Bad things have befallen Peru, which was one of the bright spots in Latin America a few years ago. David Frum, not a favorite author, writes about the current state of politics in that Andean nation for The Atlantic.
Even before COVID-19 struck, Peru faced a dissolution of familiar political structures. The country has rotated through five presidents or acting presidents since 2016. Then came the terrible shock of the pandemic.
Parties of the left and center collapsed. The round of voting on April 11 was topped by a union leader so obscure that nobody even bothered to poll for him until November 2020—and who did not rise above 3 percent in the polls until early March 2021 - Pedro Castillo.
In shocked reaction, Peru’s non-left has rallied since April 11 to Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the president-dictator who crushed the Shining Path insurgency in the 1990s. (snip) The release from prison of the now-82-year-old former dictator is a central issue of his daughter’s 2021 presidential campaign.
Of the five presidents mentioned above, three have been within the last year. I am sad for Peru, which I rather liked when the DrsC visited there. I am also sad for nearby Chile which was another bright spot before falling back into Latin America’s familiar malaise.
Perhaps unfairly, I view that malaise as the lingering curse of long-gone Iberian colonialism, a cultural legacy which plagues almost everywhere south of the Rio Grande. One can also fault “liberation theology” which has played a large role in the region’s semi-dominant Catholicism.
