Analysis - Castillo’s Ouster Is Not the End of Peru’s Political Crisis: The unfortunate truth is that Peru’s political crisis will likely get worse before it gets better (Foreign Policy - 12/16/2022)

Castillo’s Ouster Is Not the End of Peru’s Political Crisis

After the successful fast-track impeachment of Peru’s former president, Pedro Castillo, on Dec. 7, euphoric lawmakers posed for photographs on the floor of the country’s Congress, laughing and giving thumbs-up. Their elation was understandable. For nearly 17 months, Castillo’s chaotic administration had staggered from corruption scandal to policy failure and back again while repeatedly clashing with lawmakers, climaxing in Castillo’s abrupt TV announcement just hours earlier that—in a flagrant violation of the nation’s constitution—he was going to dissolve Congress and rule by decree.

But the triumphalism could hardly have been more inappropriate. Not because Castillo, who faces six separate corruption investigations, did not deserve impeachment; aside from the authoritarian denouement, his brief period in office has done deep and lasting damage to Peru’s institutions and economy, seeing the country’s credit rating downgraded while Castillo packed the public bureaucracy with a mix of unqualified and ethically unfit apparatchiks. Nor even because Peruvians are suffering intensely right now, all while being ignored by the feuding far-left executive and ultraconservative legislators; half are experiencing food insecurity, double the pre-pandemic level, and many more are suffering the human and economic aftereffects of the pandemic, with Peru registering the world’s highest COVID-19 mortality rate.

What was truly jarring about the lawmakers’ joy was that Castillo’s ouster in no way marks the end of Peru’s political crisis, which has been simmering since 2016. More likely is that it is merely another staging post in the country’s descent into polarization, ungovernability, and—in a worst-case scenario—a potential resurgence, albeit on a smaller scale, of the violence of the 1980s and ’90s that, according to the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, claimed the lives of nearly 70,000 Peruvians, mainly the rural poor caught in the crossfire of Maoist insurgents and the security forces seeking to crush them. The unfortunate truth is that Peru’s political and social turmoil will likely get worse before it gets better. The question is by how much.