Photo: Archivo/RHC

By Guillermo Alvarado 

As is known, Peru's President Pedro Castillo managed to evade a parliamentary trial for alleged "permanent moral incapacity" to govern, but that only means victory in one battle, because the right-wing war against his administration remains practically intact.

The maneuver led by the Avanza País, Renovación Popular and Fuerza Popular parties, the latter belonging to Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the ex-dictator of the same surname, only reached 46 of the 52 votes needed to admit the trial against the governor for debate in Congress.

Fortunately, there was enough lucidity in Peru Libre, the political formation that promoted Castillo's candidacy, to realize that abandoning the president at this moment meant, no more and no less, its suicide as an organization.

This would be a good moment to overcome the open contradictions between the president and the party, still in government, to save a work plan subjected to fire by his adversaries since the first day of his administration.

It must be said that the presence of the rural teacher in the Executive headquarters has given the right wing enough arguments to overcome their differences.

In this way they managed to completely eliminate the first cabinet appointed by Castillo, who was forced to abandon some of his campaign promises, among them the convocation of a Constituent Assembly to draft a new Magna Carta.

For this purpose, the Congress of the Republic managed to approve a bill that prohibits the holding of a popular referendum on the fate of the Fundamental Law of the Andean country.

From now on, the specter of impeachment for alleged moral incapacity will be hanging over the government like a Sword of Damocles.

This is an absurd tool, which in practice violates the right to vote and the capacity of the people to elect their rulers and replaces it with the whim of the dominant party or parties in the Legislative.

It is a rule that has existed since Peru was born as a Republic, but was rarely applied. The first Peruvian president, José de la Riva Agüero, was dismissed in this way in 1823 and the next case occurred almost a century later, in 1914 against Guillermo Billinghurst.

From then on it fell into disuse until the legislature used it to depose Alberto Fujimori in 2000, and in recent times it has become a political weapon that creates instability, popular discontent and chaos and does not solve the country's underlying problems.