Today, Explained - Peru’s democracy crisis

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Dozens have died in anti-government protests in Peru. Journalist Simeon Tegel reports from Lima on how the mounting anger over corruption and inequality has implications for the entire hemisphere. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a typical year, over a million people visit Machu Picchu. The lost city of the Incas is by far the biggest draw for tourists in Peru. It's one of the biggest attractions on the continent. But this past weekend, some unprecedented news. Machu Picchu would be shutting down indefinitely. Authorities have closed the famous Machu Picchu site, with rescue teams evacuating 400 tourists Saturday. The closure comes as anti-government protests in Peru

continue to spread across the country. Protesters are demanding the resignation of the country's president. More than 40 people have been killed in clashes with security forces. But these protests aren't just affecting Machu Picchu or Peru. They've got implications for the entire continent, maybe the entire hemisphere. That's ahead on Today Explained.

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from, we reached out to Simeon Tegel this week to find out what's going on in Peru. He's a freelance journalist who covers the country for the Washington Post. So it's about noon Wednesday right now. Things are fairly quiet in the capital here in Lima, but that's normal. The protests start later on in the afternoon and then stretch into the evening and the night. And they are usually now involving violent clashes between the police,

who are using riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets. There are a lot of protesters, perhaps the majority, who are peaceful, but there is a violent fringe who have a different agenda. And they are engaging in violent clashes with the police. They're using their own makeshift riot shields, throwing rocks, that kind of thing. But that's what's been happening over the last few days, and I think we're going to see more of it tonight. Why should the world be taking note of these protests in Peru? Well, I think this is another domino in this global trend of democracies in trouble. Peru has been, its democracy has been pretty fragile and on the back foot since at

least 2016. But really, in the last 18 months, the decline has been notable. First, while Pedro Castillo was president, he was a disastrous president, incompetent and corrupt, and had really betrayed the voters, the poor, who he claimed to represent. And then it's just taken to another level since he was ousted with these violent protests. We've got a Congress that has a 90% disapproval rating that is busy trying to pass laws to control the electoral authorities and concentrate power in their own hands. So this is another democracy on the rocks, part of this global trend. But there are other reasons as well why I think in the US, people should be concerned about what's going on in Peru. Peru is the world's second producer of cocaine. There's only three. And Peru is second

to Colombia. It's also the world's largest producer of counterfeit dollars, among other things, in Peru. So, you know, what happens in Peru does matter in the U.S., and I think we all need to be concerned about the threat to rule of law and political stability and democracy in Peru right now. Tell us how exactly these protests in Peru got started and when. So the protests began after Pedro Castillo, the president, was impeached and arrested on December 7th. He attempted to stage what many have described as a coup by trying to install an emergency government and rule by decree.

The country's top court declared the move unconstitutional. The armed forces and police refused to support him. And by day's end, Castillo had been impeached, taken into custody for the alleged crime of rebellion. He was a leftist president, far left. The party he represented, Free Peru, actually calls itself Marxist-Leninist. He also is a campesino, which in Peru means someone who works the land. So he came from very humble beginnings in the Andes.

He was also a rural school teacher and a labor leader, a wildcat strike leader. And when he'd come to power, he'd done so making a lot of promises, frankly, populist and unrealistic promises, that he was going to eradicate poverty in Peru. And Peru is a country that is very, very economically unequal. There's a lot of poverty here, even though the country itself, the economy has been booming over the last 20 years. But many Peruvians, especially in the Andes and the Amazon have not shared in that prosperity there's many people here who live in grinding poverty for example without running water or electricity

who when they're ill can't access a doctor even though on paper health care is a right in Peru and these people had all believed Pedro Castillo's promises that finally there would be a president who would represent them and take on the Lima establishment, which they blame for marginalizing them and discriminating against them for so long. So when he was ousted, I think that even though he deserved to be impeached, he'd been just, you know, absolutely disastrous president and then launched this failed coup. But when he was ousted, I think the backlash and the protests were inevitable. Some supporters blamed Congress for his demise.

It would have been a different story if Congress had let him work. But no, they only wanted to fill his post. The only thing I'd add is that they might have died down had it not been for this really clumsy response from the government that has just sought to basically just crush the protests, including the peaceful protesters. They have declared a state of emergency because they want to shut the voice of the people. But the people will keep protesting. We will keep fighting until the end for all our fallen brothers.

The politicians giving the orders are responsible for this. We are furious, outraged with everything that is happening. So the government responds really with brutality. Tear gas billows through the streets of Lima as clashes between security forces and anti-government protesters continue after nearly seven weeks of unrest. The police have now killed nearly 60 people, many of them with live rounds. We're not even talking about rubber bullets, but live ammunition.

And although in some cases, the protesters were storming airports around the country, and I think a lot of democracies, you know, if you do that, you could expect the security forces to respond forcefully. But many of these people weren't even protesting. They weren't anywhere near airports. We've had a doctor who was attending to one wounded protester who was shot. We had a teenage girl who volunteered at an animal shelter and was heading there when she was shot. There have been quite a few cases like this. So it seems the police, the response has been indiscriminate and disproportionate. That's what human rights groups are saying. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Organization of American States. And it's not a surprise because the Peruvian police have this long tradition of just repression, heavy-handedness

and violating human rights. unfortunately. As an institution, they seem to be pretty out of date, certainly with modern policing methods and human rights standards. We don't want more dead and wounded. How many people lying in hospital beds suffering the consequences of the government's intention of killing everyone? What do they want? To start a civil war in Peru? Why has the response been so violent? That's the big question. I think it's partly just the institution, the police doing its thing. I sense that the government isn't really in control of the police.

Dina Boloarte, the new president, who was Castillo's vice president, but who has, since she took office, really moved quite a way to the right. Some people would even say she's been captured by the right or is a hostage to the right now, and there's a right-wing majority in Congress. So his successor, who was his VP, is overseeing this government response, and though he was a leftist, she's on the right now? Yes, I think that's partly because she's been captured. Congress would probably impeach her as well if she carried on trying to do anything remotely left-wing. I think also partly she's a political neophyte. The vice presidency was her first experience of elected office, so I think she's probably out of her depth.

But I also think that she's a weak president, as well as an accidental one, and that she's actually not really in control of the police. They're doing their own thing. She agrees with it and is then going on TV to justify and insist we're not messing around with these protesters anymore. But I actually think that if she wanted to rein the police in, she probably wouldn't be able to. That was not a peaceful protest.

The violent acts that occurred in December and January will not go unpunished. Who is protesting out here, Simeon? Is it the rich? Is it the poor? Is it the left? Is it the right? Is it some cornucopia of all of those? So the people who are protesting are on the left, and most of them are poor. They're the people that felt that Pedro Castillo was finally championing them, and that's why they're so unhappy when he was ousted. The rich, generally speaking, are absolutely opposed to these protests. So there are these fault lines in Peru that overlap

geographic, racial, and of class. If you're white in Peru, you're going to be well off, usually, and you're more likely to live in Lima. Most of the protesters have come from the Andes, people who really live in very difficult conditions. But then there's also union members, students, various others here in Lima who've joined them as well. It's clear that the protesters haven't been intimidated by this government's response,

at least yet, because they're still out in the streets. What do they want? What are they demanding? They don't have a leader. So there's no one individual who can really claim to be speaking for them. But the demands that they've broadly been voicing initially were that they wanted Pedro Castillo freed and reinstated as president, which was a non-starter. That was never going to happen, and they're not really asking for that anymore, most of them. They feel that the Peruvian constitution works against them, against the poor and is for the rich, though there doesn't seem to be much clarity on how a new constitution

would change the reality for most Peruvians, how it would change their daily lives or benefit them. Then they want Dina Boloarte, the president, to resign. And that's one of the demands that has got stronger because they now feel that, although they didn't like her in the first place, they now feel that she also has blood on her hands. She's responsible for the nearly 60 people who have been killed by the police since she took power. We are demanding our rights. That rotten coup Congress let them get away with the genocidal Dina Boloarte. They do not represent us. They kill our brothers and sisters. And then the final demand, which I think is the most realistic, is for new elections. I think that's something where many Peruvians who aren't protesting and may not even agree

with the protesters about many things would agree. Peru has this hybrid parliamentary presidential system where you have fixed five-year terms for Congress and the president. They're elected at the same time. We're only 18 months into that term, but Congress now has a 90% disapproval rating. It just got staggered from one corruption scandal to another. So they've completely lost all legitimacy just 18 months into their five-year term. Dina Boloarte, I think, on the one hand, she's out of her depth, but on the other hand, she still justifies the police repression. She gave a speech to the Foreign Journalist Association in which she described the police response as immaculate. That's her words. So, I mean, she really, I think, in just over one month in power,

has really managed to pretty much destroy her own legitimacy, at least with regard to a large part of the Peruvian population. So the protesters have a host of demands up to the resignation of Peru's new president, but it sounds like there's no indication that any of their demands will be met in the near future. So publicly, Dina Boloarte has been insisting that she is not resigning and that that would just be abdicating her responsibilities to the country. There are reports that privately she's been very personally shaken by the death toll and really doesn't want that on her record

and has been persuaded not to resign by the Prime Minister. That isn't confirmed, but that's what's being reported. The thing is, if she did resign, on the one hand, it would force new elections, which would have to happen, I think, by the end of this year. But in the meantime, the person who would take over would be the Speaker of Congress, who is currently a conservative former army general, who the protesters would like even less than Dina Boloarte, and who's been implicated in severe human rights abuses, even a massacre during Peru's internal conflict in the 1980s and 1990s, when we had the Shining Path, who were Maoist insurgents or terrorists just ravaging the country in a conflict they started, and which actually, according to the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission, took 69,000 lives. So where does this end, do you think? I suspect that things get worse before they will get better.

I think new elections would be the obvious reset that the country needs. But there's a huge problem with that as well, which is Peru's political system is really dysfunctional and closed, and it's going to throw up similar results. In other words, more members of Congress who are implicated in corruption and who are basically legislating for murky economic interests, everything from the cocaine trade and illegal mining to Peru has this disastrous higher education system where you have a lot of private,

very lucrative universities that are offering substandard education that are linked to these parties. And there's been this ongoing battle for most of the last decade to reform that and impose some standards and have regulation. That battle appeared to be won a year or two ago, but Congress has reversed that. So I think even if you have new elections, it would at least get rid of this current completely discredited cohort of lawmakers. But I think that the new cohort would be probably just as problematic, although it would take them a while to, like, dig themselves into as deep a hole of disapproval as the current Congress. More with Simeon on how Peru got into this mess and how it might get out in a minute on Today Explained.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Okay, so at the top of the show,

Simeon, you mentioned that these protests in Peru have broader implications for democracy, not only in the country, but democracies across the world that have been failing. Tell us what we need to know about Peruvian democracy to understand it and how it relates to maybe other countries or the region, at least. So Peruvian democracy, it's in trouble right now, but it's been pretty fragile for a long time. Most of Peru's history, it's not had a very functional democracy. The 1990s, there was a dictatorship, Alberto Fujimori, who was this hard right president, who was elected democratically in 1990, but then on the one hand started stealing everything that wasn't bolted down. It was just, you know, quite incredible kleptocrat who just took out billions from public coffers, but was also carrying out all kinds of authoritarian ploys, including running death squads to attack suspected subversives to kill them. And we now know that some of the people who were killed by these illegal death squads had no links to Shining Path or other terrorist groups. He was eventually forced to resign in 2000. And that's when the latest phase of Peruvian democracy resumed. So we're just two decades in, and it's really not put down deep roots in the country.

I think the other really important piece of background to know about Peruvian democracy is that corruption here is just incredible. And it makes it impossible, I think, for the country to have functional, effective public policies in everything from housing and health care to infrastructure, the environment, and also anti-poverty programs. So this corruption, I would say, is widening and deepening the fault lines in Peru,

the deep fault lines that you have that already run along lines of race, class, and geography. And so Peru, which has long been one of the U.S.'s most reliable allies in South America, I think right now that democracy here is really in trouble. And how did Pedro Castillo fit into that picture of trying to lay democratic roots? when he was first elected. He did not work in the presidential palace. It's known as the House of Pizarro, named after the Spaniard who led the conquest and subjugation of the Incas. It was this colonial symbol, and he said he would work somewhere else. And so then he went to this private house that some businessman buddy of his had lent him. And for the first weeks of his presidency, he was meeting there. We don't know who, because no of his presidency he was meeting there we don't know who because no register of who he was meeting was kept when there was this huge storm of protest about that and it was also

became clear that Castille himself might have legal exposure he then went and did use the presidential palace after all but that's just like the first of you know an endless list of things he did that clearly showed that he was not a Democrat. I mean, he also was continually vilifying the press, which he accused of trying to destroy his government. You know, certainly there's some very tendentious media outlets here, proving equivalents of Fox News, I would say. But a lot of journalists here were just trying to do their jobs and cover both Congress and the president. And they were not being allowed to both by the right wing Congress, which for a period wasn't allowing journalists into the

chamber, and this left wing president who were at war with each other and then both of them with the press. At this point, Perus had six presidents in five years. Are there people in the country who are fed up with democratic experimentation? lower level than that. Well, one was Haiti, which is, I would describe as a failed state. And I think the other one is Honduras, which has all kinds of problems itself, including one of the world's highest murder rates. So you could understand if Hondurans want, you know, some kind of authoritarian crackdown, if that's what they're now looking to. But yeah, there are all kinds of studies indicating this kind of waning support for democracy in Peru and a desire for some kind of savior to come along and just make their living conditions better. So what do you think the best possible outcome here is for Peru? First of all, there's no easy answer. There's no quick fix to

Peru's problems. There's no political party or even individual politician that I can see on the horizon who might be able to provide the kind of leadership the country needs now. So very hard to see a way out. I think new elections is one part of it, but the new elections need to be accompanied with deep political reforms that would make future elections much more representative of what Peruvians want and would ensure that members of Congress especially would be responsive to what their voters want because right now they get voted in and then just ignore the voters and have their own often very corrupt agendas and the one other element is certainly in the long term Peru needs a really comprehensive policy to tackle the

corruption that is just everywhere in Peru and just is really a large part of this problem. I mean, I should say that there's been a lot of progress on different fronts in recent years, especially prosecutions of corrupt politicians, including multiple ex-presidents. But, you know, it's this incredible, almost existential battle in Peru, or war, I should say. And there are battles being won and lost all the time in different institutions, including the prosecutor's office, within the judiciary, in Congress, on multiple fronts. And if democracy fails with some sort of finality in Peru, what does that mean for struggling democracies elsewhere in Latin America? Does it have a domino effect? That would be very bad news for the region. I don't know that directly, because that happens,

the same thing's going to happen in a neighboring country. But, you know, it would certainly be one more domino there's already issues with democratic commitments of for example uh luis arce the president of bolivia venezuela is anything but a democracy and peru is this important u.s ally in the region historic u.s ally i mean really i think seeing democracy here go down in flames, it would be a really worrying step. I think it would be a bit of a landmark in this global process of populism and nativism that we're seeing. Simeon Tegel is a journalist based in Lima, Peru. Our program today was produced by Abishai Artsy. He had help putting it together for Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, and Afim Shapiro.

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