Peru - A Country in Crisis - Part Four

Concluding the series, Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio examines the roots of Peru's current crisis, with its impeachments, demonstrations, and states of emergencies. Part 4/4. Coronavirus to the present, and the repeating cycle. 

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Transcript

Peru - A Country in Crisis - Part Four

6th June 2021. 

The Coronavirus pandemic batters the country, giving it statistically the worst fatality rate in the world. 

It’s a Sunday, and voters go to the polls to elect one of two candidates in a presidential run-off - between the daughter of an imprisoned former president and a rural teacher-turned-politician. 

On the left is Pedro Castillo, on the right is Keiko Fujimori. 

Castillo was a rural schoolteacher in the country’s poor, remote Andes. The son of illiterate peasants, he entered politics by leading a teachers’ strike. He is a traditional leftist who is motivated by historical injustice, and he is committed to rewriting the constitution that was approved under the regime of Keiko Fujimori’s father, Alberto Fujimori.

Keiko Fujimori votes in a wealthy neighborhood of the capital of Lima where she lives. A former congresswoman, she has promised various financial incentives should she get elected - it is her third time running, including a $2,500 one-time payment to each family with at least one COVID-19 victim. She has also proposed distributing 40% of a tax for the extraction of minerals, oil or gas among families who live near those areas.

It’s a choice between the left and the right, but it’s - especially - a choice over the legacy of Alberto Fujimori. Keiko Fujimori is a politician, but first and foremost she is her father’s daughter. 

By mid 2021, Peru has had four presidents in the last three years, and at the end of 2020 at one point had three presidents in five days. The pandemic has collapsed Peru’s public health services, leading to a wave of international stories about cardboard coffins as the state is unable to cope with the dead. It has also left millions unemployed and amplified longstanding inequalities in the country, and deepened people’s mistrust of government as it mismanaged the COVID-19 response and a secret vaccination drive for the well-connected erupted into a national scandal.

Keiko Fujimori herself has been imprisoned as part of a graft investigation though she was later released. Her father is serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and the killings of 25 people. She has promised to free him should she win.

Whatever the result, the country will be unable to escape the past.

As it happens, Castillo wins on a razor-thin margin, and Keiko Fujimori refuses to accept the result. Peru enters its cyclical vortex once again, and the left-winger’s victory is met with an unbending conservative wing that denounces his alleged communism in what is once-again a head-on ideological confrontation between fundamentally different visions of the country. 

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The government of Castillo suffered from political instability since the beginning, facing multiple corruption investigations and impeachment attempts. Throughout, he denied any wrongdoing.

Then Congress tried again, this time using the accusation of “permanent moral incapacity”, a term which has been used many times before and since but which experts say lacks an objective definition. Castillo repeatedly spoke out against the fact that there was a political campaign to remove him from power. And there was, but it was also inevitable. It’s political cultural behaviour in power by now, by then. 

Pedro Castillo was arrested on December 7, 2022, shortly after he attempted to dissolve Peru's Congress and rule by decree, a move widely condemned as an unconstitutional coup attempt, and which Fujimori had used years before. He was charged with "rebellion" and "conspiracy" for attempting to disrupt the constitutional order. He was initially ordered to be detained for seven days, which was later extended to 18 months of preventive detention as prosecutors built their case. In March 2023, his pre-trial detention was extended again, this time by 36 months. Castillo remains in pre-trial detention at the Barbadillo prison in Lima, where former president Alberto Fujimori had also been imprisoned. 

Earlier this year, former president Martin Vizcarra was also arrested and held. There is now a special facility built for former leaders of the country in a police base in the capital of Lima.

On 10 October 2025, the Congress of the Republic of Peru voted unanimously to remove Dina Boluarte as President of Peru for "permanent moral incapacity" - that nebulous accusation once again. Boluarte had replaced Castillo, and now, Jose Jeri has replaced Boluarte.

It’s a spiral, an unending descent, at the center of which, more than a generation after, the name Fujimori is still at the heart. Peru has elections coming up in 2026. Expect more of the same, expect - once again - the legacy of Alberto Fujimori to once again, silently, be the main issue on the ballot paper.