Corruption: The tool to oust Peruvian presidents

Originally published at http://estrategia.la/2020/11/10/corrupcion-la-maquina-de-deglutir-presidentes-peruanos/

By Mariana Álvarez Orellana | 12/11/2020 |  Latin América and the Caribbean

Sources: Rebelión / CLAE

The president Martín Vizcarra has also fallen: less than two months after having escaped from a first attempt of declaring the Presidency vacant, the Peruvian leader was dismissed by the Congress, that accused him of “permanent moral incapacity”, an ambiguous constitutional concept that allows a wide margin of interpretation, but refers to him having received bribes years ago when he was the governor of the southern region of Moquegua.

Five months from elections, a president of the Congress; Manuel Merino, smiled satisfied after convoking a session where he himself will put on the presidential sash that nobody handed over. Only 19 voted to save the leader and there were four abstentions.    

The decision, highlighted La Otra Mirada, shows the moral incapacity of the more than 60 parliamentarians that have indictments in the public prosecutor’s office or those that have proven cases and that are awaiting the decision of the congress to lift their parliamentary immunity.

“How have we arrived to the point that these gentleman “fathers of the Homeland” with more than one in question that puts them in a similar boat: chats, tablets, the Richard Swing case, tampered photos, bribes, protection rackets, among other things and they cook up a presidential vacancy without any proof other than a press report based only on the testimony of three candidates hoping to be witnesses with immunity that have spent the more than two years trying to obtain benefits in the public prosecutor’s office?”, it asked.

The panorama is not at all favourable, the political leaders that aren’t represented in the Congress will try to play it to their own benefit, meanwhile, in the media, there remain the millions of poor people that die not only from COVID, and hunger, but also from diphtheria, and those to which the assistance bonus hasn’t arrived and at best already it won’t arrive to them, those that perhaps won’t receive any vaccine, those to whom a pension will appear an eternal fairytale. 

Vizcarra, at 58 años, had taken the struggle against corruption as his main political rallying cry since he arrived to power,  and paradoxically, was dismissed by the Congress dominated by an opposition that accused him of moral incapacity and of receiving bribes seven years ago.

The motion of dismissal of the head of state was approved by 105 votes in favour, 18 against and four abstentions, thoroughly surpassing the 87 necessary, at the closing of a plenary session of almost eight hours. Vizcarra ruled out undertaking legal action to overturn the decision, at the same time that the streets of Lima were the setting of protests against the dismissal, and besides which it was condemned with a banging of pots and pans.

In a previous judgment on the 18th of September, Vizcarra was accused of urging two functionaries of the government palace to lie about a questioned contract made with a singer, but his adversaries only obtained 32 votes. In this way, he has become the second president that has left the post during this governmental period of five years, that started in July 2016.

Among those who voted to oust the president were Fujimorist legislators, with a long history connected to corruption, and that today savour their revenge against the man that made them lose their majority in the Parliament and supported anti-corruption processes that took their leader, Keiko Fujimori, to prison.

Also voting for his dismissal, the lawmakers from the ultranationalist Union por el Perú (Union for Perú), whose principal parliamentarians are accused of corruption and that is directed from jail by the ex-soldier Antauro Humala - brother of the ex-president Ollanta- in prison since 2004 for the death of four police officers during the capture of a police station in a frustrated attempt to topple the ex-president Alejandro Toledo.

Likewise, the legislators of Podemos Perú, a party led by a businessman that has made himself a millionaire with a business of low quality universities and that two days ago was detained being accused of bribing judges to manage an irregular inscription of his party; from a party that answers to an evangelical sect.

Also the greater part of the congress members of Acción Popular, the group of the replacement for Vizcarra; a sector of the small number of lawmakers from the leftist Frente Amplio, that only has eight members, and some other parliamentarians.

Among the few that opposed the dismissal of Vizcarra were legislators from the centrist party, Morado, and a couple of lawmakers from Frente Amplio, among some others, due to the risks of instability in these difficult circumstances, but they demanded that the public prosecutor’s office investigate the accusations against Vizcarra, something that is already underway.

Opinion polls by Ipsos and the Institute of Peruvian Studies revealed that 70 percent of the population opposed the cutting short of the presidential term in this situation. Vizcarra had an approval rate of between 54 and 57 percent, while his replacement has an approval rate that barely reaches between 22 and 24 percent.

Bye Vizcarra

Engineer by profession, Vizcarra, an almost unknown to the public, assumed power in March 2018 after the resignation of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, cornered by complaints of corruption, a scourge in this country that has affected its last five leaders. Kuczynski invited him to be his presidential running mate in the 2016 elections due to his qualities of being able to defuse conflicts in a country where the communities protest for greater income from the exploitation of natural resources.

After assuming the post, Kuczynski included him in his cabinet to hold the portfolio of Transport and Communication, the position that he resigned from in May 2017 after receiving harsh criticism for approving changes in the $520 million contract to build an airport. His greatest challenge as president was the dissolution of the previous Congress in September 2019, after tough confrontations with the Legislature dominated by the Fuerza Popular party, of Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former dictator, Alberto Fujimori.

When Pedro Pablo Kuzcynski was dismissed, the country wasn’t facing a health emergency, nor was it a few months from an election, nor in the middle of an economic crisis from the pandemic. Today the situation is different and the congressional forces that promised to lead the country aren’t guaranteeing an ordered transition, noted Fernado Pérez García in La Otra Mirada.

And they don’t guarantee it because they represent the owners of the “Chinese” universities, that he wants to bring under university reform, they represent radical Antaurism and the spiteful Fujimorism that want its leaders out of prison and they represent the most threaten corporate right that wants to sabotage what little he has advanced in the anti-corruption process and has been paralysed by coronavirus, he added.

Who is Merino?

After the dismissal of President Martín Vizcarra by the ambiguous concept of “permanent moral incapacity”, the head of the unicameral Congress of Perú, Manuel Merino, assumed the post of president in Perú. The first great unknown that he will have to decide is resolving if he will call immediate elections (which is outlined in the Constitution) or will he wait until the 11th of April, the date that had been set out by the now former president Vizcarra for the next national vote.

Despite now managing the Executive Power of Peru, Merino, agronomist and cattle rancher, who is 59 years old, was a second rank politician always linked to Acción Popular (AP), the centre-right party founded in 1956 by Fernando Belaunde Terry, not one of its most known figures.

He held a seat in Congress during two periods: 2001-2006 and 2011-2016, representing the northwestern department of Tumbes, where he is from. He returned to Congress last January, when they carried out elections to choose the Parliament after Vizcarra had dissolved the previous one in September 2019.

The victory of Acción Popular - the largest minority in the parliament- thrust him into the Presidency of the body. He gained notoriety during the first frustrated attempt to dismiss Vizcarra, after knocking on the door of the military headquarters without success to ask for support of the military so that he could assume power, to then later give apologies for the error.

“Perhaps making a call in the circumstance of that day could have been ill-judged, for that I express my sincerest apologies to the Armed Forces”, he said after two high-ranking military chiefs informed the Minister of Defense that Merino had called them to get the backing from them both for the process of vacancy that was up for debate in the Congress.

 Now Vizcarra waits to face the investigations of the public prosecutor’s office and probably the courts. The same fate of the last presidents of Peru: Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Alan García (who committed suicide), Pedro Pablo Kuczinsky.

Mariana Álvarez Orellana, is a Peruvian anthropologist, teacher and researcher and she is an analyst associated to Centro Latinoamericano de Análisis Estratégico (CLAE, www.estrategia.la)