Link: “Peru rises up after coup against elected President Pedro Castillo” 12.12.2022

Extremely informative interview with Daniela Ortiz, a Peruvian leftist, explaining the context behind the so-called “self-coup”, immediately followed by a real coup, in Peru last week. For example, like Chile, Peru currently suffers under a constitution put in place by their late 20^th century dictator; there’s immense public pressure to replace this constitution with something more democratic, but the right-wing are resistant.

That same right-wing controls most of the news media (sounds similar to Rupert Mur­doch’s control over our media, but even more virulent) as well as the police force, upper echelons of the state bureaucracy, and the Congress (which currently has an 11% approval rating). The Peruvian right has never accepted the legitimacy of Cas­tillo’s election, and constantly insult him as a rural Indigenous person from an impoverished area who is therefore inherently unfit to be the President. They’ve stonewalled him constantly in Con­gress, and left him unable to pass much of anything. From the sounds of things, it sounds like the current constitution permits both the Con­gress to remove the president in the case of “moral incapacity” (whatever that means), and the president to remove the Con­gress in the event that Con­gress is completely unworkable. The President tried to move first, calling for elections for a Con­sti­tu­tional Assembly to draft a new constitution, but Con­gress struck back hard enough to win, and then they threw Cas­tillo in jail (where his daughter had already been as some kind of attempted hostage situation…).

Another informative article on this, shorter with a higher-level overview, would be this in the Green Left Weekly .