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Hello everyone, so on December the 7th, 2022, yesterday at the time of filming this, Peruvian
President Pedro Castillo tried to dissolve Congress and was then ousted by said Congress.
This series of events resulted in a lot of idiocy from Westerners who call themselves
leftists.
For example, this tweet.
Peru's president just tried his country's version of January 6th and failed spectacularly.
Headline, Peru lawmakers impeach President Castillo after he attempts to dissolve Congress.
Now that's not even remotely an accurate assessment of the situation.
In fact, that is one of the stupidest, most harmful comparisons I could ever imagine anyone
making.
Yet it's nonetheless being said incredibly confidently, and as you can see, it got 2,000
likes somehow.
Clearly, this person and many others like them, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
of people have been making similar claims, don't feel any need to actually learn about
the situation before they speak on it.
They think that, after just skimming a headline on CNN or whatever, they're already qualified
to make incredibly confident pronouncements that compare the Latin American left to cure
non-conspiracy theorists fascist in the USA.
If you're still watching this video at this point, you're already better than them, congratulations.
You're willing to learn about the situation rather than just making incredibly stupid
ignorant pronouncements to delegitimize those who fight against US-backed neoliberal hegemony
in Latin America.
So good, so I assume that you're interested in what actually happened and why, so let's
go over it.
Pedro Castillo was elected to the presidency last year, and absolutely no one saw this coming.
He was a relative of unknown, and he'd only recently come to minor fame as a figurehead
of a teacher's union.
Everyone had assumed that the election would have been a contest between two neoliberals
who only have very minor disagreements with one another, as pretty much every Peruvian
election in the last 20 years has been.
This was the first time anyone, even remotely opposed to the neoliberal status quo, had
ever even made it to the second round since the 70s and 80s.
Castillo's electoral platform was largely centered around two main things, replacing
the country's constitution and dialing back the neoliberal status quo via nationalizations
of natural resources and investment in education, health, and social programs.
Essentially, a reversal of the anti-poor pro-corporation policies imposed upon Peru since the 90s
by its elite and their allies in the US.
This one Castillo brought backing from the Peruvian left, including crucially Veronica
Mendoza.
Before Castillo came out of nowhere, Mendoza was the left politician who everyone thought
was most likely to win the presidency.
Mendoza overall has much better politics than Castillo.
She has the same sorts of beliefs on economics and class struggle, while also being more
socially progressive.
This is one of the things that the Western left jumped on Castillo for during his electoral
campaign, posting completely idiotic and frankly offensive memes like this one, implying that
Pedro Castillo was somehow just as bad as the literal neoliberal fascist who he was running
against.
Incredible.
So according to them, Castillo was terrible.
He was a homophobic misogynist.
And that made him undeserving of even critical support, all that he deserved was derision.
The only possible reason to vote for him according to them was just because he was not his opponent.
This was, and still is, such a stupid idea that it really just beggars belief that anyone
peddling it could ever even call themselves left.
Peru is a poor country.
Well, no, let me rephrase that.
Peru is not a poor country.
Peru, like most countries in the world, is very rich.
Rather, the majority of Peru's population, who are indigenous and mestizo, have been
kept poor for centuries by a largely white economic elite, with the help of their allies
in the US.
When people are forced into poverty, when they don't even have access to a half-decent
education, when they have to work so much just to survive that they don't even have
the time to ask themselves why they believe what they believe, they tend to fall into
more reactionary social beliefs and other such superstitions.
This is the same reason why the least religious societies in the world today tend to be the
richest.
It's also the same reason why, for example, black people in the USA tend to have more
conservative social views than white people.
It's not some innate trait of them being black.
It's rather just because black people are, on average, poorer.
The reason why western countries tend to be more socially progressive is, well, because
for centuries they looted the wealth for the rest of the world, enriching themselves while
keeping nearly everyone else poor.
It's not because the West has some sort of innately superior, more progressive culture.
They were just as superstitious, homophobic, and misogynist as everyone else when they
were at the same level of development.
But when your economic circumstances improve, when you have more free time to think about
what you think, when you have access to more and better education, you're much more likely
to realize how incredibly stupid it is to be misogynistic, homophobic, or what have
you.
It comes from a poor, rural background, directly, too.
He's not a guy from the country who won a scholarship to go and study at a private university
or anything like that.
He's not some guy who happens to be from a poor town who won a scholarship to go and
study at Harvard and then came back a neoliberal.
He's not just some token, basically.
He's the real deal.
When he was running for president, he was literally living in a stone house with no electricity
or sanitation, working as a teacher and tending to his small family farm.
Look, I'll show you his house.
There you go.
Okay?
So, of course, it's fairly inevitable that most people in this situation hold reactionary
social views.
That is just a fact.
It's a fact of living in a society of relative poverty.
The way to fight these views is to fight their root cause, poverty.
And Castillo's platform was based around trying to do exactly that in a country that has been
run for nothing more than corporate profit for three decades.
The condescending, self-righteous Western left may not have understood this, probably
willingly not, but the Peruvian left understood this perfectly.
So Castillo won the support of the vast majority of the country's left, from the aforementioned
Veronica Mendoza to LGBT collectives.
This was not advocacy for just a reluctant vote for him to keep the other candidate out.
It was enthusiastic because he promised something that would actually shake up the economic
system and Latin American leftists know better than anyone the overwhelming importance of
doing that.
And Castillo, to his credit, showed a willingness to work with them, holding meetings with trans
rights advocates and what have you during his campaign.
In the end, Castillo ended up narrowly winning the election against Keiko Fujimori, with
a lot of help from centrist voters who voted for him just because he wasn't her.
Castillo had basically the entire media establishment against him.
Every single racist stereotype imaginable was thrown at him, and he was framed as an
insane communist terrorist hell-bent on mass murder.
But him being elected was hardly the end, really, it was just the start.
You see, Peru is the most right-wing country in South America.
Even more right-wing than Colombia.
This is for two reasons.
One, in the 80s and 90s, there was a Maoist insurgency called Sandero Luminoso, and they
made a habit of mass-murdering peasants the same people they claimed to be fighting on
behalf of.
Despite the fact that every single other Peruvian communist, socialist, and anarchist group
denounced them, Sandero Luminoso nonetheless gave the right-wing media the perfect ammunition
to be used against the left for decades to come, and they've since done everything possible
to ensure that many people equate leftism in general with terrorism.
This has made many people very skeptical of all shades of leftism, which prior to this
was actually quite popular.
Second, in the 90s, the country was ruled by Alberto Fujimori, who was elected as president
but then became a neoliberal dictator, much in the tradition of the other US-backed dictators
in the region during the prior decades.
Aside from his numerous instances of mass-murder and actual genocide, he ran a US-backed mass-sterilization
campaign of indigenous women.
Fujimori also radically restructured the Peruvian political system and economy to ensure that
it would be as difficult as possible to change anything about it in the future, thus ensuring
that even long after he was gone, neoliberal economic policies would continue and that
it would be near impossible to challenge them.
This is why every single Peruvian election, even in the post-Fujimori era until 2021,
is best summed up as a choice between right-wing neoliberal and right-wing neoliberal who also
openly vindicates Fujimori.
Aside from that, there has been no meaningful difference in policy in the Peruvian political
establishment.
If you want to learn more about Fujimori, I have a video on the matter.
It's very detailed and goes into a ton of depth.
It's called Alberto Fujimori, dictator of Peru, and yeah, look for it on my channel.
I also have a video on Senderu Luminosa, which I forgot to mention.
It's called The Shining Path of Peru, and you'll also find it on my channel.
So yeah, check that out if you're interested.
I think some pretty decent videos that can really get you up to speed on the history that
resulted in the present political situation in Peru.
So at the core of the present situation is the Peruvian constitution, which was actually
replaced by Fujimori during his dictatorship, hence why one of Pedro Castillo's core campaign
promises was to try and change it.
Because there's just no way that anything he proposed would ever be possible otherwise.
And by the way guys, I'm trying to get this video out as fast as possible, so if I'm not
looking at the camera, it's because I'm reading a script.
I want to get this out today.
So very sorry about the relatively low standards of evidence and production value here compared
to my usual content.
Anyway, so all of this is precisely why Castillo was never going to be able to do any of what
he had proposed.
He was just one man who happened to lock his way into an unexpected presidential term.
He had no backing from any remotely substantial political party.
All that he had behind him was the relatively small Peruvian left.
And he had absolutely everything against him.
The entirety of the mainstream media, the entirety of the Peruvian political establishment,
which has long been entirely dominated by neoliberals who are not exactly amenable to
his economic proposals, and the system itself, set up by Alberto Fujimori, a literal far-right
dictator to ensure perpetual right-wing dominance.
Castillo never even got to the point of being able to carry out basic everyday governmental
functions, let alone actually instituting his reform programs.
His proposal to reform the Constitution was shot down by the overwhelmingly right-wing
Congress, who treated document written by a dictator to perpetuate himself in power
as if it was some sort of holy book, and changing it would be unimaginable.
He did have the power to pass presidential decrees, but whenever he did so, the media
and the right-wing immediately framed him every single time as some sort of dictator.
So then he started to try and pass laws through Congress instead.
And they did everything possible to obstruct them there.
In a situation like that, there's really no way to win.
The country was intentionally made completely ungovernable.
One of the most hilariously stupid articles of Fujimori's Constitution, which is at the
root of all of this, is Article 113.
It states that the President of the Republic may vacate his office for the following reasons.
And one of them is his permanent physical or moral incapacity declared by Congress.
So that means that the Congress can overthrow the President at any time by voting to declare
him morally incapable.
What does morally incapable mean?
Whatever the fuck they want.
It doesn't mean anything.
It's undefined.
It's vague.
It's exactly the perfect thing that a Congress needs to override the popular vote and a presidential
term of another branch of government arbitrarily.
Now this wasn't a worry for Fujimori, as the Congress during his term was ham-picked pretty
much by the man himself.
But it's caused a multitude of problems since, because, obviously, moral incapacity can mean
literally anything.
So the Congress has the ability to overthrow the President, who is directly elected to
head a completely separate branch of government at any time for any reason.
Fujimori also abolished peruse by a Cameral Congress and replaced it with a Unicameral
One, meaning only one House, with only 120 seats.
This makes it far easier for Congress to pass laws without any possible impediment, which
was exactly what Fujimori wanted during his dictatorship.
Since then, this has caused massive problems.
Anytime the right wing gets a congressional majority, which, given how a right wing pru
tends to be, they usually do, they are able to use the fact that one simple vote called
among 120 people can overthrow the popularly voted President, and they use it to great
effect.
In 2017, the neoliberal president at the time, Pedro Pablo Kozinski, was threatened with
a vote of moral incapacity by the Fujimori bloc in Congress, led by the man's actual
children.
Yeah, a bunch of his kids are congressmen.
Or at least, why?
They threatened to overthrow him unless he used his presidential part in power to pardon
Alberto Fujimori, in jail for life for numerous massacres and genocide.
The president agreed, and because he did so, he secured a no vote on his impeachment from
the Fujimori bloc.
Then in the next year, that same president resigned because videos surfaced, which showed
the Fujimori bloc bribing people, other congressmen, to vote no on that motion on his behalf.
So as you can see here, recently, Kenji Fujimori, Alberto's son, has been sentenced to four
and a half years of prison for his role in that scandal.
So um, is there really anything more negative that I can say about this article of the Constitution
and the absolutely nefarious fucked up shit that it enables?
Yeah, there is actually.
Let's continue.
So after Kozinski resigned, he was replaced by his vice president, Martin Wiskater, who
was just another centurite neoliberal.
And then in 2022, following political disagreements between Wiskater and other neoliberals in
Congress, particularly with the fact that Wiskater was supposedly investigating corruption,
they again decided to use the moral incapacity vote against him.
The first one in September failed.
And then hilariously, two months later, they did it again, because there's no limit on
how many times they can do this, by the way.
So in November, this time, it passed, and Wiskater was ousted from the presidency.
This has since been widely considered as a coup, a bad faith misuse of an ambiguous
constitutional provision to overthrow the executive whenever the congress pleases.
Now, so clearly, Congress was very happy to brazenly abuse this power against two straight
neoliberal presidents, with whom they agreed on 99% of things.
So what chance do you think that Castillo stood against this?
I think it's safe to say that he had no chance whatsoever.
Practically immediately after he was elected, before he had even taken office, they were
already plotting to impeach him for moral incapacity.
You can see here, this is an article from August, literally one month after he was sworn
in, discussing the debate about whether he should be declared morally incapable.
Or the 2021, I mean.
And then in October, four months after he was sworn in, the first vote against him for
moral incapacity to try and overthrow him was called.
The next month, the vote was held, and it fairly narrowly failed.
The only reason for this is that Castillo seems to have recognized the fact that he was going
to be impeached at pretty much every point from ever instituting even a single minor
reform of any type, really.
So he started to say to the demands of the right.
He appointed more centrist ministers, dialed back his more radical rhetoric, etc.
This secured his survival for a short time.
Four months to be exact.
Four entire months from the last vote, before they called for a new one.
The second one in seven months of his presidency.
Unbelievable.
Now, some might say that Castillo basically dropping everything they need to promise is
a betrayal.
And sure, that's fair.
Perhaps he should have fought harder.
But the truth is, even if he had, it wouldn't have worked.
Castillo really did next to nothing in his presidency.
And the reason for that is not some personal failing.
It's the fact that the second that he did anything that even remotely threatened the
economic status quo, Congress would try to overthrow him.
That was hanging over his head the entire time.
If they did it twice, even though he was basically doing nothing, can you imagine
how fast the vote would have been called and how fast they actually would have passed it?
If he had actually tried to do anything remotely close to his campaign promises?
This brings us to the events of September 7th.
At the time of filming this, that's yesterday.
Congress was set to hold yet another moral incapacity vote against Castillo, the third
in an 18 month long presidency.
Imagine if the Republicans impeached Biden for three times in 18 months for whatever
dumb ass reason they could come up with, not just that, but there was actually a reasonable
prospect of them actually succeeding in doing so.
It's no less stupid.
Castillo actually probably would have survived this impeachment vote again, but he would
have had to move even further away from his initial platform in the process.
So what seems to have happened is that Castillo reacted to the prospects of Congress trying
to coup him for the third time in a 13 month time span by basically just saying fuck it.
And taking some very drastic and frankly stupid measures.
Before the vote was to be held, he went on TV and announced that he was dissolving the
Congress, calling new congressional elections, and decreeing an elected constitutional convention
to draft a new constitution.
Technically, the president has the power to dissolve Congress under one circumstance
if they refuse to confirm two ministerial appointments.
That hadn't happened.
Now, morally, I'm just going to sort of come out and say this because I think it should
be pretty obvious.
This was not actually a bad thing at all.
And if you somehow think it was, I've kind of gotten used for you, you're just a liberal
who is totally obsessed with the sanctity of rotten, corrupt institutions, regardless
of how completely unreformable they've already clearly proven themselves to be.
Just wanted to elaborate slightly more on this point here, because I kind of forgot
to say it.
To people like this, the sanctity of institutions that were specifically set up to benefit
the rich and hurt the poor is infinitely more important than actually taking any action
to help the poor, if it means at all, not operating within the so-called sacred norms
of these institutions, which in Peru are certainly not defensible in any way, shape, or form.
In effect to them, socially constructed institutions that only serve to hurt most people are more
important than the actual welfare of those people and taking any measures to improve
it.
So if that cannot be achieved within a completely corrupt, fucked up system, I guess they just
have to live in misery forever.
That's basically the sort of mentality that is at play here.
Castile was responding to literally the third coup attempt against him in just a year and
a half with his own coup attempt that tried to preempt the third coup attempt.
He was trying to do to Congress what Congress was trying to do to him with the intent to
call a constitutional convention which would replace Fujimori's constitution and ensure
that nothing like this can happen again.
That's unabashedly a good thing if it were possible.
Why would you not support changing the Peruvian constitution?
Something that has been proven totally impossible to do by just following the process set up
by that same constitution itself by the dictator Alberto Fujimori.
It's certainly nothing like Peru's January 6th, as the genius American who I quoted in
the intro said.
You cannot reform a system like this, one that is right-wing and neoliberal by design.
And what has happened to Castile during his short, completely failed presidency is the
perfect proof of that.
The bad thing about this is rather that strategically, it was an incredibly dumb move.
It had literally no chance of working.
Thanks to Castile being totally impeded from being able to do basic governance and the
endless media smear campaigns against him, he only had around a 20% approval rating according
to many polls.
Every single other branch of government and government institution was also vehemently
opposed to him since the very beginning and he certainly didn't have any support from
the police or military, who are incredibly right-wing.
Fujimori's government was, after all, backed by the same military and police force and
they haven't been reformed since.
Obviously, a system set up by a neoliberal dictator to ensure endless neoliberal hegemony
was certainly never going to back a leftist taking drastic measures to try and reform
said system.
So, I'm not exactly sure how Castile thought this was ever going to work, or if he even
did.
I seriously hope he didn't.
It seems like he just sort of snapped or something.
A result of being impeded and attacked relentlessly since the very beginning, pretty much just
for being a poor man who wanted to make things in his country better for the majority of
poor people.
People who are far more in common with him and whose interests are far more aligned with
what he proposed than with the American train economists who usually run the country.
No other explanation aside from like insanity really makes sense.
Regardless of how righteous he may have been in his anger, what he did could only have
gone one way, exactly as it did, with him garnering little to no institutional support
required to undertake such a measure and just being unceremoniously ousted by the same
Congress that has been trying to oust him for his entire presidency.
Now, this is going to be used as some sort of example of anti-democratic leftism.
Of course, ignoring all of the context that I just went over here and the complete rottenness
of the Peruvian political system.
Castile was between a rock and a hard place.
He had a five year term as president, three and a half years left to go.
Yet within the first few months, it was already clear that he would not be allowed to do a
single thing.
I think personally, if I was in a situation like that, three and a half years left to
go, I'd probably just fucking quit, you know, and like go into hiding somewhere and never
speak to the media ever again, because honestly, fuck that.
So I can kind of understand what drove him to do this, um, yeah.
Castile has also been the victim of racist and classist attacks.
From the very second that he ever arose onto the national scene, he's a peasant with clearly
indigenous features who tends to wear typical rural attire and indigenous inspired fashion
rather than the business suits of the pro-corporation economists that the Peruvian elite love.
For them, someone like him is suited only to be serving them, to be ruled by people
like them.
Not to rule them.
Sadly, I've seen many Western self-labelled leftists spread the same racist, ignorant,
uneducated narrative of the Peruvian elite.
It seems that, deep down, many of them are racist elitists too, who would prefer a generic,
white, US-backed neoliberal who wears the correct attire while keeping tens of millions
of Peruvians in poverty for the sake of corporate profit.
Castile's mere appearance in a position of national prominence inspired much of the
indigenous and mixed race population of the countryside completely marginalised from Peruvian
politics for centuries to make themselves visible.
While the wealthier urban areas voted against him, they overwhelmingly voted for him, and
many even marched on the capital from very far away at great personal expense in support
of him.
It's sad that someone whose election was taken to be a sign of change finally coming
for many of Peru's most downtrodden people ended up being completely unable to accomplish
really anything for them at all.
The failure of Pedro Castillo is a case study in the fact that politics is far more than
just individuals.
Without a movement to legitimise them, politicians are nothing, and Castillo basically arrived
to the presidency just through coincidental dumb luck, not really through the power of
a concerted, long-lasting movement.
Nor was there really much of a movement in place that was really ready to take up the
mantle and back him.
The obvious counter-example to this would be ever Morales in Bolivia.
Morales is merely the figurehead of a mass movement of the downtrodden.
Without them, he would have been nothing, floundering and completely incapable of doing
anything that he did.
That was proven when, despite his overthrow, the movement survived without him.
I would maybe say that Peru was just not ready for a leftist president.
There's just a matter of building a movement there over time like Mass did in Bolivia,
but I'm not sure that's even true here.
Mass didn't just get a president elected.
They got a legislative majority elected, and they were backed by an overwhelming plurality
of the population, and they still are today.
But they also grew popular in a completely different era when the reach of the capitalist
mass media was nowhere near what it is now in the age of widespread internet access
and cell phones.
How can a feat like that be repeated in Peru, with a political system so well designed to
ensure right-wing hegemony, and the only news that most people ever receive, telling them
that anyone against complete corporate control of the Peruvian economy is a communist terrorist
who wants to eat their babies?
How do you reform a system where Tucker Carlson and Fox News is every single media outlet?
How do you reform a system specifically designed to facilitate the immediate overthrow of anyone
who tries to reform it?
I just made this video quickly in an effort to correct a lot of the completely incorrect
things I've been seeing spread in English-speaking spaces in the wake of what happened on December
7th.
I am so, so tired and jaded with these incredibly simplistic idiotic narratives being spread
by the western left regarding not just Latin America, but really the third world as a whole.
For some reason, so many western leftists just can't help but make themselves useful
idiots for the anti-human, neoliberal right-wing.
It sucks that people cannot just spend 30 minutes googling what happened and be like,
ah, yeah, that's obviously what happened, because it's so obvious when you look into
the background, when you just look into the year and a half of Castillo's presidency,
they would take you 20 minutes, but they can't do it.
Instead, they just tweet out, haha, exactly like January 6th.
Yup, the fascist neoliberal right-wing congress trying to coup a leftist president because
he wants to actually fight poverty in his country and make the country better for poor
indigenous, mestizo people like him.
Him responding to that by trying to do the exact same thing to the right-wing congress.
That's just like January 6th.
That tweet, that tweet, that awful tweet, the greatest example of everything wrong with
western leftism and the utter disrespect that it shows, the utter contempt really that it
shows to the rest of the world.
How can there be any solidarity between the third world and the first world left when
the first world left is so prone to these sorts of incredibly reductive anti-left narratives
that serve the interests of the very right-wing that they pertain to be opposing, that serve
that country's very own imperialist interests?
How can it be?
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hello everyone so on December the 7th
2022 yesterday at the time of filming
this Peruvian president Pedro Castillo
tried to dissolve Congress and was then
ousted by said Congress this series of
events resulted in a lot of idiocy from
westerners who call themselves leftists
for example this tweet Peru's president
just tried his country's version of
January 6 and failed spectacularly
headline Peru lawmakers impeached
president Castillo after he attempts to
dissolve Congress now that's not even
remotely an accurate assessment of the
situation in fact that is one of the
stupidest most harmful comparisons I
could ever imagine anyone making yet
it's nonetheless being said incredibly
confidently and as you can see it got 2
000 likes somehow clearly this person
and many others like them tens of
thousands hundreds of thousands of
people have been making similar claims
don't feel any need to actually learn
about the situation before they speak on
it they think that after just skimming a
headline on CNN or whatever they're
already qualified to make incredibly
confident pronouncements that compare
the Latin American left to Q Anon
conspiracy theorist fashionists in the
USA if you're still watching this video
at this point you're already better than
them congratulations you're willing to
learn about the situation rather than
just making incredibly stupid ignorant
pronouncements to delegitimize those who
fight against U.S backed neoliberal
hegemony in Latin America so good so I
assume that you're interested in what
actually happened and why so let's go
over it Pedro Castillo was elected to
the presidency last year and absolutely
no one saw this coming he was a relative
unknown and he'd only recently come to
mind a Fame as a figurehead of a
teacher's Union everyone had assumed
that the election would have been a
contest between two neoliberals who only
have very minor disagreements with one
another as pretty much every Peruvian
election in the last 20 years has been
this was the first time anyone even
remotely opposed to the neoliberal
status quo had ever even made it to the
second round since the 70s and 80s
Castillo's electoral platform was
largely centered around two main things
replacing the country's Constitution and
dialing back the neoliberal status quo
via nationalizations of Natural
Resources an investment in Education
Health and Social programs essentially a
reversal of the anti-poor
pro-corporation policies imposed upon
Peru since the 90s by its Elite and
their allies in the U.S this one
Castillo brought backing from the
Peruvian left including crucially
Veronica Mendoza before Castillo came
out of nowhere Mendoza was the left
politician who everyone thought was most
likely to win the presidency Mendoza
overall has much better politics than
Castile she has the same sorts of
beliefs on economics and class struggle
while also being more socially
Progressive this is one of the things
that the Western left jumped on Castillo
for during his electoral campaign
posting completely idiotic and frankly
offensive memes like this one implying
that Pedro Castillo was somehow just as
bad as the literal neoliberal fascist
who he was running against incredible so
according to them Castillo was terrible
he was a homophobic misogynist and that
made him undeserving of even critical
support all that he deserved was
derision the only possible reason to
vote for him according to them was just
because he was not his opponent this was
and still is such a stupid idea that it
really just Beggars belief that anyone
peddling it could ever even call
themselves left Peru is a poor country
well well no let me rephrase that Peru
is not a poor country Peru like most
countries in the world is very rich
rather the majority of Peru's population
who are indigenous and mestizo have been
kept poor for Centuries by a largely
wide economic Elite with the help of
their allies in the U.S when people are
forced into poverty when they don't even
have access to a half decent education
when they have to work so much just to
survive that they don't even have the
time to ask themselves why they believe
what they believe they tend to fall into
more reactionary social beliefs and
other such superstitions this is the
same reason why the least religious
Societies in the world today tend to be
the richest it's also the same reason
why for example black people in the USA
tend to have more conservative social
views than white people it's not some
innate trait of them being black it's
rather just because black people are on
average poorer the reason why Western
countries tend to be more socially
Progressive is well because for
centuries they looted the wealth of the
rest of the world enriching themselves
while keeping nearly everyone else poor
it's not because the West has some sort
of innately superior more Progressive
culture they were just as superstitious
homophobic and misogynist as everyone
else when they are at the same levels of
development but when your economic
circumstances improve when you have more
free time to think about what you think
when you have access to more and better
education you're much more likely to
realize how incredibly stupid it is to
be misogynistic homo Arabic or what have
you Castile comes from a poor rural
background directly too he's not a guy
from the country who won a scholarship
to go and study at a private university
or anything like that he's not some guy
who happens to be from a poor town who
won a scholarship to go and study at
Harvard and then came back a neoliberal
he's not just some token basically he's
the real deal when he was running for
president he was literally living in a
stone house with no electricity or
sanitation working as a teacher and
tending to his small family farm look
I'll show you his house there you go
okay
so of course it's fairly inevitable that
most people in this situation hold
reactionary social views that is just a
fact it's a fact of living in a society
of relative poverty the way to fight
these views is to fight their root cause
poverty and Castillo's platform was
based around trying to do exactly that
in a country that has been run for
nothing more than corporate profit for
three decades the condescending
self-righteous Western left may not have
understood this probably willingly not
but the Peruvian left understood this
perfectly so Castile won the support of
the vast majority of the countries left
from the aforementioned Veronica Mendoza
to LGBT collectives this was not
advocacy for just a reluctant vote for
him to keep the other candidate out it
was enthusiastic because he promised
something that would actually shake up
the economic system and Latin American
leftists know better than anyone the
overwhelming importance of doing that
and Castillo to his credit showed a
willingness to work with them holding
meetings with trans rights Advocates and
what have you during his campaign in the
end Castillo ended up narrowly winning
the election against Keiko fujimori with
a lot of help from Centrist voters who
voted for him just because he wasn't her
Castillo had basically the entire media
establishment against him every single
racist stereotype imaginable was thrown
at him and he was framed as an insane
communist Terrorist hell-bent on mass
murder but him being elected was hardly
the end really it was just a start you
see Peru is the most right-wing country
in South America even more right-wing
than Colombia this is for two reasons
one in the 80s and 90s there was a
maoist Insurgency called Sendero
luminoso and they made a habit of mass
murdering peasants the same people they
claimed to be fighting on behalf of
despite the fact that every single other
Peruvian communist socialists and
Anarchist group denounced them Sendero
luminoso nonetheless gave the right-wing
media the perfect ammunition to be used
against the left for decades to come and
they've since done everything possible
to ensure that many people had quite
leftism in general with terrorism this
has made many people people very
skeptical of all shades of leftism which
prior to this was actually quite popular
second in the 90s the country was ruled
by Alberto fujimori who was elected as
president but then became a neoliberal
dictator much in the tradition of the
other U.S backed dictates in the region
during the prior decades aside from his
numerous instances of mass murder and
actual genocide he ran a U.S backed Mass
sterilization campaign of indigenous
women fujimori also radically
restructured the Peruvian political
system and economy to ensure that it
would be as difficult as possible to
change anything about it in the future
thus ensuring that even long after he
was gone neoliberal economic policies
would continue and that it would be near
impossible to challenge them this is why
every single Peruvian election even in
the post fujimori era until 2021 is best
summed up as a choice between right-wing
neuroliberal and right-wing year liberal
who also openly vindicates fujimori
aside from that there has been no
meaningful difference in policy in the
Peruvian political establish if you want
to learn more about fujimori I have a
video on the matter it's very detailed
and goes into a ton of depth it's called
Alberto fujimori dictator of Peru
and yeah look for it on my channel I
also have a video on Sunday luminosa
which I forgot to mention it's called
The Shining path of Peru and you'll also
find it on my channel so yeah check that
out if you're interested I think some
pretty decent videos that can really get
you up to speed on the history that
resulted in the present political
situation in Peru so at the core of the
present situation is the Peruvian
Constitution which was actually replaced
by fujimori during his dictatorship
hence why one of Pedro Castillo's core
campaign promises was to try and change
it because there's just no way that
anything he proposed would ever be
possible otherwise and by the way guys
I'm trying to get this video out as fast
as possible so if I'm not looking at the
cameras because I'm reading a script I
want to get this out today so very sorry
about the relatively low standards of
evidence and production value here
compared to my usual content anyway so
all of this is precisely why Castille
was never going to be able to do any of
what he had proposed he was just one man
who happened to lock his way into an
unexpected presidential term he had no
backing from any remotely substantial
political party all that he had behind
him was the relatively small Peruvian
left and he had absolutely everything
against him the entirety of the
mainstream media the entirety of the
Peruvian political establishment which
has long been entirely dominated by
neoliberals who are not exactly amenable
to his economic proposals and the system
itself set up by Alberto fujimori at
literal far-right dictator to ensure
Perpetual right-wing dominance Castillo
never even got to the point of being
able to carry out basic everyday
governmental functions let alone
actually instituting his reform programs
his proposal to reform the Constitution
was shot down by the overwhelmingly
right-wing Congress who treat a document
written by a dictator to perpetuate
himself in power as if it was some sort
of holy book and changing it would be
unimaginable he did have the power to
pass presidential decrees but whenever
he did so the media in the right wing
immediately framed him every single time
as some sort of dictator so then he
started to try and pass us laws through
Congress instead and they did everything
possible to obstruct them there in a
situation like that there's really no
way to win the country was intentionally
made completely ungovernable one of the
most hilariously stupid Articles of
fujimori's Constitution which is at the
root of all of this is article 113. it
states that the president of the
Republic May vacate his office for the
following reasons and one of them is his
permanent physical or moral incapacity
declared by Congress so that means that
the Congress can overthrow the president
at any time by voting to declare him
morally incapable what does Marlene
capable mean whatever the they want
it doesn't mean anything it's undefined
it's vague it's exactly the perfect
thing that a Congress needs to override
the popular vote and a presidential term
of another branch of governments
arbitrarily now this wasn't a worry for
fujimori as the Congress during his term
was hand-picked pretty much by the man
himself but it's caused a multitude of
problems since because obviously
modeling capacity can mean literally
anything so the Congress has the ability
to overthrow the president who is
directly elected to hit a completely
separate branch of government at any
time for any reason fujimori also
abolished Peru's bicameral Congress and
replace it with a unicameral one meaning
only one house with only 120 seats this
makes it far easier for Congress to pass
laws without any possible impediment
which was exactly what fujimori wanted
during his dictatorship since then this
has caused massive problems anytime the
right wing gets a congressional majority
which given how our right wing Peru
tends to be they usually do they are
able to use the fact that one simple
vote called among 120 people can
overthrow the popularly voted president
and they used a great effect in 2017 the
nearly liberal president at the time
Pedro Pablo Kozinski was threatened with
a vote of moral incapacity by the
fujimori Block in Congress led by the
man's actual children yeah a bunch of
his kids are Congressman or at least
while they threaten to overthrow him
unless he used his presidential pardon
powers to Pardon Alberto fujimori in
jail for life for numerous massacres and
genocide the president agreed and
because he did so he secured a no vote
on his impeachment From the fujimori
Block then in the next year that same
president resigned because videos
surfaced which showed the fujimori block
bribing people other other congressmen
to vote no on that motion on his behalf
so um as you can see here recently Kenji
fujimori
Alberto's son has been sentenced to four
and a half years of prison for his role
in that Scandal so um is is there really
anything more negative that I can say
about this this article of the
Constitution and the absolutely
nefarious up that it enables
yeah there is actually let's continue so
after kazinski resigned he was replaced
by his Vice President Martin vizkata who
is just another center right neoliberal
and then in 2022 following political
disagreements between viscada and Avenue
liberals in Congress particularly with
the fact that viscada was supposedly
investigating corruption they again
decided to use the moral incapacity vote
against him the first one in September
failed and then hilariously two months
later they did it again because there's
no limit on how many times they can do
this by the way so in November this time
it passed and viscardo was ousted from
the presidency this has since been
widely considered as a coup a bad faith
misuse of an ambiguous constitutional
provision to overthrow the executive
whenever the Congress pleases now so
clearly Congress was very happy to
brazenly abuse this power against two
straight nearly liberal presidents with
whom they agreed on 99 of things so what
chance do you think that Castillo stood
against this I think it's it's safe to
say that he had no chance whatsoever
practically immediately after he was
elected before he had even taken office
they were already plotting to impeach
him for moral incapacity you can see
here this is an article from August
literally one month after he was sworn
in discussing the debate about whether
he should be declared morally incapable
August 2021 I mean and then in October
four months after he was sworn in the
first vote against him for modeling
capacity to try and overthrow him was
caught the next month the vote was held
and it fairly narrowly failed the only
reason for this is that Castillo seems
to have recognized the fact that he was
going to be impeded at pretty much every
point from ever instituting even a
single minor reform of any type really
so he started to see to the demands of
the rights he appointed more Centrist
ministers dialed back his more radical
rhetoric Etc this secured his survival
for a short time four months to be exact
four entire months from the last vote
before they called for a new one the
second one in seven months of his
presidency unbelievable now some might
say that Castillo basically dropping
everything that he had promised is a
betrayal and sure that's fair Pepsi
should have fought harder but the truth
is even if he had it wouldn't have
worked Castile really did next to
nothing in his presidency and the reason
for that is not some personal failing
it's the fact that the second that he
did anything that even remotely
threatened the economic status quo
Congress would try to overthrow him that
was hanging over his head the entire
time if they did it twice even though he
was basically doing nothing can you
imagine how fast the vote would have
been called and how fast they actually
would have passed it if he had actually
tried to do anything remotely close to
his campaign promises this brings us to
the events of September 7th at the time
of filming this that's yesterday
Congress was set to hold yet another
moraling capacity vote against Castile
the third in an 18-month long presidency
imagine if the Republicans impeached
Biden for three times in 18 months or
whatever dumbass reason they could come
up with not just that but there was
actually a reasonable Prospect of them
actually succeeding in doing so it's no
less stupid Castillo actually probably
would have survived this impeachment
vote again but he would have had to move
even further away from his initial
platform in the process so it seems to
have happened is that Castillo reacted
to the the prospect of Congress trying
to cure him for the third time in a
13-month time span by basically just
saying it and taking some very
drastic and frankly stupid measures
before the vote was to be held he went
on TV and announced that he was
dissolving the Congress calling new
Congressional elections and decreeing an
elected Constitutional Convention to
draft a new constitution technically the
president has the power to dissolve
Congress under one circumstance if they
refuse to confirm two ministerial
appointments but that hadn't happened
and now morally I'm just gonna sort of
come out and say this because I think it
should be pretty obvious this was not
actually a bad thing at all and if you
somehow think it was I've kind of gotten
use for you you're just the liberal who
is totally obsessed with the sanctity of
rotten corrupt institutions regardless
of how completely unreformable they've
already clearly proven themselves to be
just wanted to elaborate slightly more
on this point here because I kind of
forgot to say it to people like this the
sanity of Institutions that were
specifically set up to benefit the rich
and hurt the poor is infinitely more
important than actually taking any
action to help the poor if it means at
all not operating within this so-called
sacred Norms of these institutions which
in Peru are certainly not defensible in
any way shape or form in effect to them
socially constructed institutions that
only serve to hurt most people are more
important than the actual welfare of
those people and taking any measures to
improve it so if that cannot be achieved
within a completely corrupt up
system I guess they just have to live in
misery forever that's basically the sort
of mentality that is at play here
Castillo was responding to literally the
third coup attempt against him in just a
year and a half with his own cue attempt
that try to preempt the third coup
attempt he was trying to do the Congress
what Congress was trying to do to him
with the intent to call a constitutional
convention which would replace
fujimori's Constitution and ensure that
nothing like this can happen again
that's unabashed really a good thing if
it were possible why would you not
support changing the Peruvian
Constitution something that has been
proven totally impossible to do by just
following the process set up by that
same Constitution Itself by the dictator
Alberto fujimori it's certainly nothing
like Peru's January 6 as the genius
American who I quoted in the intro said
you cannot reform a system like this one
that is right wing and neoliberal by
Design and what has happened to Castillo
during his short completely failed
presidency is the perfect proof of that
the bad thing about this is rather that
strategically it was an incredibly dumb
move it had literally no chance of
working thanks to Castile being totally
impeded from being able to do basic
governance and the endless media smear
campaigns against him he only had around
a 20 approval rating according to many
polls every single other branch of
governments and government institution
was also vehemently opposed to him since
the very beginning and he certainly
didn't have any support from the police
on military who are incredibly right
wing fujimori's government was after all
backed by the same military and police
force and they haven't been reformed
since obviously a system set up by a
near Liberal dictator to ensure endless
neoliberal hegemony was certainly never
going to back a leftist taking drastic
measures to try and reform said system
so I'm not exactly sure how Castillo
thought this was ever going to work or
if he even did I seriously hope he
didn't it seems like he just sort of
snapped or something a result of being
impeded and attacked relentlessly since
the very beginning pretty much just for
being a poor man who wanted to make
things in his country better for the
majority of poor people people who are
far more in common with him and whose
interests are far more aligned with what
he proposed than with the American train
economists who usually run the country
no other explanation aside from like
insanity really makes sense regardless
of how righteous he may have been in his
anger what he did could only have gone
one way exactly as it did with him
garnering little to no institutional
support required to undertake such a
measure and just being unceremoniously
ousted by the same Congress that has
been trying to oust him for his entire
presidency now this is going to be used
as some sort of example of
anti-democratic leftism of course
ignoring all the context that I just
went over here and the complete
rottenness of the Peruvian political
system Castillo was between a rock and a
hard place he had a five-year term as
president three and a half years left to
go yet within the first few months it
was already clear that he would not be
allowed to do a single thing I think
personally if I was in a situation like
that three and a half years left to go
I'd probably just quit you know
and like go into hiding somewhere and
never speak to the media ever again
because honestly that so I can kind
of understand what drove him to do this
though yeah Castile has also been the
victim of racist and classist attacks
from the very second that he ever arose
onto the national scene he's a peasant
with clearly indigenous features who
tends to wear typical rural attire an
indigenous inspired fashion rather than
the business suits of the
pro-corporation economists that the
Peruvian Elite love for them someone
like him is suited only to be serving
them to be ruled by people like them not
to rule them sadly I've seen many
Western self-labeled leftists spread the
same racist ignorant uneducated
Narrative of the Peruvian Elite it seems
that deep down many of them are racist
elitists too who would prefer a generic
white U.S backed neoliberal who wears
the correct attire while keeping tens of
millions of peruvians in poverty for the
sake of corporate profit Castillo's mere
appearance in a position of national
prominence inspired much of the
indigenous and mixed race population of
the countryside completely marginalized
from Peruvian politics for centuries to
make themselves visible while the
wealthier urban areas voted against him
they overwhelmingly voted for him and
many even marched on the capital from
very far away a great personal expense
in support of him it's sad that someone
whose election was taken to be a sign of
change finally coming for many of Peru's
most downtrodden people ended up being
completely unable to accomplish really
anything for them at all the failure of
Pedro Castillo is a case study in the
fact that politics is far more than just
individuals without a movement to
legitimize them politicians are nothing
and Castillo basically arrived to the
presidency just through coincidental
dumb luck not really through the power
of a concerted long-lasting movement nor
was there really much of a movement in
place that was really ready to take up
the mantle and back him the obvious
counter-example to this would be Evo
Morales in Bolivia Morales is merely the
figurehead of a mass movement of the
downtrodden without them he would have
been nothing floundering and completely
incapable of doing anything that he did
that was proven when despite his
overthrow the movement survived without
him I would maybe say that Peru was just
not ready for a leftist president it's
just a matter of building a movement
there over time like Mass did in Bolivia
but I'm I'm not sure that's even true
here Mass didn't just get a president
elected they got a legislative majority
elected and they were backed by an
overwhelming plurality of the population
and they still are today but they also
grew popular in a completely different
era when the reach of the capitalist
mass media was nowhere near what it is
now in the age of widespread internet
access and cell phones how can a feat
like that be repeated in Peru with a
political system so well designed to
ensure right-wing hegemony and the only
news that most people ever receive
telling them that anyone against
complete corporate control of the
Peruvian economy is a communist
terrorist who wants to eat their babies
how do you reform a system where Tucker
Carlson and Fox News is every single
media Outlet how do you reform a system
specifically designed to facilitate the
immediate overflow of anyone who tries
to reform it I just made this video
quickly in an effort to correct a lot of
the completely incorrect things I've
been seeing spread in English-speaking
spaces in the wake of what happened on
December 7th I am so so so tired and
jaded with these incredibly simplistic
idiotic narratives being spread by the
Western left regarding not just Latin
America but really the third world as a
whole for some reason so many Western
leftists just can't help but make
themselves useful idiots for the
anti-human neoliberal right wing it
sucks that people cannot just spend 30
minutes Googling what happened and be
like ah yeah that's obviously what
happened because it's so obvious when
you look into the background when you
just look into the year and a half of
Castillo's presidency it would take you
20 minutes but they can't do it instead
they just tweet out haha exactly like
January 6. yep the fascist neoliberal
right-wing Congress trying to coo a
leftist president because he wants to
actually fight poverty in his country
and make the country better for poor
indigenous mestizer people like him him
responding to that by trying to do the
exact same thing to the right-wing
Congress that that's just like January
6. that tweet that tweet that awful
tweet the greatest example of everything
wrong with Western leftism and the utter
disrespect that it shows the other
contempt really that it shows to the
rest of the world how can there be any
solidarity between the third world and
the first world left when the first
world left is so prone to these sorts of
incredibly reductive anti-left
narratives that serve the interests of
the very right wing that they pertain to
be opposing that serve their country's
very own imperialist interests how can
it be
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