Latin America will long remember what went down on Wednesday in Peru. President Pedro Castillo took to live television to dissolve a hostile Congress but neither his cabinet nor the military followed, and by the day’s end he was the one out of a job and behind bars for attempting a coup. In his 16-month scandal-ridden stint, how did the 53-year old left-wing trade unionist fail so badly in his campaign pledge to stamp out the corruption that’s plagued the country’s political elites?
Is it about the man or is it about Peru? The nation is now on its sixth president in as many years. Castillo's attempted power grab smacks of the one that succeeded in 1992. The perpetrator was then-President Alberto Fujimori, the father of the now opposition leader Keiko Fujimori, who’s still in jail on corruption charges. But the story of Peru over the last 25 years has also included notable successes: years-long sustained growth that seemed to ignore political turmoil, as well as strong development and the decline of a brutal armed insurgency in the coca-growing hinterland. Why can't Peru fix its politics?
