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paper sobre castillo 2021.pdf
1. Latin America Erupts: Peru Goes Populist
Paula Muñoz
Journal of Democracy, Volume 32, Number 3, July 2021, pp. 48-62 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2021.0033
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797785
3. 49
Paula Mu~noz
been Peru’s young people, a group not previously known for being po-
litically mobilized. As the protests and the police repression in response
to them had gone viral on social media, Merino (who had been in line for
the national presidency by virtue of his post as president of Congress)
had quit. To take his place, Congress had chosen one of its members,
centrist Francisco Sagasti, to head a transitional administration. Another
chapter in Peru’s long-running institutional conflict between the execu-
tive and legislative branches of government had been written.
This troubling episode, during whose course police had killed two
young demonstrators while wounding hundreds more, had been the pref-
ace to a 2021 campaign season marked by widespread citizen apathy,
electoral fragmentation, and huge uncertainty. While Peruvian electoral
campaigns in the 2000s had been notorious for their fluidity, unpre-
dictability, and highly fragmented quality, this election surpassed all
precedents in those regards. With nineteen candidates competing for
the presidency, opinion surveys taken as late as a week before the vote
showed a statistical draw among five candidates who split about half the
vote, while close to another third of respondents said that they were un-
decided or planned to cast null or blank ballots. Shock was widespread
when the April 11 votes were counted and a radical-leftist candidate,
Pedro Castillo of the Free Peru (Perú Libre, or PL) party, came in first
with 18.9 percent. The share of respondents who told pollsters that they
intended to vote for him had begun to rise late—only a week before
the election, he had been in sixth place with 6.5 percent—then had in-
creased steadily in the campaign’s final days.
A teacher, union leader, and rondero (rural local-defense militiaman)
from the northern highlands, Castillo became nationally known for lead-
ing a months-long 2017 teachers’ strike during which he rejected the au-
thority of the national teachers’ union. A self-defined Marxist, Castillo
promised to change the neoliberal model for what he called a “popular
economy with markets,” to nationalize strategic sectors such as mining,
to review signed public contracts, and to prioritize support for domestic
demand.
Drawing inspiration from the populist examples of Bolivia’s Evo
Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Castillo also promised to change
the 1993 Constitution by convoking the election of a national assembly.
Beyond this, he vowed to deactivate constitutionally autonomous insti-
tutions such as the Constitutional Tribunal and the Defensoría del Pueb-
lo (ombudsman’s office), while “correcting” the actions of regulatory
agencies such as those charged with overseeing transport and higher
education. This stated intention to interfere with independent organs of
horizontal accountability makes clear Castillo’s lack of liberal-demo-
cratic credentials.
Running as the candidate of her Fuerza Popular (FP) party, Keiko
Fujimori finished the first round in second place with 13.4 percent, fol-
4. 50 Journal of Democracy
lowed closely by radical conservative Rafael López Aliaga with 11.8
percent. In this, her third bid for Peru’s presidency, Fujimori campaigned
with a more authoritarian and conservative discourse, promising to use
the mano dura (hard hand) against crime and disorder, highlighting the
achievements of her father’s authoritarian government, and openly ad-
mitting that she would use her presidential powers to pardon him. She
spoke of his corrupt acts and rights abuses—offenses of which he has
been duly convicted by Peruvian courts—as mere “mistakes.”
How did a country that in late 2020 saw unforeseen mass mobiliza-
tions in support of democracy end up, just a few months later, hav-
ing to make its presidential-runoff choice between two candidates with
dubious democratic credentials? How did a candidate who has never
held elected office, who comes from a peripheral province, and who ran
on a radical-left platform manage to win the presidency in supposedly
conservative, status quo–oriented Peru? And what are the prospects for
Peruvian democracy in the years to come?
Overall, the 2021 election reflects the persistence of important trends
that have characterized the Peruvian political system for some time.
These trends include the extreme weakness of existing political parties
and the consequent fragmentation of the party system, as well as the
habits of improvisation that political actors have developed amid these
conditions of fluid political preferences and weak partisan loyalties.
Next to these trends must be placed the sporadic emergence of overlap-
ping socioeconomic and territorial divides that pit Lima and the coastal
regions, which are more integrated into the export-oriented economy,
against the less integrated, peripheral areas of the country.
Castillo is the candidate of those peripheral areas, but they alone were
not enough to make him president. It must be understood that the 2021
campaign took place amid an acute socioeconomic crisis that changed
the priorities of a cluster of previously better economically incorporated
citizens, and only after years of political-institutional instability had re-
shaped the political system. Within this new scenario, citizen disaffec-
tion and discontent played a big role in driving electoral preferences,
lending fresh salience to regional and socioeconomic cleavages that
had been apparent in the 2006 election results before being obscured by
economic growth. The fragmented party system, meanwhile, helped the
more radical and vocal options to gain life.
Bad Blood and Corruption Scandals
Since 2015, Peruvians have watched power struggles between the
executive and legislative branches of government intensify under the
influence of external “system-shocking” events. The first of these was
the sprawling international corruption scandal that grew out of Brazil’s
Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) investigations and follow-on probes
5. 51
Paula Mu~noz
into bribes paid by Odebrecht, the giant Brazilian construction conglom-
erate. The second and more recent event was the covid-19 pandemic.
In 2011, an earlier left-populist candidate from “peripheral” Peru, Ol-
lanta Humala, had narrowly defeated Keiko Fujimori in a runoff for the
presidency. Her FP retained a significant bloc of seats in the unicameral,
130-member Congress, however, and began seeking to wield seldom-
used mechanisms for exerting legislative control over other branches.2
Five years later, the politicized use of horizontal-control mechanisms
intensified after FP won 73 seats in Congress while Keiko Fujimori suf-
fered another close presidential loss, this time to neoliberal Pedro Pablo
Kuczynski.3
From the outset, FP set itself up as a confrontational and
even obstructionist force. The party used its majority to censure the edu-
cation minister. Then, in 2017, FP defeated votes of confidence in first
the economy and finance minister, and then the whole cabinet. No one
had foreseen how relentlessly virulent the congressional fujimoristas
would prove themselves to be, or how little they would care about public
rejection.4
Dormant and vague institutional rules became weaponized as
the new administration and its opposition faced off in a game of “con-
stitutional hardball”5
that tested the institutions of Peruvian democracy
to their limits.6
At first sight, the bitterness of the struggle seemed surprising, given
that Kuczynski was himself on the right and had backed Fujimori over
Humala in 2011. The neoliberal, technocratic president stood on the op-
posite side of a divide that separated him from the populist conservative
movement represented by FP, however.7
Moreover, while FP had made
what seemed (by the standards of Peru’s weak party system) to be im-
pressive progress in party-building,8
it still had not become coherent and
institutionalized enough to develop longer time horizons when making
decisions.9
As of 2016, FP still included as candidates an array of inde-
pendents—each with an individual agenda and set of interests—whose
actions were hard for party leaders to predict, much less control.
What made the legislative-executive hardball even harder was the
exogenous shock, arriving only six months after Kuczynski’s July 2016
inauguration, of the Lava Jato–Odebrecht scandal. In December 2016,
Odebrecht officials struck a deal with the U.S. Justice Department in
which the company admitted that it had offered kickbacks to public of-
ficials in twelve countries as part of a scheme to win large infrastruc-
ture contracts. Peruvian prosecutors immediately launched investiga-
tions based on these far-reaching admissions, which were rocking Latin
American establishments from the Dominican Republic and Mexico to
Chile and Argentina.10
The interbranch clashes quickly became intertwined with the corrup-
tion allegations, which were being made against politicians both in and
out of power and across all branches of government. At first, when sus-
picions seemed to focus mainly on former presidents Humala and Ale-
6. 52 Journal of Democracy
jandro Toledo (2001–2006), fujimoristas and others in Congress saw a
chance to discredit these rivals while shielding their own leaders. Inter-
estingly, however, these efforts backfired.11
Legislators were never able
to control the judicial task force in charge of the case, in part because
some of their allies in the judiciary became implicated in another do-
mestic corruption scandal known as the Cuellos Blancos (White Collars)
case. With no political shielding to hinder them, the Odebrecht inves-
tigations ended up implicating former president Alan García (1985–90,
2006–11), who committed suicide in April 2019 when a judge ordered
his detention. Keiko Fujimori was placed under pretrial arrest in Oc-
tober 2018, and did not gain release on bail until May 2020, after the
pandemic hit. With her in prison, FP and the fujimoristas lost a portion
of their influence in Congress and also the judicial sphere.12
The Odebrecht case eventually came to implicate Kuczynski too, giv-
ing Congress an excuse to impeach him and leading finally to his res-
ignation in March 2018, after less than two years as president.13
Upon
stepping up to the top job from the post of first vice-president, Vizcarra
focused on anticorruption appeals to help him confront Congress and
build public support for himself as a reformist president. In December
2018, he won voters’ overwhelming approval of a constitutional refer-
endum to reform the governing body of the national judiciary; to ban
parties from using private funds to buy political advertising during cam-
paigns (only public financing is allowed); and to bar members of Con-
gress from consecutive reelection.
The referendum’s success boosted Vizcarra’s popularity and dealt a
sharp blow to the obstructionist legislature. The contest between them did
not end there, however. In 2019, Vizcarra named an expert commission
to recommend further political reforms. A majority of Congress resisted
approving the bills that the executive put forward in keeping with the bulk
of this commission’s recommendations, thereby raising tensions between
the branches to an even higher pitch. In September 2019, Vizcarra used
his constitutional power to dissolve Congress after it tried to appoint six
new Constitutional Tribunal members despite presidential calls to make
more transparent and accountable the process used to select such jurists
(Vizcarra construed this as a second congressional show of no confidence
in his administration, thereby triggering his dissolution authority). By
sending the FP majority in Congress home pending new elections, the
president deprived Keiko Fujimori of her institutional stronghold.
Vizcarra respected the established procedures for handling the crisis
and did not concentrate power, thus securing the continuity of democ-
racy.14
He set new legislative elections for 26 January 2020 and stuck to
that calendar. Only nineteen of the 130 “dissolved” lawmakers ran for
reelection, and of those only two won—both of them well-known oppo-
nents of the fujimoristas who had dominated the previous legislature.15
In particular, FP took a beating as its seat total plunged from 72 to 15.
7. 53
Paula Mu~noz
Five new parties won representation. Popular Action (AP), the largest
single party in the fractured new Congress, won just 25 seats.
Even with the fujimorista majority gone, however, confrontation per-
sisted. In addition to being fragmented,
Congress was also populated by sec-
ond-tier politicians prone to the influ-
ence of particularistic interest groups.
Vizcarra, who had opted not to pres-
ent a list in the elections, soon found
himself in fresh conflicts with an array
of inexperienced legislators and a host
of private interests. Looking to win
the battle for public opinion as the co-
vid pandemic devastated the economy,
Congress approved several populist
measures that invaded the executive’s
exclusive competence to define spending initiatives. Since the new Con-
gress had been snap-elected to finish the five-year term of the dissolved
Congress and the constitution forbids dissolving Congress in the last
year of its mandate, the weapon that Vizcarra had used in 2019 was out
of his reach. The emboldened legislature defied him again and again.16
In November 2020, amid the escalating institutional conflict, fresh
press leaks from the Odebrecht investigations hinted at a plea deal that
would expose Vizcarra as having taken bribes when he was a governor
in southern Peru from 2011 to 2014.17
Although the president retained
majority support in opinion surveys, a 105-member supermajority of
Congress ousted him on November 9 by declaring the presidency vacant
on account of the incumbent’s “permanent moral incapacity.” The presi-
dent of Congress, Manuel Merino, took over as interim chief executive,
but mass protests across the country forced him to resign after just five
days. Congress then chose from within its ranks a new transitional presi-
dent (Sagasti) who had not voted for Vizcarra’s removal.
Two important changes that shed light on the 2021 election and two
others that are relevant to assessing democracy’s prospects in Peru
were incubated during this political-institutional crisis. First, citizens
have grown even more alienated from the political system as they have
watched the clash of powers stumble forward amid corruption scandals
and a severe crisis of the economy and public health. Second, these
alienated citizens feel even less inclined than before to vote for estab-
lishment candidates, widening the representation gap still further. Third,
the new presidential term begins with Congress, despite its lost legiti-
macy, standing stronger than before in relation to the executive branch.18
Finally, the bouts of institutional conflict—not to mention the split on
the right between fujimoristas and non-fujimoristas—have weakened
what had been a strong coalition of technocrats and economic elites
After five years of
corruption scandals and
political showdowns,
no candidate could elicit
the kind of passionate
support that had
once been a feature of
Peruvian politics.
8. 54 Journal of Democracy
aligned behind a neoliberal consensus. Even before the June runoff, a
majority in Congress had already begun challenging certain institutional
underpinnings of the neoliberal regime that has been since the 1990s
the leading source of continuity in an otherwise fluid political system.19
The First Round: (More) Fragmentation
Peruvians from across the country and all walks of life had hung
on every turn of November 2020’s convoluted and chaotic events, but
once the nineteen presidential candidates and twenty congressional lists
began officially running in December, public interest faded. The race
unfolded in a cloud of civic indifference. Campaigning went forward,
but many voters remained disengaged and did not pick a candidate to
back. As of late March 2021, a record 30 percent said that they remained
undecided or planned to cast null or blank ballots.
Many voters simply did not like anything that was on offer. Just a
week before the April 11 voting, surveys showed five candidates in a
statistical tie for first (with the identities of some of the five varying
from one firm’s survey to another’s). Castillo’s candidacy had begun to
gain ground, but he appeared to be trailing the top group, with around
6.5 percent of likely voters backing him.
The last week of the campaign was excruciating. Peruvian law bans the
publication of preelection polls. Surveys circulated through private chan-
nels to which only the better-connected had access. These surveys suggest-
ed that Keiko Fujimori and the economist and author Hernando de Soto
were the frontrunners, but captured glimpses of Castillo coming up quickly
on the left as he won nearly 13 percent in an April 10 mock balloting. Most
of the country, not privy to private surveys, was shocked by his first-round
total of nearly 19 percent of valid ballots. The next day, as the official
electoral count advanced, the results confirmed that Fujimori—a person
whom 70 percent of voters had as of mid-March told pollsters they would
never support—was headed for her third presidential runoff since 2011.20
What can explain why this mostly boring first round finished with
such a shocking ending? To begin with, the first round confirmed that
citizen disaffection, already high by regional standards,21
had reached
the highest pitch seen since the democratic transition of 2000. After
five years of corruption scandals and political showdowns, no candidate
could elicit the kind of passionate support that had once been a feature
of Peruvian politics. Peruvians eschewed all the politicians and their
parties even more intensely. In this regard, Castillo’s status as a new-
comer whose candidacy caught fire late in the race probably helped him.
Yet even he received a slice of the first-round vote considerably smaller
than the share (24.3 percent) that the third-place finisher had won in the
2001 presidential election. In presidential races from that one through
2016’s, the top three first-round candidates had garnered a total share
9. 55
Paula Mu~noz
that averaged just under 80 percent of all valid votes cast. In 2021, the
top three combined for just 45 percent.
Along with disaffection, extreme partisan fragmentation contributed
to the scale of citizen disengagement from the race. In the absence of or-
ganized parties, neither conservatives nor leftists nor centrists were able
to coordinate. This inability to coordinate was particularly noticeable on
the right, which splintered its support across six candidacies that together
won about 45 percent of the valid votes. This is surprising considering
that the division on the right in the 2016 election was partly responsible
for the political drama that came later. Without parties to lengthen their
time horizons, rightists were unable to protect their own interests.
This greater fragmentation of the right came after five years during
which social issues, including gender equality and LGBTQ rights, had be-
come matters of heated and even harsh contention. After the 2020 elector-
al punishment of fujimorismo for starting and escalating the institutional
crisis, a conservative alternative appeared in the form of far-right candi-
date Rafael López Aliaga. He finished third on April 11 with 11.8 per-
cent, a few hundred-thousand votes behind Fujimori. Castillo and Yonhy
Lescano of AP (9 percent) may be radical and progressive on economic
policy, but they share a profoundly conservative stance on social issues.
Ironically, the splits on the right helped fujimorismo to make it to the
runoff. In contrast with other, less rooted political options, fujimorismo
has a stronghold of loyal partisans who buoyed Keiko Fujimori’s candi-
dacy throughout the race. She likely picked up some of the right-leaning
voters who had been considering López Aliaga or even de Soto (7.5
percent) but who had been put off by those candidates’ lackluster debate
performances. She may also have gained votes from some who viewed
her as the strongest bulwark against what they considered the threat of
Castillo becoming president.
Finally, pandemic-related restrictions on campaigning also mattered.
Unlike political advertisements or social media, rallies and other cam-
paign events allow candidates to connect personally with Peruvian vot-
ers and more effectively persuade them.22
This seemed to be the case in
this election, too. The two candidates who showed the least respect for
public-gathering restrictions, Castillo and López Aliaga, were the ones
who rose the most in the polls toward the race’s close.
The protests of November 2020, against Merino’s assumption of the
interim presidency, did not end up being decisive for the race. These
protests occurred after the race had already been convened and the rules
settled, leaving no room for new actors to become part of it. Second, de-
spite high expectations for the new generation that had stood up during
the protests, the truth is that the mobilizations had been more reactive
than proactive, with inexperienced participants who joined spontane-
ously out of rage and coordinated only through social media. Third, and
importantly, candidates who had not been involved in Vizcarra’s remov-
10. 56 Journal of Democracy
al—and who therefore might have capitalized on making it an issue—in
fact opted not to focus their campaigns on it. As unpopular as Merino’s
accession to the presidency had been, the party landscape is so fractured
that parties which backed Vizcarra’s ouster did not necessarily suffer at
the polls for having taken that stance. The fujimoristas, Vizcarra’s most
vociferous opponents, added nine seats in the election and now have a
total of two-dozen seats, making FP the second-largest single party in
Congress. Their bloc is exceeded in size only by the 37 seats that Cas-
tillo’s party, Perú Libre, picked up in this, its very first race.
Toward the Runoff
While partisan disorganization matters, the “elephant in the room” is
obviously the compounded crisis that Peru has been suffering and which
has made many voters willing to take risks in hopes of changing a situ-
ation that has been affecting them personally and in dire ways.23
In this
regard, the 2021 election resembles the election of 1990, when a Peru
wracked by hyperinflation and the Maoist violence of the Shining Path
insurgency had turned to a classic outsider candidate named Alberto
Fujimori, then a little-known agricultural engineer.24
The impact of the covid-19 pandemic on Peruvian society has been
nothing short of traumatic. Peru has experienced one of the world’s high-
est mortality rates from the disease, and indeed has suffered the most
deaths per thousand people of any country in Latin America. The election
coincided with the beginning of a second covid wave, which mounted in
Peru during April 2021. The covid-related drops in GDP and employ-
ment that Peru has experienced have been among the world’s steepest; the
country now has the most sharply rising poverty rate in the region.25
After
years of reasonably good economic growth, ever more Peruvians every
day are finding that they must pool resources just to secure enough to eat.
Unsurprisingly, then, behind changing electoral preferences—and es-
pecially a new willingness to take a chance on an outsider such as Cas-
tillo—lay deep and growing discontent. The economic growth that had
obscured socioeconomic and territorial divides following the 2006 election
had faltered,26
leaving these cleavages sharply exposed once again.27
Unat-
tached, disenchanted voters searched among the center-left candidates for
the likeliest change-maker, and settled late in the race on Castillo. Indeed,
the polls showed that a significant proportion of undecided voters up to the
last two weeks of the campaign were Peruvians farther down the ladder of
socioeconomic status, and those least interested in politics. These voters
lifted Castillo first into the runoff, and then to an election victory.
Amid the compounded crisis of institutions, of covid, and of what the
covid lockdowns and dislocations have done to Peru’s export-dependent
economy, the divides of region and of socioeconomic class have reas-
serted themselves with a vengeance. The territorial divide is especially
11. 57
Paula Mu~noz
stark. The map of the runoff results reveals “peripheral” Peru as a sea
favoring Castillo and change, while Lima (in demographic terms a huge
conurbation that is home to about 30 percent of the national population),
five coastal electoral districts, and two in Amazonia voted for Fujimori
and the defense of the neoliberal status quo. The 2021 runoff map thus
strongly resembles the 2006 map.28
But while in 2006, as commodity
prices rode high and the economy boomed, a majority concentrated in
coastal areas voted to maintain the status quo, the compounded crisis in
which Peru finds itself fifteen years later has tipped the balance in favor
of change demanded by those living in the rest of the national territory.
Castillo rallied the discontent that the compounded crisis has bred
by giving voice to a populist discourse that paints the heartless rich and
the capital’s corrupt political class as enemies of the people and their
interests. He promised to convene a constituent assembly “to create a
constitution that has the color, smell and flavor of the people.”29
He even
threatened to deactivate autonomous institutions that do not respect the
will of “the people.” As he put it, if “this government goes to the Con-
stitutional Court and it rules against the people, we will immediately
deactivate the Constitutional Court and the next court will have to be
elected by popular mandate, as well as all the judges and prosecutors.”30
Although Castillo later offered assurances that he would not deactivate
this court if elected, concerns about PL’s democratic credentials grew
with the publication of a 2020 audio recording on which an elected PL
legislator can be heard saying “we are socialists and our path to a new
constitution is a first step. If we take power, we will not let it go. With
all the respect that you and your democratic bullshit deserve, our idea is
to stay and establish a revolutionary process in Peru.”31
Castillo’s populist discourse was effective in mobilizing mostly
poorer and rural voters, in part due to their tendency to identify with his
humble personal manner and origins. He embodied hopes for a change
that will favor “the people” at last. This strategy allowed him to con-
solidate a solid “floor” of 40 percent support during the runoff race de-
spite the blatantly improvised character of his campaign, his penchant
for self-contradiction, and the mediocre performance that he (and the
team of “experts” behind him) exhibited in the official debates.32
Yet his
populist strategy failed to win over enough undecided voters to give him
anything resembling a comfortable victory, and instead has left him (at
best) scraping into office with the thinnest of majorities.
Meanwhile, Fuerza Popular deployed a very aggressive campaign of
fear, calling Peruvians to unite against the threat of “communism” and
defend democracy and individual liberties, including private property.
This nationalist and even McCarthyist rhetoric was accompanied by sev-
eral waves of fake news. This campaign of fear was actively supported
by businessmen who paid for large lighted billboards and other forms of
messaging warning people against the dangers of communism. Based on
12. 58 Journal of Democracy
this strategy of fear, Keiko Fujimori managed to politicize a social-class
divide and rally center-right voters who viewed her with skepticism
and had backed other candidates during the first round. In surveys, sup-
port for her began slowly but steadily rising, with her strongest backing
concentrated mostly in Lima and middle and high socioeconomic sec-
tors. Noticing that poorer sectors were remaining unmoved, FP during
the last two weeks of the race started promising all kinds of economic
incentives, including an “oxygen bonus” worth about US$2,500 to all
families who had lost someone to covid.
Both Castillo and Fujimori chose to campaign in ways that made the
economic model the center of a polarizing clash that was portrayed as
a matter of life or death. Neither candidate made any effort to move to
the center. Neither took the democratic and reformist agenda that had
been defended in the streets in November 2020 seriously enough to go
beyond mere gestures, such as signing an oath to support democracy that
civil society groups had written and asked the candidates to formally en-
dorse.33
In the end, this shared unwillingness to do more than posture as
moderate may have done more to harm Keiko Fujimori—who, after all,
is a member of the political establishment—than it did to hurt Castillo’s
avowedly “outsider” candidacy. In such a tight race, a more credible
commitment to democracy might have swayed an outcome-changing
number of antifujimoristas (being against the Fujimoris is an important
negative political identity in Peru)34
to put aside their misgivings and
vote for her. Instead, she hardened her rhetoric and brought old fuji-
morista figures back to the fore as part of her technical team—steps that
may have pushed away enough persuadable antifujimoristas to cost her
the presidency for the third time in a decade.35
The final leg of the runoff race was agonizingly close. Keiko Fuji-
mori’s support continued to rise slowly. Unpublished surveys taken the
day before the election showed a statistical tie with an edge to Fujimori.
Members of the upper classes and fujimoristas who were privy to this
information believed that they had the election won. The problem came
later when the polling places closed and the rapid vote count from Ip-
sos showed Castillo leading the race, contradicting the exit polls. As the
hours ticked by, a razor’s-edge contest began to come into focus, with
Castillo in the lead by a little more than a quarter of one percentage point.
The economic and social elite panicked. False reports concerning
what the “communists” (PL is an avowedly Marxist-Leninist party,
although Castillo says that he is not a communist) would do once in
power, such as taking away middle-class homes and banning all sorts
of valued imports, flooded social media. This included fake news about
alleged fraudulent PL tactics as well as calls on the armed forces to seize
power before the “communists” could do so.36
It was in this overheated
climate that Keiko Fujimori convened a press conference in which she
alleged tabulation fraud, contending that “there has been a strategy of
13. 59
Paula Mu~noz
Perú Libre to distort or delay the results that reflect the popular will.”37
Then FP initiated procedures to nullify the vote counts from more than
seven-hundred electoral tables (each accounting for about two-hundred
votes) concentrated in Castillo-supporting low-income areas. But only
134 of them met the legal deadline,38
which is now being disputed by
FP lawyers. Matters dragged on. Both sides have been holding rallies
and protests. Although these have so far been peaceful, there is concern
because FP followers have protested against some election officials at
their homes, which is clearly a form of intimidation.39
With 100 percent of results in, Castillo won the election by 44,058
votes. As of this writing on June 16, however, Peruvians are still wait-
ing to hear official confirmation of who will govern them for the next
five years. They will have to keep waiting, moreover, until electoral au-
thorities rule on the hundreds of appeals requesting nullifications of vote
tallies. Meanwhile, there are worries that things will get out of control.
More Trouble Ahead
Now that the voting is over and the electoral process is crawling to
a close, what comes next? The prospects for Peruvian democracy look
bleak. The 2021 election’s biggest loser was the reformist and demo-
cratic center, broadly defined. That center now stands bereft of both so-
cial organization and political representation. Undemocratic tendencies
and interest groups can be expected to enjoy much greater freedom to
assert their demands amid intense polarization. Containing these groups
will be an uphill struggle.
The unprecedented levels of nullification requests mean that the official
proclamation of results may yet take weeks. Meanwhile, there is a tense
political environment and fears of violence. On the right, FP leaders, elites,
and candidates are questioning the electoral authorities’ decisions. Some
in FP have called for a new election, while others have even said that the
military should intervene. On the left, PL is deploying a legal strategy to
defend votes for Castillo, while Castillo himself remains mostly silent. Re-
cently, he briefly told the press that he and his party are patiently awaiting
the official certification of the result, but added that they “would not allow
the people’s vote to continue to be discriminated against.”40
Even if Castillo’s runoff victory is confirmed, continuing political
instability remains a serious risk. Castillo is an improvisational outsider
with an unsteady leadership style. If he won the race (which seems likely
as of this writing), it was more despite his faults than due to his talents.
Castillo ran as a guest on the ticket of PL, which is in fact Vladimir Cer-
rón’s registered socialist party. Cerrón had to extend this invitation after
failing to seal an electoral alliance with Verónika Mendoza’s New Peru.
Cerrón, a former regional governor of Junín who has been sentenced on
corruption charges, could not himself run due to his legal conviction.
14. 60 Journal of Democracy
A Marxist, Cuban-trained medical doctor, Cerrón is clearly much more
radical than Castillo and there remain questions as to whether he could
end up radicalizing the elected government by virtue of the leverage that
he can exert as the real boss of PL’s parliamentary bloc. As for Castillo,
he has yet to show that he commands Perú Libre in any meaningful way.
Congress, though fragmented, remains potent as an institution, and
there is the lingering specter of Vizcarra’s deposition on grounds of what
amounts to a vague morals clause. Having ejected one president in this way,
will Congress entertain notions of giving another the same treatment when
legislative-executive relations once again grow strained, as likely they will?
While Castillo may be able to marshal enough votes (if his alliance with
Cerrón holds and a few additional votes from the opposition can be se-
cured) to block a vacancy procedure such as the one that was used to unseat
Vizcarra, the right still has plenty of seats that it can use to destabilize the
government or to win a game of political hardball in the medium term.
To the wild card of congressional moves to declare the presidency va-
cant and the threat of authoritarian tendencies emanating from segments
of the right, we must add the risk that Castillo will carry out his populist
promises and use the powers of the presidency to handcuff or manipulate
the system’s institutional “balancers.” Would he, for instance, resolve to
seek a constitutional assembly through extra-institutional means? Might
he even seek to close Congress, as Vizcarra did, on possibly dubious no-
confidence grounds in order to trigger the election of a legislature more to
his liking? Might he try to interfere with the judiciary? Although forays by
Castillo down such authoritarian avenues cannot be ruled out, his chances
for success will hinge more on his capacity to mobilize sustained support in
the streets, including those of Lima—a difficult feat to accomplish in Peru.
If civil unrest and protest intensify, as they could well do, what will
be the response from a national police service that is still struggling to
recover the legitimacy that it lost due to its excessive uses of force dur-
ing the November 2020 protests? More police overreactions would be a
disaster, but so would a police force too cowed and demoralized to protect
innocent citizens, keep basic order, and step firmly between angry street
factions before they can hurt each other. The institutional crisis among ci-
vilian politicians is bad enough, but if it spreads until it sucks in the armed
organs of national security—the police and even the military—we may
see to our sorrow that things in Peru have yet more room to grow worse.
NOTES
1. Vizcarra himself had not been elected to the presidency. He had been elected to the
first vice-presidency in 2016, and had acceded to the presidency when Pedro Pablo Kuc-
zynski, facing impeachment, had resigned in March 2018.
2. Paula Mu~noz and Yamile Guibert, “Perú: El Fin Del Optimismo,” Revista de Cien-
cia Política 36, no. 1 (2016): 313–38.
15. 61
Paula Mu~noz
3. Eduardo Dargent and Paula Mu~noz, “Peru: A Close Win for Continuity,” Journal of
Democracy 27 (October 2016): 145–58.
4. Alberto Vergara, “Latin America’s Shifting Politics: Virtue, Fortune, and Failure in
Peru,” Journal of Democracy 29 (October 2018): 65–76.
5. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018).
6. Maritza Paredes and Daniel Encinas, “Perú 2019: Political Crisis and Institutional
Outcome,” Revista de Ciencia Politica 40, no. 2 (2020): 483–510.
7. Carlos Meléndez, “La derecha que se bifurca: Las vertientes populista-conservadora y
tecnocrática-liberal en perú post-2000,” Colombia Internacional 99 (2019): 3–27.
8. Steven Levitsky and Mauricio Zavaleta, “Why No Party-Building in Peru?” in Steven
Levitsky et al., eds., Challenges of Party-Building in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016), 412–39.
9. Vergara, “Latin America’s Shifting Politics.”
10. Ezequiel González‐Ocantos et al., “The Criminalization of Corruption in Latin
America: Prosecutors, Politicians, and Voters During Lava Jato,” unpubl. ms., 2021.
11. González‐Ocantos et al., “Criminalization of Corruption in Latin America.”
12. Zoila Ponce de León and Luis García Ayala, “Perú 2018: La precariedad política en
tiempos de Lava Jato,” Revista de Ciencia Politica 39, no. 2 (2019): 341–65.
13. For a detailed account of this convoluted episode, see Vergara, “Virtue, Fortune,
and Failure in Peru” and Ponce and García, “Perú 2018.”
14. Paredes and Encinas, “Perú 2019.”
15. Eduardo Dargent and Stéphanie Rousseau, “Perú 2020: ¿El quiebre de la continui-
dad?” Revista de Ciencia Politica, forthcoming.
16. Dargent and Rousseau, “Perú 2020.”
17. César Romero, “La declaración contra Martín Vizcarra fue un pedido del equipo Lava
Jato,” La República (Lima), 23 November 2020, https://larepublica.pe/politica/2020/11/22/
la-declaracion-contra-martin-vizcarra-fue-un-pedido-del-equipo-lava-jato.
18. Paredes and Encinas, “Perú 2019”; Dargent and Rousseau, “Perú 2020.”
19. Alberto Vergara and Daniel Encinas, “Continuity by Surprise: Explaining Institu-
tional Stability in Contemporary Peru,” Latin American Research Review 51, no. 1 (2016):
159–80.
20. See https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2021-03/situacion_
politica.pdf.
21. Julio F. Carrión et al., Cultura Política de la Democracia en Perú y en Las
Américas, 2016/17 (Lima: USAID, 2018).
22. Paula Mu~noz, Buying Audiences: Clientelism and Electoral Campaigns When Par-
ties Are Weak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
23. Kurt Weyland, The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies : Argentina,
Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
16. 62 Journal of Democracy
24. Maxwell A. Cameron, Democracy and Authoritarianism in Peru: Political Coali-
tions and Social Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994).
25. Claudia Viale, “Peru: Updated Assessment of the Impact of the Coronavirus Pandem-
ic on the Extractive Sector and Resource Governance,” 2020, https://resourcegovernance.
org/analysis-tools/publications/peru-updated-assessment-impact-coronavirus-extractive.
26. The election of 2006 also featured a deep socioeconomic and territorial divide. In
that race, a nationalist and radical-leftist candidate (Humala) was defeated by a candidate
promising responsible change consistent with neoliberalism (García). See Cynthia Mc-
Clintock, “A ‘Left Turn’ in Latin America? An Unlikely Comeback in Peru,” Journal of
Democracy 17 (October 2006): 95–109.
27. Paula Mu~noz, “Peru’s Democracy in Search of Representation—Divisive Politics
and Democratic Dangers in Latin America,” in Thomas Carothers and Andreas E. Feld-
mann, eds., Divisive Politics and Democratic Dangers in Latin America (Washington,
D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2021), https://carnegieendowment.
org/2021/02/17/peru-s-democracy-in-search-of-representation-pub-83787.
28. See https://elcomercio.pe/elecciones-2021/elecciones-2021-mira-aqui-como-evo-
luciona-el-nuevo-mapa-electoral-tras-la-segunda-vuelta-interactivo-ec-data-regiones-
segunda-vuelta-pedro-castillo-keiko-fujimori-ipsos-conteo-rapido-flash-electoral-noticia.
29. See https://elcomercio.pe/politica/pedro-castillo-vamos-a-desactivar-en-el-acto-
el-tc-y-el-tribunal-siguiente-tiene-que-ser-elegido-por-mandato-popular-nndc-noticia.
30. See https://elcomercio.pe/politica/pedro-castillo-vamos-a-desactivar-en-el-acto-
el-tc-y-el-tribunal-siguiente-tiene-que-ser-elegido-por-mandato-popular-nndc-noticia.
31. See https://rpp.pe/politica/elecciones/guillermo-bermejo-si-tomamos-el-poder-
no-lo-vamos-a-dejar-noticia-1337383.
32. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlcp5SYnyo.
33. See https://elcomercio.pe/elecciones-2021/pedro-castillo-y-keiko-fujimori-firman-
la-proclama-ciudadana-en-que-consiste-y-que-impacto-tendria-peru-libre-fuerza-popular-
segunda-vuelta-noticia.
34. Carlos Meléndez, El mal menor: Vínculos políticos en el Perú posterior al colapso
del sistema de partidos (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2019).
35. Dargent and Mu~noz, “Peru”; Steven Levitsky, “Peru’s 2011 Elections: A Surpris-
ing Left Turn,” Journal of Democracy 22 (October 2011): 84–94.
36. Ministry of Defense of Peru (@MindefPeru), “Frente a la difusión en redes so-
ciales con llamados a la intervención de las Fuerzas Armadas en asuntos netamente
electorales o políticos,” Twitter, 9 June 2021, https://twitter.com/MindefPeru/sta-
tus/1402667413452251136.
37. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=782bWeC4otY.
38. See https://ojo-publico.com/2811/el-68-de-nulidades-de-fuerza-popular-en-plazo-
de-ley-son-rechazadas.
39. See https://ojo-publico.com/2805/autoridades-electorales-y-fiscal-acosados-por-
seguidores-fujimoristas.
40. See https://peru21.pe/politica/elecciones-2021-pedro-castillo-convoco-a-conferencia-
pero-se-nego-a-responder-a-la-prensa-pedro-castillo-peru-libre-elecciones-2021-prensa-
extranjera-julio-guzman-noticia/.
![Latin America Erupts: Peru Goes Populist
Paula Muñoz
Journal of Democracy, Volume 32, Number 3, July 2021, pp. 48-62 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
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