It seemed like a story from the richest Peruvian literature when a rural school teacher, Pedro Castillo, came to power.
Elected president of Peru far from the traditional Peruvian elites, with a political program taken from the old manuals of popular Latin American revolts.
With his peasant sombrero and clutching a Bible, he swore to realize the dream of all this literature, popular emancipation – if not a revolution, while mending the fractures of a deeply divided and polarized country.
Castillo was a disaster of dramatic proportions. In less than a year and a half, he had appointed and dismissed five ministries, broken with old and new allies, never managed to create any stable base in a Congress in which he did not have a majority. And he got involved in corruption scandals.
And Peru, already in a strong economic crisis, entered an environment of political drift in which 80% of the population did not trust either the president or the Congress.
Even around the first peasant to be president of Peru, few people believed that Castillo was the victim of a conservative rage.
He was the victim of his own political incapacity, which culminated in a crude attempt at a coup d’état.
Castillo’s trajectory qualifies him to become a character in one of these famous Peruvian soap operas. But he did not manage to sensitize one of his most distinguished writers, Mario Vargas Llosa. Castillo is simply illiterate, snapped Llosa.
Source: CNN Brasil
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