By Itzamná Ollantay on April 8, 2021
Pedro Castillo
This Sunday, April 11, more than 25 million Peruvians are eligible to elect at the polls the new President of the Republic and two vice presidents of the country, 130 congressmen and 5 supranational representatives. There are 18 presidential candidates competing for the presidency.
This bicentennial country is currently governed by a fragile transitory government, after an unexpected closing of the Congress of the Republic and the formation of a new one for a period of one and a half years.
In addition, Peru survives the streak of three presidents in just a few days, after the fall of the then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski involved in acts of public corruption eating away at the entire state structure.
Since the establishment of the neoliberal system in this South American country (1992), all its former governors have been or are being prosecuted or imprisoned for acts of corruption, with the exception of one who committed suicide to avoid being arrested, and another who died.
To this political reality that discourages even the most convinced citizens, we must add the COVID19 pandemic that exposed the bicentennial misfortunes of the apparent Peruvian State and condemns to existential uncertainty the Peruvian creole that always believed itself to be above Cuba, Venezuela or Bolivia. In fact, the country is very badly wounded both materially and emotionally.
Under these conditions, the citizens are obliged to go to the polls to vote under penalty of a fine equivalent to the average of 20 dollars. And what can be seen, only hours before the general elections, is that none of the presidential candidates has manage to surpass 10% of the electoral preferences.
This indicates that on June 6, in the second round, it will be defined who will be the next ruler to assume power, without much popular support. It seems that the elections will only prolong the situation of socio-political instability in the country.
How did Peru reach this situation?
At the beginning of the 90’s of the last century, the neoliberal economic system was implemented in Peru as the hegemonic culture. To the extent that not only common goods and public companies were privatized without major social resistance, but also the Peruvian common sense was neoliberalized. In schools, philosophy subjects or anything that stimulates critical thinking were canceled and children were made to believe that “when they grow up, everyone will become a successful free market entrepreneur”.
While they installed this false utopian horizon in the Peruvian common sense, the national oligarchy (through its qualified research centers, its spectacular corporate disinformation media, its churches and its universities) entrenched in the average Peruvian the hatred for anything that sounds or represents “social or political left”. To the extent that the Peruvian leftists themselves have become neoliberalized and are now afraid to openly propose the nationalization of privatized goods and services or the strengthening of the State through public enterprises.
The Peruvian neoliberal experiment is practically where the implacable neoliberal gendarmerie has under control the individual and collective fears and desires of the people in order to avoid any possibility of thinking or promoting processes of transcendental changes.
That is why the “political left” which, in this chaos, has great possibilities of coming to power, confesses publicly and in advance to be against the dictatorial government of the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It promises it would continue with the immoral neoliberal economic policies in order to save private companies with public funds.
The constitutional reform they promise is practically an electoral slogan to win votes. Sad and harsh reality in an impoverished and plundered country but with the illusion of turning its 32 million inhabitants into 32 million successful private entrepreneurs.
But in this country, a laboratory for further psychosocial studies, an electoral phenomenon appears that the Peruvian Creole oligarchy and its Peruvian disinformation media cannot hide. It is the Pedro Castillo phenomenon
Castillo, a peasant, teacher leader, rural elementary school teacher, from the depths of the Andes, challenges the neoliberal ethics and aesthetics of Peru with his mere peasant presence in a spectacular and showy Peru.
With his hat on and pencil in hand, he travels the country, even defeating COVID19, filling the squares and streets with crowds of the “unwanted” survivors of the neoliberal system, proclaiming the slogan: “No more poor people in a rich country”.
Pedro Castillo, with his Andean accent and logic, proposes to nationalize privatized goods, to strengthen the State through public enterprises, to agree on a new Political Constitution to reorganize State institutions, to undertake a universal education for critical thinking…
We do not know exactly how many Peruvians will feel identified with the “Pedro Castillo attitude”. What is certain though is that his disruptive presence in the apathetic Peruvian electoral situation is already a great achievement for the hope of any structural changes in the country.
No one assures that the proposals put forward by Castillo are feasible in their entirety. The only certainty is that Peru, product of 30 years of continuous neoliberalism, is a deluded beggar that even lost “the golden bench” in which it was sitting hoping to become one day a business hotbed.
We do not know exactly how many Peruvians will feel identified with the “Pedro Castillo attitude”. What is certain is that his disruptive presence in the apathetic Peruvian electoral situation is already a great achievement for the hope of structural changes in the country.
No one assures that the proposals put forward by Castillo are feasible in their entirety. The only certainty is that Peru, product of 30 years of continuous neoliberalism, is a deluded beggar that even lost “the golden bench” in which it was sitting hoping to become one day a business seed.
Source: teleSUR, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English