The Political Crisis in Peru
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2022
⏱️ 56 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On December 7, Peruvian president Pedro Castillo attempted to dissolve Peru’s Congress and implement a state of emergency. His dictatorship lasted only a few hours before he was impeached by Congress and arrested—making him the fifth president to leave office in Peru in five years. Since Castillo’s arrest, Peru’s crisis has spiraled further, with protests in the streets and a violent response by the police and military that has left 25 people dead.
To understand what’s going on right now in Peru, Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Rodrigo Barrenechea, a 2022/23 Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and an assistant professor at the Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. They talked about how and why Peru ended up here, the fragile state of the country’s democracy, and why Rodrigo thinks that Castillo’s attempted dissolution of Congress was “the most ill-planned coup d’etat in Latin American history.”
You can read Rodrigo’s article on the crisis in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio (in Spanish) here.
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Transcript
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.0 | The Self Assessment deadline is January 31st and it's approaching fast. |
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| 0:58.0 | And with that kind of mindset in which politicians don't know if they will be here tomorrow, |
| 1:05.0 | but they know they are here now, it's very difficult to solve the situation. |
| 1:11.0 | That's why I was saying the main problem in Peru is that we not only have no parties, |
| 1:18.0 | we have no politicians. |
| 1:20.0 | We just have people that are in power for some short term, right? |
| 1:27.0 | Without medium to long term thinking, it's impossible for democracy to work. |
| 1:33.0 | And that's what you're seeing in Peru. |
| 1:36.0 | I'm Quintet Jurassic, senior editor at LawFair. |
| 1:39.0 | And this is the LawFair podcast, December 20th, 2022. |
| 1:45.0 | On December 7th, Peruvian President Pedro Castillo attempted to dissolve Peru's Congress |
| 1:52.0 | and implement a state of emergency. |
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