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For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Peru has been in the cool zone for a while now. The left, long crippled by the memory of Shining Path, isn't really a serious factor. Peru's got one of the highest coronavirus mortality rates in the world. A good outcome is basically impossible. But things could definitely get worse...

Here are the twitter accounts of some left-wing/succ dem parties and organizations: https://twitter.com/FrenteAmplioPe [Broad front, the main left-ish party in the last general election] https://twitter.com/juntosperu?lang=en [Together for Peru, the left-ish party that's emerged more recently and seems likely to run best in the next general election]

Here's my opinion/explanation of the situation:

  • The thing to know about Peruvian politics generally is that there is an indigenous vs colonizer thread to every political dispute that is all mixed up with and often confuses the left/right struggle the average Chapo is more familiar with. And there's also a strong urban/rural divide that confuses the worker/bourgeoisie struggle--there were literal peasants in the country within easy living memory.
  • In 2016, Peru elected Kuczynski president. He was a boring centrist lib, and the only thing you can say in his favor was that he was better than his opponent Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a dictator, representing the nationalist right. But... the Fujimoristas controlled Congress. So this set up a brutal battle between libs (presidency) and neolibs/far right (congress), which lasted two years.
  • By 2018, both of sides got owned by the Odebrecht scandal (lava jato in Brazil). Keiko was forced out for being involved, Kuczynski resigned because he paid off Keiko's brother to force her out and avoid impeachment. This is all "alleged," but who really cares--point is, the two most powerful forces in Peruvian politics in the 2016 general election had devoured each other by the end of 2018. (And actually, the prior president was also charged.)
  • So in Peru there are two Vice Presidents. Martín Vizcarra was first up to bat, and he was also just a basic lib, but he did an anticorruption campaign that people liked. The popular support he had compared to congress went to his a head a bit, and he started cracking down hard on parliamentary immunity, and proposed some constitutional amendments. Since a lot of people in Congress were corrupt, they naturally started playing hardball because they were facing jail time.
  • Long story short, he dissolved congress (which was constitutional, but controversial), and there was a congressional election in 2018. Vizcarra was doing a lib "I'm not going to sully myself with partisan politics thing" and ended up with a super fractured congress with all sorts of weird parties like FREPAP taking up the slack that was left from the absolute collapse of Fujimorismo. (Meanwhile, on the left, Frente Amplio, which had done pretty well for a left-ish party in Peru and got 20% of the presidential vote in 2016, started fracturing. Because of course.)
  • Another key thing: in the constitutional food fight over dissolving congress, they appointed the second vice president as president, but she refused, and resigned. So there was no vice president anymore. Obviously this matters a lot, now.
  • The election didn't do shit to solve anything really, though some anticorruption amendments passed, and then coronavirus happened. Vizcarra went hard on quarantines, early, but it didn't work because the Peruvian state doesn't really have the public health resources to prevent the spread. So Peruvians got the worst of both worlds: devastating quarantine plus mass death. It was and is heartbreaking, Chapos.
  • Vizcarra's whole deal was that he had popular support, where Congress didn't, so they didn't the balls to come at him. But with COVID, he lost some of that support, which emboldened Congress, and basically leads us to the present, where Congress impeached him over an old corruption charge. Almost all of Congress voted in favor of this, btw, including the left parties. There's no love for Vizcarra in Congress, period.
  • Without a vice president, the president of the congress, Merino, was next in the line of succession. This is where things get complicated. See, Peru has a history of Congress bringing coups into power. Merino immediately made a far-right government with heavy Navy presence (in Peru, the Navy is always more right wing than the Army, which actually led one of Latin America's few left-ish military dictatorships in the 60s/70s). It was also revealed that he had been communicating with the Navy before the impeachment vote. So basically, Merino should have just made a milquetoast interim cabinet until the elections in April, but he overreached, and did so in a way that has a lot of negative resonance in Peruvian history. Which led to the protests we see now. (Also, it appears there were more Vizcarra fans out there than Merino thought.)
  • This isn't the late 80s, there's no Shining Path, and coups are out of fashion in Latin America. So it looks like, today, the protesters succeeded in getting Merino out of power.
  • These protestors are mostly pro-Vizcarra libs though, so it's not like we're getting a revolutionary government.
  • As always in Peru, the question now is "what will the military do?" and then, second, "what will Congress do?"
  • Unfortunately, there's no real left force here to take advantage. But you never know--now it seems like absolutely anything could happen in the next elections, in April 2021. All the old powers and parties are almost entirely discredited. So, stay tuned!
  • All this upheaval will almost certainly interfere with the COVID response at a really bad time, though.
  • congressbaseballfan [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Thanks for the write up. Any insights into indigenous left movements, particularly given the proximity and success of left movements in Columbia and Bolivia? Or did Fujimori and co. have a broader impact?

    • skollontai [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      The Bolivian parallel is confusing right? How could one country have MAS and the other, neighboring country have... nothing much going on? I would ascribe it to a few things:

      • There are big demographic differences. Bolivia has an indigenous majority that surrounds a comparatively small rich "white" (they think they are, anyway) minority in the cities. Peru is basically three different countries: a wealthier, whiter coastal area; the Andean highlands; and the Amazon. The indigenous people in the Amazon departments are culturally distinct from the Quechua-speaking people in the mountains. At times, the various indigenous groups have been in tension (lots of highland folks were brought to the Amazon to do labor on plantations and ranches that took land from other indigenous peoples). Bolivia is also very plurinational, but the history is more favorable to a wider indigenous movement.
      • Shining Path and Fujimori definitely have some blame. The public was propagandized to view anything left of social democracy as a call for brutal violence, and the left wing institutions that did exist were brutally suppressed by Fujimori. I don't think the dictatorship would be enough by itself though (see the flowering of the left in Chile), they needed Shining Path as a foil to do the lasting damage they did.
      • Land reform under Bermúdez made a lot of the peasant class small land holders or members of agricultural syndicates. This to a degree relieved a lot of the tensions that continued to fester in Bolivia.
      • Peru is richer than Bolivia, just due to geography, resources and size.

      All that being said, there are a lot of cool indigenous organizations out there, doing ecological work in the Amazon, helping revitalize the syndicates, organizing people in the slums. There's plenty of reason for hope in the longer term, it just hasn't cohered into a national political force that can achieve a majority in the upcoming crisis election.