Peru: Missed Opportunity – The Rise and Fall of Pedro Castillo

An interview with Peruvian Trotskyist Farid Matuk by Brandon Madsen

How a Lack of Organized Marxist Leadership Undermined the Potential for Transformative Class-Struggle Politics in Peru

When left-wing presidential candidate Pedro Castillo was elected in Peru in 2021, running with the Perú Libre party, it kindled the hopes not only of many workers and poor people in Peru but also of the left internationally. This was certainly true in DSA, which sent a delegation to Peru and published messages of congratulation to Castillo. But by the end of 2022, Castillo had been forced out of office, arrested, and replaced by the pro-capitalist administration of Dina Boluarte.

Ever since, there has been a combative protest movement by the poorest and most oppressed layers of Peruvian society against the new regime. These protests have been met with police violence, with January 2023 marking the largest mass killing of protesters by police since at least the 1960s. Unfortunately, the protest movement has so far been unable to break through and achieve any real gains in terms of regime change, constitutional reform, an expansion of democracy, or other issues.

To get an inside perspective, I interviewed Farid Matuk, an economist by profession and Peru’s former chief statistician, who has been a prominent left figure in the country for several decades. A self-described “full-time Trotskyist militant” from 1975 to 1982, he reports having twice been detained by authorities for his political activism: first for a few days in 1976 for protesting against a visit by Henry Kissinger, and then for four days on trumped-up charges of being an “ambassador for terrorists” in 1993. He ran for Congress as a member of the left bloc Frente Amplio (“Broad Front”) in 2020, though he was not elected. He has been an outspoken critic of Peru’s right-wing governments, advised several elected leftist politicians, and worked for national ministries under left-leaning governments, including in the ministries of Production and Agriculture under Castillo, but this has in no way blunted his sharp criticisms of the left’s recent and past mistakes.

First, with the dozens of protesters recently killed by police, I have to ask – is it dangerous to be an activist in Peru right now? Are people afraid to protest?

It’s still a lot less dangerous than under the government of Fujimori in the 1990s. You don’t have a death squad that goes to your house. They pretend to give you some sort of due process. The main risk of harm to protesters comes from the police at the demonstrations. There is a sort of deep state in the police and in the army that shoots to kill. No president, no matter how left or progressive they were supposed to be, has ever stopped them. The old #1 record for police killing the most protesters in a single day – prior to it being topped this January in Juliaca, Puno – actually happened under a pro-Soviet government in 1969.

“Castillo arrived in government as a recognized leader of the left … mainly because he had been there in the streets leading very large strikes.”

When the police decide to kill people, they simply do it. But I wouldn’t say that this is something coming from the president. Instead, I would say that the police and the army have a large degree of autonomy, and no one in power has ever seriously tried to unroot that.

But are people afraid to protest? I don’t think so. The killing has been very selective, targeting individual protesters, not smashing up organizations of the left. So, in that way, I disagree with anyone who might call this a fascist government. It’s not. And lately, the killing has been slowly reduced. The last ones on a mass scale were in January in the south of Peru, and now we are more or less back at the “habitual” level of violence.

This is a very old and deeply rooted problem in Latin America generally, not just Peru. The police and the army function independently and are not subject to civilian mandate. If they consider it necessary to kill, they kill you; if they don’t, they don’t. They are not subject to the rule of law.

Can you summarize for our readers the background to Castillo’s election, and a bit about what it was like when he actually took office?

I would start by going back to 2016. That year, the left won the second-largest bench [delegation, bloc] in Congress. And in the popular vote, the left came in third place, and was very close to being number two.

“As soon as Castillo was elected, he started making concessions to the right.”

The left members of parliament were elected in April, but unfortunately by December of that year, the bench of the left had a tragic, unprincipled split – not even over anything political, but just personality-based issues like who gets to be the spokesperson. So, the expectations of left-wing voters hoping to have a strong left that leads a government were gone. For five years after that split, the approach of the left members in Congress was essentially what Lenin criticized as “bourgeois parliamentarism”: they were just proposing laws and laws and more laws, with a target of amending the constitution, but there was very little direct action, and very little in the way of a long-term project. It’s like they thought that by changing words on paper you are going to get a revolution. In my view, that’s just plain wrong. So, the leaders of the left who were elected in 2016 disappointed the voters.

That’s when Pedro Castillo suddenly comes along and wins the election in 2021. He was already in first place in round one, with right-wing leader Keiko Fujimori in second place.

Pedro Castillo won because he was involved in workers’ struggle and direct action in the streets. He led two strikes of the teachers’ union: a successful one in 2017, and one in 2018 that lost. Soon after that came COVID, and everything stopped. But Castillo was recognized instantly as the leader of the fierce teachers’ union strikes, a leader of the left, of the poor. And with 19 percent of the popular vote, he got number one in the first round.

Now, 19 percent was the same portion of the vote that Frente Amplio got in 2016, when it came in third place. The difference is that, when Castillo ran, the right was so confident that they split into many small parties. They decimated themselves. So then the second round was a contest between left and right. That was one big difference compared to the 2016 elections, which was right vs. right in the second round.

So, Castillo arrived in government as a recognized leader of the left, not just due to his formal position, but mainly because he had been there in the streets leading very large strikes. That was how he ascended to the presidency. The problem is that as soon as Castillo was elected, he started making concessions to the right.

The first concession, which was very striking to me, was that he ratified Julio Velarde as president of the Central Bank, the same person who has been in charge since 2006, and who led an increase in inflation – an increase in the price of the dollar – and with that, an increase in the price of everything that is important in Peru. Castillo ratifying him was the first signal that he was trying to make some deal with the bourgeoisie. That was in June 2021.

The second important sign, for me, was that in the preparation of his first cabinet, in July, the two ministries with the largest budgets – Housing and Transport – were assigned to people who were complete unknowns, with no reputation whatsoever. And worse still, they didn’t participate in any of the preparations for taking office; they just showed up on the day they were sworn in and that was it. But they were given huge budgets. That was the second signal that Castillo was doing something strange.

And the third sign – which is the last one I’ll list, because after that there start to be too many to count – was that Frente Amplio was kicked out of the government. Frente Amplio had been in charge of one ministry – the Ministry of Production. So, that minister was removed at the beginning of October, and he was replaced by a person nominated by Acción Popular, which is a right-wing party.

It became clear that Pedro Castillo was making an alliance with the bourgeoisie in order to survive. Not in order to achieve anything for the people, not for any tangible goal that anyone could see, just to politically survive.

Can you explain a bit about the significance of having elected a president of indigenous descent in a country like Peru?

I wouldn’t say that Pedro Castillo was elected primarily for being of indigenous descent. He was essentially elected for being a trade union leader and doing strikes. Teachers in the public schools are very low paid. So, he was a low-paid worker – not a high-paid worker like, say, Lula was in the steel industry. Also, he was a rural teacher, so he was not properly a peasant. Another characteristic to note is that he’s not fluent in Quechua [the main indigenous language in Peru]. He understands some, but he was never fluent.

He was elected mainly because he represented the rural working poor. Of course, most of the poor and most of the rural people are also indigenous. But he never raised a flag of indigenous rights or a fight against racism; his electoral success was born out of the economic contradictions.

What were the political tensions like between Castillo and his cabinet? Why do you think there was so much reshuffling of cabinet members?

In the cabinet, there was no political program, and therefore no consistent basis for anything. People would just appear out of nowhere and become ministers. Inside the ministries, there were no public policies of any sort. On paper, there was a nice government plan that I helped write, but the government implemented absolutely none of it. We wrote a whole plan for nothing.

The reshuffling reflected Castillo’s desperation to politically survive at all costs. At one point he installed a far-right prime minister that didn’t last even a week. Why he did it remains a mystery. But in essence he displayed an eclectic, petit-bourgeois pattern of behavior. Castillo tried to survive without any political compass: he tried being left, he tried being right, but he had no political north.

What do you think were the underlying causes of the December 2022 coup, and what, if anything, do you think could have been done to prevent Castillo from being ousted?

My understanding, based on public info from someone who worked closely with Castillo, is that he believed on December 7 that he was going to get kicked out by the Congress that afternoon. And so he decided, “if I’m going to be kicked out, then I will do something magnificent in order to go out as a hero.” And yes, he did something magnificent: he opened his mouth and said, “Congress is dissolved.” It’s classic Hegel – “spirit makes matter.” He believed that he opened his mouth and things happened.

Imagine if, on that same December 7, he had instead said, “Today, Congress, at 3:00 pm, will decide if I am ousted; I invite the people of Peru to gather in the front hall of the Congress awaiting their answer.” He could easily have gotten at least 50,000 people at the doors of Congress, and Congress wouldn’t have dared to kick him out.

But to take that course of action, that would imply being a revolutionary. That implies having an approach of direct mass action. Castillo rejected direct action. He chose a petit-bourgeois approach: “I am going to do something that will be recorded in history.” Yes, he’s recorded in history – as a disaster! He was a rebel who seized state power for 80 minutes. That might be the shortest coup d’é tat in the history of the world. The special police that are the Peruvian equivalent of the US Secret Service, who were monitoring him, captured him immediately.

Here’s an analogy I’ve used many times: Say you make a fake pistol out of wood, and you go to the bank and say, “This is an assault; give me all your money!” It’s obvious to everyone in the bank that you’re alone and your weapon is fake. So all ten employees at the bank jump on top of you and disarm you.

This is essentially what Pedro Castillo did. And his attempt was about as effective as the guy robbing the bank with the obviously wooden pistol. How did he come to this completely irrational decision? For me, the only explanation is the petit-bourgeois belief that personal effort is what conveys you to success. There is no concept of social action, mass action, collective action.

Given the political deficiencies you just mentioned, do you think that it was a mistake for Marxists to enter the Castillo government?

Well, the problem was that Castillo decided not to clash with Congress. I proposed that Castillo’s should be a “war cabinet” that does not shy away from a head-on clash with Congress. And that we should be conscious of the fact that this clash would likely end in one of two ways: the executive branch dissolves the legislative branch, and we elect a new legislature, or else Congress ousts the president. So you have a large political contradiction, and you go in with open eyes about that, and you work with the concept of class struggle. For me, on that basis, entering the government as a Marxist is not a problem.

But the Castillo government did nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing that was significant to history – not a law, not even a proposal for a law. Nothing.

For example, the agreement Castillo made with us during the election was that on his first day in office, in his speech to the Congress, he would denounce the whole constitution, and he would call for a national assembly to make a new constitution. The legal proposal for it was already written, by Verónika Mendoza; all he had to do was introduce it.

But once actually in office? “No,” he said, “it’s not the time now; it’s too radical.” The classical petit-bourgeois reformist argument. Well, that was what he showed himself to be, and that’s what he stayed – right up to the day he was kicked out.

“If [we made] one major mistake, it was not to right away start publicly criticizing Castillo’s irrational decisions and failure to pursue the more militant approach he had promised.”

As a member of Frente Amplio, I participated in the Castillo government with the idea that this was a government elected to represent the left side of the political spectrum; the people trusted this government, so we needed to participate. But if there was one major mistake, it was not to right away start publicly criticizing Castillo’s irrational decisions and failure to pursue the more militant approach he had promised.

Instead of choosing a fighting course of action based on the class struggle, Castillo tried again and again to pacify the right wing, pacify the bourgeoisie, giving them whatever they asked for. And, of course, they kept asking, asking, asking for more – asking everything under the sun in order to preserve law and order. When you are elected as a leader of the left but your actions in the government are the same as the status quo, that’s a clear contradiction.

Can you describe for us a bit about the character of the protests that have been going on in Peru since Castillo was ousted?

The protests are extremely disorganized. There is no leadership, there is no political party, there are not even any individuals who show up as leaders. It is just an absolute vacuum. You have a significant uprising, a lot of protests, but there is no real political leadership of any kind. And the people who pretend to be providing political leadership are just focused on bourgeois legality, not the movement: trying to get a law passed to propose a new national assembly, to make a new constitution, to make a law to elect a new president, etc., and all within the bourgeois rules. To me, it’s absolute nonsense.

From what I can tell, it seems like the popular protests have been mainly from the most oppressed layers of Peruvian society, but have not yet brought into struggle the “heavy battalions,” so to speak, of the working class. Would you say that’s accurate?

I would essentially agree with that. The COVID pandemic here in Peru decimated and broke up the working class. The lack of trade union organization is just horrible, even by US standards. So, we are a very backward society, very split, very fractured. Especially given the failure of the Castillo leadership – and, even more important for me, the previous failure of Frente Amplio in 2016, splitting not even a year after the elections – we need a new leadership, from scratch.

So, the real state of the movement against the Boluarte regime is that it’s a spontaneous movement. There are complaints, protests; but there is no leadership, no final target. There is no construction of organization. And without organization, everything is just hanging in thin air.

Are there any lessons that the left and workers’ movements internationally should be drawing out of the experience in Peru?

You need organization; you need to build a party. Without organization, you go nowhere. Because if by any chance you get a position in the executive or legislative branch, and you don’t have an organization, don’t have direct action, then you are gone, you are dead. For me, the essential lesson is: build an organization.

Also, find methods of organizing that allow for renewal of the organization’s leadership, so you don’t have one perpetual leader. For example, now in Latin America, it’s “Evo Morales forever.” Conceptually, it’s the same as Stalin. Or Lula in Brazil, conceptually it’s the same. There are no new leaders, there is no organization, there is no ideology; there’s just a cult of personality. One of the things that we have learned is that we are against the cult of personality. And a cult of personality is what we’ve had with Fidel Castro, then Lula, then Evo Morales, then Chavez, but he died, and then you have a new cult with Maduro. And Ortega is the extreme case of the cult of personality. So, there is no organization, no genuine leadership, no renewal of leaders. And that categorically guarantees a disaster.