Left governments and coup in Peru

We said in one recent column that the attitude towards representative democracy was an issue that divided the Latin American left: we have once again seen those divisions around the failed coup d’état that he tried to perpetrate Pedro Castillo.

Bolivian President Luis ArceFor example, he said on social networks that “the constant harassment of anti-democratic elites against progressive, popular and legitimately constituted governments must be condemned by all.” Except for the fact that it is not clear what made the Castillo government “progressive”, I believe that Arce’s initial statement deserves consideration. The problem arose when Arce’s own government, after last November’s electoral farce in Nicaragua, issued a statement in which it “greeted the brotherly Nicaraguan people for their participation and democratic vocation in the electoral process.”

If I may digress, Martha Hildebrandt supported Velasco in the 1970s and Fujimori in the 1990s, but, whether left or right, she always supported authoritarian governments. The problem, as we see in the case of Arce, is that support for authoritarianism almost always reveals a moral hemiplegia: virtually no one supports the abuse of power in the first person, they only tolerate it when it is exercised against those who do not think like one.

In case of Lopez Obrador is different. On the one hand, his government voted in favor of resolutions critical of authoritarianism in Nicaragua both at the UN and at the OAS. However, it stopped doing so in the second of those forums since the second half of 2019. And although that can be explained by the attempts to use the OAS for political purposes by Donald Trump, that does not explain why the Government of Mexico does not He spoke on his own about the electoral fraud of 2021 in Nicaragua.

In any case, regarding what happened in Peru, López Obrador said, in the first instance: “Non-intervention and self-determination of peoples is a fundamental principle of our foreign policy”. On the one hand, it is not an act of interference in internal affairs to demand that a State comply with international agreements that it voluntarily signed. Furthermore, in the Peruvian case, it was Castillo himself who invoked the Inter-American Democratic Charter before flagrantly violating it. On the other hand, after invoking the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs, the next thing the Mexican president does is give his opinion on the internal affairs of Peru: “We consider it unfortunate that for the interests of the economic and political elites, from the beginning of the legitimate presidency of Pedro Castillo, an atmosphere of confrontation and hostility has been maintained against him until it led him to make decisions that have served his adversaries to consummate his dismissal with the sui generis precept of ‘moral incapacity’”.

The first part of that opinion has some basis. Fujimorismo, for example, not only did not accept a legitimate electoral result in 2021, but, for all practical purposes, it did not accept it in 2016 either. And since then it has been part of seven vacancy attempts against three presidents, not only Castillo . But precisely that proves that the problem was not reduced to attempts to subvert a legitimately constituted left-wing government: they did the same against Kuczynski and Vizcarra. The second part of AMLO’s message, however, involves suggesting that Castillo is not responsible for his own decisions: nothing and no one forced him to attempt a coup, just as he was not forced to place corrupt and incompetent characters in the government in equal parts.

Lula, for example, did not make that mistake, maintaining that “You always have to regret that a democratically elected president has that fate, but I understand that everything walked within the constitutional molds.”

Source: Elcomercio

jack

I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.