Pedro Castillo faces new destabilizing attack in Peru

Lima, December 18 (RHC)-- In a new destabilization maneuver against Peruvian President Pedro Castillo, the Attorney General's Office presented before the Prosecutor of the Nation, a document in which it denounces the president for the alleged commission of the crimes of illegal sponsorship and influence peddling.

The Attorney General's denunciation will force the Attorney General, Zoraida Ávalos, to make a decision on the initiation of a preliminary investigation to President Castillo. "Before the presentation of a complaint, the Prosecutor's Office must act," said sources of the Public Prosecutor's Office.

Prosecutor Soria Luján asked the head of the Public Prosecutor's Office to inapply article 117 of the Constitution which prohibits investigating a president of the Republic in the exercise of his functions for common crimes.

The denunciation is presented when last week, the Plenary of the Peruvian Congress rejected the admission of the motion of vacancy against President Pedro Castillo, presented by the right-wing parties on November 25th.

In a hard attack against Castillo from the opposition in Congress and now from the Attorney General's Office, the Peruvian president will face a new case against him when the attempts of the right wing to remove him from office are increasing.

The Minister of Justice, Aníbal Torres, pointed out that the people who lost the 2021 general elections are trying to assign responsibilities to President Castillo in order to remove him from office.

"What is happening is that the vacators, those who lost the elections, are in this very intense work with the press very desperate to find responsibilities of the president in order to remove him from office, as international organizations and the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights itself say," said the Minister of Justice in an interview for TV Peru.

Torres considered as absurd the fact that the president is being asked to consign the people with whom he met, since they were not official meetings.  "Another absurdity: that the president cannot, in his house, receive his parents, his brothers, his uncles, his nephews, or other private persons who come to meet him there."

"Does he have to register those people?  Who said he is obliged to do that?  In what norm is that, in what Constitution, in what law?  There isn't.  It's an absurdity.  Those facts that are not official facts do not have to be registered," he culminated.

For his part, Castillo said last Thursday that 2022 must be the year in which "the pandemic is contained, the economic recovery is accelerated and the institutionalism and governability are strengthened" in the country.

Castillo participated in the graduation ceremony of the Military School of Chorrillos, in Lima, where he remarked that "the institutionality of the Army and the Armed Forces is fully guaranteed, and must be beyond any doubt."

"No one can question the respect we Peruvians have for our military institutions", he emphasized.