Peru: a revolution in progress
ByAlberto Giovanelli
To understand the keys of the powerful popular uprising that runs through the country and that has caused an unprecedented crisis of the Peruvian political and institutional regime, We must begin by understanding that an immense revolutionary process is going through the country. It must be clearly stated that this is not simply a crisis, Rather, it is the breakdown of a political order whose decline has been permanent until the lumpenization of the political caste., the constitutional break and, Finally, to a situation of power vacuum in which even today, Monday 16 of November, We found.
The succession of vacated presidents (destitute), other prisoners, of suicides(Alan Garcia), the accusation of corruption that weighs on more than fifty percent of the representatives of the Congress, and the uncertainty that we go through in these hours, are results of this decline, accelerated to unsustainable levels after the 2016 elections that enshrined the also dismissed Pablo Kuchinsky.
Martin Vizcarra, an engineer former governor of Moquegua, Kuchinsky's successor and lobbyist for international mining companies located in the south of the country, He was also dismissed in the last week by a mafia alliance forged in Congress with the complicity of the media oligopolies and business power., that has had the consent of the institutions, whose silence allowed, in practice, the use of legal resources and institutional means to carry out a coup in the midst of an atrocious economic and social crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Merino successor, barely lasted 5 days in power, devastated by a popular mobilization that faced repression that claimed at least two young lives and the disappearance of about a hundred protesters.
The political order instituted in the 2000, propped up by interest groups participating in the National Accord –which were no longer representative of the popular demands that for years mobilized against the Fujimori regime– left intact the Constitution of 1993, the neoliberal economic model intact, intact the technocracy that imposed the economic and legal reforms that have consolidated the privatization of the State in recent years, intact the electoral system and the collapsed party system that has given fruit to a free market of electoral undertakings, and intact the mafia networks entrenched in various state institutions.
During years, the elections have been pantomimes of democracy: no real matches, no real possibility of alternation, and with increasingly less competitive and more opaque processes, that favored the mafias with greater ability to pay and influence. Four - and perhaps five - Presidents of the Republic with very serious accusations of corruption, those who always governed in the same direction despite the change in the electoral "mask" are very clear evidence of this. All focused on negotiating, shamelessly, particular interests of all kinds.
This week, that will be marked in history, as if out of nowhere, throughout the country we have seen indignant crowds emerge and declare insurgency, willing to risk everything. The protests have been led by brave young people grouped and grouped in spontaneous collectives and, as well, pre-existing. In a few days and in the midst of the pandemic, they succeeded in geometrically multiplying expressions of rejection of the usurping government of Manuel Merino, but also to the cow Vizcarra. Even, managed to add those who observed the first street protests with distrust, the cacerolazos called for the 8 of every night, the projections of images once the curfew forced to leave the streets, or the hashtags and memes that set fire to the virtual public sphere. The politicized social tide emerged unstoppably. The strength of this expression of popular sovereignty lies, for now, in its ability to add plurally to those who bet to rescue the country from the clutches of the mafias. Nevertheless, We also know that to refound the country we will need more than enthusiasm, outrage and spontaneity.
Re-founding the country is the essential goal we must set ourselves. It's possible? Yes, and, precisely, because we are witnessing the breakdown of the political order. The constitutional crisis in which we find ourselves forces us to project ourselves into the future, no to the past, and to agree on solutions that prevent, Yes now, that the mafias and corporate interests set the course and destiny of the country. There is no place in this situation to promote cosmetic changes and minimal reforms that leave institutional structures intact., hence the absolute crisis of progressivisms, that in expressions like those of the Broad Front or those of the New Peru of Verónica Mendoza, They only express themselves as the "progressive" leg of a collapsed regime and desperately offer alternatives that do not break the margins imposed by bourgeois institutions. No. The electoral undertakings that mark the pulse of Congress should not lead this process. Neither should corporate interests that use the media that make up their oligopolies as a megaphone and that, at your will, make and break in the state.
Who, so? How? Where? The idea of a free and sovereign Constituent Assembly process in Peru is much more than a slogan of the Peruvian left. Today is the task of the moment, an immediate task. It is a process that has to be driven from the bottom up, not top down. It has to open true deliberative and reflective spaces in society and, although there can and should be proposals of various kinds, these have to be debated, weighed, reconsidered, eventually articulated to, Finally, be expressed in a formal process that generates solid agreements that workers and mobilized people must appropriate.
The conditions are in place to promote this call now that the Fujimori constitutional political order instituted in Mexico has been broken. 1993. There are formal conditions, but, especially, the social conditions exist. In recent days we have seen the emergence of politicized society, between young people and workers, the claim to redo the rules of the game, to change even the roots and refound the country. And with whom? If there are no matches, With whom? No matches, It is true, But that does not mean that in Peru there is no organization or capacity to organize. In Peru there is a huge number of social and popular organizations that, for decades, they already articulate forms of diverse incursion into politics as mechanisms of resistance and dispute with the state that excludes or crushes them. Indigenous peoples organizations are, maybe, the most emblematic in this field. Youth groups of all kinds are in the front row of the uprising. And there are also, although to a lesser extent, various kinds of unions that have been fighting for violated rights for decades, despite the betrayals of the union leaderships. Even, there are civil society organizations - universities, NGOs, nonprofit associations — that could and should be conscientiously involved in a process like this. Especially and as part of a generalized process, feminist groups that, for a long time, not only promote the struggle for the recognition of fundamental rights, but also transformative initiatives of society. Hence, the need for revolutionaries to postulate ourselves as the amalgamation of the immense number of processes scattered today is essential..
It is essential to put the debate and the promotion of a social process that thinks, resolutions, Speak clearly, change and reinstitute the political and economic structures that organize our society, to start turning everything around, so that once they rule those who never ruled, the workers and the people. From our International Socialist League, We call for the unity of revolutionaries behind these goals to avoid being, once again, the caboose of reformist projects that only seek to mask a corrupt system that condemns the vast majority of Peruvians to hunger. We revolutionary socialists must clearly stand up as an alternative and propose a fundamental solution, the only alternative for Peru and for Latin America. A Socialist Peru.
That would be betting on a different future.
