal is to overthrow Castillo. In addition to political and media attacks, there is a legal offensive against it.

This week, the prosecution opened an investigation into Bellido and Cerrón for terrorism based on the testimony of a person who claims to have seen them some time ago in the mountainous area of ​​Vraem to supposedly meet with the leaders of the latter. remaining column of what was Shining path, the Maoist armed group defeated more than twenty years ago. Column that years ago moved away from the original trekking and has become an armed group allied with the drug trade that controls this remote coca-producing region. Two members of Congress from the ruling party – one of them Cerrón’s brother, Waldemar, spokesman for the ruling party– are also included in this research. This lonely testimony is all the prosecution has who are looking for other evidence, but the right has already condemned them as terrorists. Bellido is also being investigated in another prosecutor’s office for apologizing for terrorism for failing to describe Sendero as a terrorist in an interview given months ago, and for praising him. ‘a senderista who died in combat almost 40 years ago. An accusation which is a persecution for an opinion. Accusing everyone on the left of terrorism is a common harmful practice of the Peruvian right.

There is another tax investigation, which also includes Bellido and Cerrón, por collecting bribes in the regional government of Junín, an Andean region of which Cerrón was governor, and the alleged use of this money to finance the Free Peru party, a hypothesis of the prosecution under investigation, but that the opposition and the media accept as a penalty. Cerrón has, in another case, a three-year suspended prison sentence for corruption. This disputed track record of the most important leader of the ruling party provides opponents of the government with weapons to attack the regime.

Bejar

The offensive against the most left-wing sector of government includes Foreign Minister Héctor Béjar, a guerrilla in the 1960s and today a respected 85-year-old intellectual. Fujimorism has applied to Congress to question him, intending to censor him and thereby force him to resign. The McCarthyist hysteria cannot stand that a former guerrilla with a long left activism is a minister. They accuse him of being a terrorist for having been a guerrilla. They demonize him for distancing himself from the Lima Group and because of the possibility of Peru leaving this corpse unburied which was a great failure, something which has been disseminated by unofficial versions but which has not been confirmed. Revealing his aversion to regional integration, they also ask him if he supports the bailout of Unasur.

In dialogue with Page 12, the deputy Sigrid Bazan, from Juntos por el Perú, a progressive coalition allied with the government, considered to be part of the moderate sector, underlines that the attacks by the right against the so-called radical sector of the regime “are part of a logic of weakening and destabilizing the President. “” They are looking for all sides and there they found one. With the power and media spaces at its disposal, the right insists on the differences that may exist, as there are in all parties, to seek to dismantle and divide the government bloc. The spirit of all of us, from different sectors of the left, trying to build for governance, is that these attacks do not affect us, that we resolve our differences internally, without disturbing the articulation processes. We have differences, but I would not speak of differences between moderates and radicals, but of different points of view on commonalities. I would bet that these attacks will strengthen us and unite us more in our coincidences ”, launches the legislator, one of the young new figures of the left.

Fujimorists

The right-wing opposition, led by Fujimori, has already launched its destabilization strategy in Congress. The ministers are just starting to get comfortable in their positions and have already announced that they will be summoned to explain their management, which is only a few days old, and they are asking for resignations. A parliamentary commission has been formed to investigate these early days of the Castillo government, something never seen before, and another commission of inquiry into the elections, insisting on the false account of an electoral fraud that never existed and that the right invented in an attempt to prevent Castillo’s victory. They did not succeed, but they now intend to challenge the Congressional electoral process to delegitimize the Castillo government.

“I have no doubt that there are sectors that are not going to give up the intention to remove a democratically elected president and put whoever they want. Without a doubt, there is action in Congress to try to impeach the president, but we can stop this attempt, for which we have a good source of support among the citizens. Citizen pressure, and certain media which may still have a more objective space, are essential to stop the attempts to impeach the president, ”explains Sigrid Bazán.