Crisis in Peru: a Marxist analysis

On December 7th, Peru’s embattled head of state, the left-populist Pedro Castillo, declared a state of emergency and called for Congress to be dissolved and replaced with a newly elected constituent assembly, which would draft a new constitution. The same day, the Peruvian Congress voted to impeach Castillo. After the impeachment, Castillo was arrested on charges of sedition and treason and his vice president, Dina Boluarte, assumed office. The vast majority of Peruvians oppose the impeachment and arrest of Castillo and hundreds of thousands have gone on strike, protested, and set up blockades to resist the power grab of the Congress and Boluarte.

To date, the police and military have murdered at least 47 demonstrators. Boluarte and her new rightwing allies want to hold new elections in the midst of rampant political repression under the guise of “restoring democracy”, but the protesters are demanding a new constitution will transform the state itself and deliver real democracy to Peru.

The Biden administration has rushed to condemn Castillo and recognize the new Boluarte government, and the press organs of imperialism have declared the temporary victory of the Congress over Castillo and the masses who support him a victory for democracy. In the face of their lies, socialists must be crystal clear: the impeachment and arrest of Castillo is yet another anti-democratic coup perpetrated by the Latin American right, in league with their gringo allies.

At the same time, we must harbor no illusions about Castillo himself, who is a populist demagogue rather than a socialist leader. The only way out of the crisis in Peru is through the self-organization of the workers and peasants currently waging a courageous struggle against the coup to a free, democratic, and sovereign constituent assembly and a new constitution.

The Long Shadow of Fujimorismo

The present coup takes place in the context of a dictatorial legacy. Former president Alberto Fujimori ruled Peru as a dictator from 1992-2000. Elected in 1990, Fujimori is responsible for imposing neoliberal economic reforms in line with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) plan for Latin America known as the Washington Consensus. These reforms cut social spending dramatically, relaxed price controls, sold state-owned firms, and expanded taxation on low and middle-income people in order to service Peru’s debts (and satisfy the demands of international capital). In 1992, he used the military to dissolve Congress and suspend the Constitution in a self-coup. He solidified his position by ratifying a new constitution via referendum. In a context of severe political repression, during which major opposition parties had been all but destroyed, the referendum passed by a margin of less than 5%.

After chasing his most prominent political opponents out of the country, Fujimori initiated a dirty war against the Shining Path guerrilla group in the countryside, during which death squads murdered with impunity. A 2002 report showed that Fujimori’s government was involved in the forced sterilization of 215,000 indigenous women and 16,000 indigenous men. In 2000, after suffering a major defeat in Congressional elections, Fujimori fled to Japan and faxed his resignation to avoid arrest. In 2009, Fujimori was extradited to Peru and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was subsequently pardoned in 2017, only to be returned to prison after a legal challenge to the pardon. His status is still the subject of an ongoing legal battle.

Despite Fujimori’s imprisonment, his legacy lives on in the heart of the Peruvian state. The constitution written by his administration in 1993 still governs the country. The congressional coalition which impeached Castillo on what is now its third attempt is led by Alberto Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, who has explicitly built her political career on top of her father’s legacy. She served as his First Lady from 1994-2000 (after her mother divorced and denounced him), openly embraces his neoliberal-authoritarian ideology of fujimorismo, and includes former members of his cabinet in her inner circle. Like her father, she has been dogged for years by credible allegations of corruption. Keiko Fujimori’s brother, congressman Kenji Fujimori, was at the center of a political deal with former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski which led to her father’s pardon and temporary release from prison in 2017.

Populism’s Dead End

Castillo, a former public school teacher born to a poor peasant family, was elected as a political outsider, promising to take on the Peruvian establishment and massively redistribute wealth and income in Peru. The political class reacted to his candidacy with predictable hostility. Even Mario Vargas Llosa, the poet and former political rival of Alberto Fujimori, endorsed Keiko Fujimori as the “lesser evil” against Castillo’s populist candidacy.

Castillo attempted to meet the hatred of the Peruvian ruling class with conciliation. Immediately following his election, Castillo’s top economic advisor assured the press that his administration would “scrupulously respect private property… to ensure that investment in Peru does not disappear.” In case this pronouncement was insufficiently deferential, he went on to make clear that “we have not considered in our economic plan nationalizations, expropriations, confiscations of savings, exchange controls, price controls, or prohibition of imports,” and that a Castillo administration would “respect all Peruvian public debt commitments.”

This class-collaborationist posture was not enough to satisfy the bourgeoisie, who could not bear to see a genuine representative of the Peruvian poor in power – even one as compromised as Castillo. From the outset, they set out to make governing an impossibility for Castillo. Both major newspapers in Peru, owned by two of Peru’s oligarchic families, declared war on Castillo from the outset of his candidacy. In less than two years, the opposition parties in Congress have attempted to impeach him three times on trumped-up corruption charges reminiscent of the “law-fare” leveraged by the right against other leftwing politicians in Latin America such as Lula da Silva of Brazil, his successor Dilma Roussef, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. By the time Castillo was impeached and arrested, the entire political class had turned on him, including his own party and his vice president Dina Boluarte, who now governs the country.

Castillo’s attempts to form a “national unity” coalition including workers, peasants, and the “patriotic” sections of the bourgeoisie, left him defenseless against these machinations. In an effort to appease his political enemies, he backtracked on his promises to break up large multinational landholdings in the countryside and repressed popular mobilizations in the streets over the rising cost of living. Having abandoned his base of power, when Congress finally had enough votes to impeach him, he was left without a large enough base of support to defend himself. Despite the insinuations by the press that Castillo had plotted all along to make himself dictator, the fact is that he announced the dissolution of Congress not as the culmination of a political struggle over the nature of the state in Peru, but as a last-ditch attempt to save his own skin (his hands were visibly trembling as he made the announcement!).

Are “Both Sides” to Blame for the Crisis?

Ironically, the impeachment of Castillo on the basis of “moral incapacity” relies on the precedent which removed Fujimori from office in 2000. Additionally, Castillo’s effort to dissolve congress and replace Fujimori’s constitution with a new one obviously recalls Fujimori’s own similar maneuver in 1992.

Liberal analysts are quick to point out these similarities in order to paint Castillo and his supporters with the same brush as Fujimori. The only difficulty for them is that, in this instance, those on the other side are loudly exclaiming their own loyalty to Fujimori, and in Keiko Fujimori’s case even bear his name. For the most part, this problem is solved by ignoring it entirely, and focusing instead on the similarity in methods of struggle carried out by Castillo and Fujimori. Such an emphasis on means rather than ends recalls Trotsky’s observation about liberal moralists in Their Morals and Ours:

If an ignorant peasant or shopkeeper, understanding neither the origin nor the sense of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, discovers himself between the two fires, he will consider both belligerent camps with equal hatred…More than anything moralists wish that history should leave them in peace… But history does not leave them in peace. It cuffs them now from the left, now from the right.

The liberal moralists of today are like Trotsky’s shopkeeper. Caught between the masses of worker, peasant, and indigenous militants and the death-squads-in-waiting behind Fujimori and Boluarte, they declare that both sides are identical. This finger-wagging posture is nothing but nihilism wrapped in liberal piety. Despite any similarity in methods of struggle, there can be no equivalence between the struggle of the masses for equality and dignity and the struggle of the reactionaries to regain control of society.

Experience teaches the masses, the masses teach us

In The Mass Strike, Rosa Luxemburg makes the following observation:

The proletariat requires a high degree of political education, of class-consciousness and organization. All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution.

Peru today is a case study of this argument. The Peruvian masses, having vested their hopes in Castillo to deliver them from the abuses of extractivist capitalism, have had their illusions dashed against the realities of bourgeois politics. Things could not have gone any other way—with no existing mass revolutionary organizations, and the historical memory of revolutionary politics tarnished by the brutal guerrilla campaign of the Maoist Shining Path in the 1980s and ‘90s. In absence of an alternative, the electoral path presented by Castillo appeared the only solution for many. No abstract arguments can dissuade a people desperate for hope from pursuing what seems on its face to be a viable way forward.

However, now that Castillo has been disposed of by the ruling class, the workers and peasants who had been drawn to him as a leader are pushing beyond his reformist vision. The demonstrators have put forward demands for a democratically elected constituent assembly, which will replace Boluarte and Congress as the sovereign body of Peru and wipe away the old Fujimorist state and replace it with a new constitution.

These demands are far more democratic than the plan of Boluarte, who wants to hold new elections under the existing constitution – and only after the movement against her coup has been pacified, with Castillo and countless worker and peasant militants rotting in prison. Boluarte is attempting to use the promise of new elections – postponed until after the uprising against her has been quelled, and only under the conditions of the old Fujimorist constitution or those reforms which her unelected government sees fit to propose – as a democratic fig leaf to cover the coup. In this respect, the defiance of the Peruvian masses in the streets, who see these proposals as the political ploys they are, shows far more political understanding than the professional political analysts employed by the bourgeois press.

The iron fist of imperialism comes wrapped in the velvet glove of liberal paternalism, which tries to convince us that the people of Latin America don’t know what’s good for them. The bourgeois press is attempting to convince the world that the Peruvian masses are, in their vast majority, dupes fighting on behalf of a would-be dictator. With their monopoly on the distribution of information, this effort has achieved some success outside Latin America. But they cannot fool the people of Peru, who see for themselves every day the hatred with which the comprador ruling class views them and their representatives.

Already, the mass movement against the congressional coup exposes the lies of the imperialist press that the people of Peru don’t want or don’t understand democratic institutions. They have laid down their lives against the coup regime, but not for Castillo; they are fighting for their own demands, and a constitution which can genuinely move the country beyond the legacy of Alberto Fujimori.

The task of socialists is to help push the struggle to its furthest possible point. Our comrades accomplish this not by talking down to the masses in the manner of the liberal press, but by instilling maximum confidence among workers, peasants, and indigenous communities to take power for themselves, so that they no longer look for leaders among politicians whose hands tremble at the prospect of confrontation with the ruling class. For those of us observing from afar, we must relentlessly expose the lies and insults hurled by the imperialist mouthpieces at our Latin American comrades in struggle.

Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.