One year on, Peru’s president fights for political survival
One year since his improbable victory, Pedro Castillo is mired in corruption allegations and congressional deadlock.
One year into his five-year term, Castillo has survived two impeachment attempts, a whiplash-inducing change of cabinet ministers, and deepening economic and political strife.
Last summer, Castillo, a political fledgling and son of illiterate farmers, stormed into Lima from his native Cajamarca in Peru’s northern Andes. An improbable frontman for his Marxist Free Peru party, he promised to rewrite Peru’s constitution, redistribute mineral wealth and resuscitate a nation reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic.
His deeply unpopular far-right challenger, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Peruvian strongman Alberto Fujimori, admonished voters that Castillo’s economic policies would steer the country into a crisis similar to Venezuela’s. But to many among Peru’s exasperated electorate, which had endured four presidents and two congresses in five years, both candidates represented dangerous extremes. Castillo won by just 44,000 votes in a runoff election last June.
“When he came into office, it’s not at all that he enjoyed the mandate of a majority,” Cynthia McClintock, a political science professor at George Washington University, told Al Jazeera. “He faced a congress in which forces on the right were very opposed to him, and a lot of people voted for him very worried.”
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