Pedro Pablo Kuzcynski was the imperfect Presidential alternative to Keiko Fujimoru and her party in 2016. She lost the Presidency by a hair (as PPK said), but nevertheless managed to get the majority in Congress. This has meant a year and a half of permanent quarreling, constant obstruction and governmental chaos. The Fujimorist Majority in Congress censored three Ministers of State (two Education and the Cabinet Head) forcing their resignation in clear acts of arbitrary abuse of power. Kuczynski responded pusillanimously every time. Only when he was called to Impeachment proceedings did he seem to react. Going into the Congressional debate on the motion, he asked for support of the people and declared to the news media that he would not be weak ever again and that if he was granted the stay he would govern decisively and with full awareness of who was who.
The impeachment procedures seemed to be little less than a formal hurdle to what was seen as an almost inminent victory for the Fujimorists. But Kenji Fujimori, the younger brother, who had been having problems with his sister Keiko’s party throughout the year, managed to form a get a group of 10 Fujimorist congressmen to vote against the motion, thus preventing the impeachment and defeating the party’s game. Apparently Alberto Fujimori is said to have phoned congress members himself during the debate to persuade them to break ranks.
The relief of the failed Impeachment was clouded by a rumored pardon, as the chip played in the game. Hoping against hope, after barely two full days of calm there came a second storm. 2017 seemed to have been a good year for Per[i. We got into the World Cup and we defeated the uncontiitutional intentions of the Fujimorists. In fact the Fujimorist party seemed to have fragmented along the lines between the Fujimori siblings.
Two days later, on Christmas Eve, while people were at home with their families, the presidential pardon was announced. To make matters worse, the pardon was granted with the same suspicious expediency and lack of due process with which two days earlier, PPK had been put on trial. Resting on a medical support that is, to say the least, suspect (according to a leading physician it is not acceptable) and a mediatic show from the hospital by Alberto Fujimori that resonates with old turbid practices we had hoped to have left behind, the pardon was recorded in the press. From the President not a word while the country started burning.
A full day of consternation and protests followed. Save for two notable exceptions of two congress members from the Officialist bench, who announced their resignation, neither the president nor anybody in government broke that maddening silence. Only a full day later, did the president appear on TV. Disheveled and looking like a fugitive in what could well have been a crammed bathroom (with the bottom half of a grand colonial painting of the Virgin with two angels, serving as backdrop closely behind his back), with a precarious signal that could have been transmitted from a cell phone, he reads a disturbing Message to the Nation.
Appealing first to his Constitutional authority and then wielding arguments familiar in the National Debate from the Fujimorst camp, he intends to justify his decision. Characterizing him as “an ex-president”, refusing to call Alberto Fujimori a Dictator (as the courts determined), Kuczynski points out that the prisoner has already served 12 years for “serious excesses and legal transgressions”, not only ignoring the verdict of the Peruvian Courts, who condemned him to 25 years imprisonment for crimes against humanity and grave acts of corruption, but igniting the anger and frustration of the victims of the dictatorship.
Unwontedly, PPK calls for national reconciliation, which he says is for the good of all Peruvians. He urges “young Peruvians” to put aside all “bad feelings from their parent’s past” and to “turn the page” so as to arrive at our bicentennary unscathed and triumphant. The lobbyist speaking.
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s message has unleashed fury in the streets. Protests have been quelched with teargas (outside the President’s residence, in San Isidro, one of the poshest districts in Lima), and an injured newsperson has been reported so far.
Ministers and Congresspeople are jumping ship. Old wounds from the Fujimori era and its human rights abuses (deaths and disappearances) have been reopened.The alleged attempt at reconciliation has resulted in anger and created a volatile polarization that threatens the life of the nation. PPK will have a hard time forming a cabinet, let alone holding the government.
There’s a lot of muted movement on the Fujimorist camp, and mostly consternation and silence on the government’s camp. With violence in the streets and the first signs of repression, anything could happen now. Either a military coup or the return of the Fujimorists, which will be greatly facilitated with their original leader now free, and his two heirs possibly reunited and now protected by PPK, who seems to have played the souless fool in this evolving tragedy.
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