Dina Boluarte: the first 100 days of government in Peru

By: Carlos Alberto Montaner - 26/03/2023

She was the first vice president. She is a very cunning woman. Dina Boluarte has managed to stay in the House of Pizarro for one hundred days. That is already a feat. An expert in Peruvian issues told me, “I’ll give her a week at most.” After thinking about it for 30 seconds, he doubled the figure, “I’ll give her two at most.” It was December 7, 2022. The day that President Pedro Castillo tried to carry out a self-coup, but failed because he had not even secretly summoned the military. Former captain Vladimiro Montesinos was missing in the equation.

Montesinos is in prison, as well as former President Alberto Fujimori. He was Don Alberto’s main adviser during the two periods that they were in government—from 1990 to 1995 and from that year to 2000. The two have accused each other of acting at their own risk. They are probably right. They are in different jails. Captain Montesinos was at the Callao naval base, under the watchful eye of the head of the base, who with one eye looked at the terrorist leader Abimael Guzmán until he died a natural death, and with the other at Montesinos until he was transferred to the Ancón II prison, in the outskirts of Lima.

Both were involved in criminal affairs, but Fujimori gets the best deal. (After all, he is a former president.) He is in the Barbadillo prison, a rare police facility where Pedro Castillo has also ended up, and where Alejandro Toledo is expected in the next few days, after being extradited from the US. The worst thing that Toledo has done is not to steal a million dollars from Soros on the grounds that he needed two to organize the march of the four suyos (Inca nations,) but to believe that the United States government would give him some kind of special favor in exchange for the favors he rendered. That ended when John F. Kennedy handed over Marcos Pérez Jiménez to the Venezuelan government, despite the great favors made in the Cold War period during the two governments of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Fulgencio Batista, sensing these inconveniences, which could cost him his life, on the early morning of January 1, 1959, while he was fleeing Cuba, ordered to turn his plane to the Dominican Republic, although the first order was to head towards the United States).

It is inacceptable to continue playing with the presidency of Peru. I have not the slightest doubt that Keiko Fujimori has a parliamentary group of harassment and takedown that can destroy Dina Boluarte without paying an excessive price for it, but if she has any patriotism left, she should not do that. Peru cannot resist another “moral vacancy” without another colonel thinking of saving the country “with the support of the people.” The “people,” of course, will lend their support at first, tired of the anarchy that has been experienced at times, but with the suspicion, confirmed many times, that this honeymoon will not be permanent.

The most consolidated democracies, like the French one, go through critical moments. But they don’t have any mechanism capable of carrying out military coups and replacing the politicians. They are condemned to replace force with dialogue. They are condemned to understand each other by “talking,” which is much better than fighting. Two of them—Costa Rica and Panama—have eliminated the Armed Forces. I have listened to two leading statesmen (Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, former president of his nation and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Ricardo Arias Calderón, Vice President of Panama, after the Yankee invasion in 1989), argue passionately about the advantages of not having planes or warships. It seems to me that resorting to the cost of this equipment is enough to silence the “militarists.” If Panama is in the forefront of Latin America, it is because it doesn’t have military spending.

I return to the case of Dina Boluarte. She was elected as a leftist and as an indigenist because she speaks Quechua. I remembered the predicament Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre got into when he concluded a talk in Berlin with a few words in Quechua. Half a dozen Germans answered him in that language. Haya de la Torre didn’t know that mysterious language. He got out of the trouble by blaming the Spanish priests for not having taught him Quechua. He said, more or less, “I carry my compatriots in my heart, not in my brain.” Dina Boluarte carries them in her heart and in her brain. [©FIRMAS PRESS]

*@CarlosAMontaner. CAM’s latest book is Sin ir más lejos (Memories.) Published by Debate, a label of Penguin-Random House, the book is available through Amazon Books.

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