The Collective Good: Action & Inaction in Perú
- JM Valat De Córdova
- Apr 26
- 10 min read
Perúvian democracy is a fragile project, haunted by a history of corruption, coups, and the persistent fear of revolt. Since the 1994 self-coup by Alberto Fujimori, the nation has operated under a constitution that eroded both the fact and perception of democratic legitimacy. In order to succeed as a democratic endeavor, Peru must adopt a new constitution that normatively adopts liberal values and principles of civic virtue. This structural transformation is necessary to ensure the inclusion and flourishing of all citizens, moving beyond the institutional instability that currently plagues the state.
Thesis: The Peruvian Constitution should be re-written for Democratic provenance.
The 1994 constitution is the direct result of an undemocratic seizure of power that dismantled the more democratic framework established in 1970 by Alberto Fujimori, and in a project that is now continued by his daughter, Keiko Fujimori in the party Fuerza Poplar (Popular Force). This current apparatus of governance is characterized by a lack of representative depth. While the system utilizes proportional voting and mandatory participation act as democratic outlets for pressure, these mechanisms fail to bridge the social fragmentation of the populace.
The legitimacy of the 'Officina Nacional Por Eleciones' (ONPE) remains under constant scrutiny, with questions regarding the validity of returned votes echoing back to the heavily disputed 2000 election. It has also repeatedly come into question in the first round of the most recent elections, as leftists, journalists, and confused onlookers see the wreckage of returns of the current election and think the universal thought: what if the worst happens? Is it rigged again?
What happens to the hundreds of thousands of people in the impoverished regions of Peru that have lower HDIs than others? In Puno? In Lima (now one of the most dangerous cities in the world)? The people who the former President Alberto Fujimori is alleged to have authorized the mass execution of during his decade long hybrid regime (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018) Fmr. President Castillo’s failure to implement a new constitution is something that is emblematic of the South America left. Socialists don’t know what to do. Communists are actively organizing more and more, in manners that have historically failed the nation, its media, and our people.
This institutional decay has fostered what certain writers have constituted a 'dictatorship by committee' within a Congress that is perceived as increasingly disconnected from the people it ostensibly serves (“How Democracies Die”, 2018.)
Section 1: Institutional Decay
The idea that one may allow themselves to be changed by the weight of a distant relative of noble origins is fundamentally unimportant. Heritage, or the idea that one should feel better or worse about themselves is unimportant in the sense that heritage does not exist as a tangible thing. Unless, one has seen portraits dolt the family halls of a hacienda, or mansion. Looking at this writer’s own, it can be traced to a family of noble origins in Spain, Jose Maria de Cordoba (named after the city in Spain.) That heritage, weighs upon this writer when they act, and is often but not always what informs the personal and political spheres of consciousness (Hegel, 1807).
How may a country full of corruption, hatred, and historical and structural racism redefine itself? Unless one has experienced something great or good that changes their lives, heritage is something that cannot be understood. On a personal level, this writer has been hit by a car, in an accident where only about 10 percent of people survive. In which, this writer had much time to contemplate the very useless and philosophical questions of life. To bring this back to electoral politics:
A dialectical material analysis can be brought to an analysis of Peru, and the nations’ particular faults. Sanchez Palomino, the current leftist candidate for President that may still have a chance of advancing to the second round, is battling with Rafael López Aliaga, the right-wing to ‘economic liberal’ mayor of Lima, independent, and formerly a member of the party National Solidarity.
Currently, Peru is grappling with that question in general elections, and answering that it doesn’t know whether the perennial candidate Keiko Fujimori is better than the insurgent opposition, or rather, Peruvians are confused.
Fujimori, while leading the polls,is the daughter of the former president of the country Alberto Fujimori, who died before the first round of the elections could be held. The current Congress and Presidency are in the process of being elected in the second round of the general election, but through money, lack of diversity in thought and actual diversity, and social fragmentation.
The social movement after the removal of former President Pedro Castillo is evidence that the Perúvian Congress is not representative of the people of Perú. Despite the proportional voting system and mandatory voting, which fines non-voters 30 soles for not voting (about 10 US Dollars, exchange rates fluctuate wildly.)
This is partially the result of the Fujimori self-coup that occurred in 1994 where the Former President re-wrote the country’s democratic constitution of 1970, which has led to an apparatus of corruption that surrounds Perúvian governance is getting worse due to structural inequalities in the Perúvian economy.
Section 2: Policy effects on Indigenous population
As a nation, Perú is undoubtedly like most others, in that it deals with the prevalent and corrosive effects of racism within its social sphere. This can be best seen by the disparity in development of the regions of Perú as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI) which shows a relatively large gap in infrastructure and other quality of life indicators between coastal areas, and particularly Perú’s capital, Lima (0.884), and the quality of life for people in regions like Puno (0.752). Which according to the U.N., ordered report, is the difference between a high and very high quality of life on the global scale (Global Data Lab, 2023).
The inequality provided the momentum for Pedro Castillo’s rise as the proclaimed "President of the Poor." Undoubtedly, the forgotten regions of Perú will again vote in the next president of Peru as well, as since Castillo’s election in 2021, we have had 5 presidents including him. And this is a good thing. Peru has for some time been undergoing what has been described as a dictatorship by committee. Without fresh, new, and refurbished political ideals it cannot be said that Peru will ever get better.
Indigenous rights , known as indigenismo have long been sidelined by all but the left-wing political factions of Peruvian democracy (Acuña, 2023). In southern regions like Puno, this neglect has fostered heavy support for socialism and communism from the after-shocks of the Sendero Luminismo’s failed attempts at winning a civil war in the nation. Puno is one of those reasons, where after the removal of Fmr., President Castillo, 70 women marched and were slaughtered by Peruvian police forces after peaceful demonstrations in the nation’s capital, Lima. By 2023, a year after Boluarte was sworn in, 90% of the nation disapproved of her (Castillo, 2025.)
After the removal of Fmr., President Castillo in December of 2022, Castillo challenged his removal in court, citing the fact that his removal was not within the actual words of the constitution (“"Back to power: Pedro Castillo asks court to annul his removal from office." CE Noticias Financieras: English, June 24, 2023). Castillo, emulating former President Alberto Fujimori, attempted what has been coined a self-coup, and was codified into the constitution as legal since Fujimori’s successful attempt.
His attempt failed that day, largely because military forces and large widespread collective action stopped him. However, after his removal, within the often forgotten regions of Peru, up in the Andes, where the air thins and the soil is not just brown, but in fact has a red tinge to it: the people took over. They took over airports, and municipal governments. They then marched, and died after President Boluarte, the former vice president of Peru who let the military shoot them in the streets. After they died, they took shelter within dorms, homes, and wherever the people could house them.
They said that the voice of Lima, so low to the coast, could not hear the voice of the mountains (in Spanish.) (Acuña, 2023). That their voices were drowned out by the sounds of bullets that Boluarte claimed she could not stop. That the illegality of the democratically elected marxist President Castillo’s removal under a textual basis of the Constitution, was of no concern to them.
It was, to this author’s memory, the single darkest day in Peruvian democracy since Fmr. President Fujimori did the same, successfully and with the assistance of the military after having systematically fought and murdered the maoist Shining Path, after 10 years of brutal civil war. However, it is not possible to understand how brutal the civil war was, unless you yourself have been in the streets of Lima, with your cousin pointing out the areas where Shining Path car bombs collapsed residential buildings in what are now affluent parts of Lima. Or, grew up hearing stories about how the Sendero Luminismo actively targeted other left-wing politicians and activists, even union organizers, in order to maintain a dogmatic control of ‘ideological purity’ and utilize this violence in a destructive, chaotic, and disgusting manner.
In fact, it was not until Christmas of 2024 when I visited the museum that commemorates the fallen in Miraflores, and attempts to chronicle the history of the civil war, funded by the European Union, that I ever thought to think of the actual terror of it all. The fact that the group exists in small forms today, somewhere in the jungle or in the Andes, is a large framing device of right-wing parties & liberal parties in the quest to delegitimize the election of leftist parties. And distrust in institutions only grows, when in the mountains they cannot hear what they say in the city, and in the city they do not listen to what is said in the Andes.
The tragic reality of this social divide was laid bare during protests against Castillo’s removal, where the lives of dozens of indigenous women were seemingly treated with less gravity than those of the largely ethnically Spanish elite. Although, this reality itself masks the complicated reality of democracy in Peru.
Peru currently has a system of governance that allows for a wide array of parties to be represented in the parliament, but they are mostly made up of figures that are or are perceived as corrupt. The last elected President, Pedro Castillo, was a member of the avowed Marxist Lenininist party: Perú Libre (or Free Peru). He was elected on a slogan of “No Más Pobres en un País Rico”, translated to No more poor people in a rich country. This writer remembers that specifically his grandparents were scared of him winning.
Castillo has been described by academics as Peru’s “President of the Poor” and attempted a self-coup of the Peruvian government in December of 2022 using a constitutionally dubious measure of, simply attempting to suspend congress before the removal of the President was successful (Acuña, 2023). He is one of many presidents that sit in a jail, specifically made for former Peruvian presidents.
Currently, Perú is embroiled in an effort to elect its next president. That race is currently between the leftist & democratic socialist members of Junto por el Perú, Roberto Sánchez Palomino and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter and former First Lady of Perú.
Keiko Fujimori. Fujimori is, nominally, socially moderate, but has run for the office of the president in every election since 2011, and has on economic issues been aptly described as a nationalist conservative. Her party was the largest in vote share and seats in the 2021 general elections which saw Castillo get elected.
K., Fujimori is currently leading the first round of elections, with about 17 percent of the vote (ONPE 2026). Sanchez Palomino is currently in a battle between Lopez Aliaga, at almost exactly 12 percent of the vote.
The ‘Officina Nacional Por Eleciones’ of Peru currently has about 94 percent of the votes returned. Lopez Aliaga is a member of what has been termed a Peruvian ultraconservative party. The institution of ONPE is currently being questioned by left-wing and far-left voices in Peru and in general has been questioned as a source of valid votes in previous elections, such as the 2000 Peruvian presidential election, where Alberto Fujimori won his third term. This is operatively not a good thing.
Conclusion
In order to understand the case of Peru, first we should look at the case of Socrates, who infamously would not apologize for being prosecuted during his own trial, “But do you see, Socrates, that the opinion of the many must be regarded, as is evident in your own case, ”(“Crito”, 400 B.C.)
From this quote, we can see in this platonic dialog, Plato trying to reconcile Socrates’ action and his own thoughts. Socrates famously in his apology to the Athenian people for the crimes levied against him at trial, used it to rail against the Athenian people and his charges. So, why did he do this? Why is this writer bringing it up? Plato, and particularly his work The Republic was used in justifying the political theory of many conservative and far-right thinkers, as Plato struggles to reconcile with the idea that people can be wrong, and that a democracy executed his teacher.
To bring this back to Perú: Peru, despite its many failings, is a nation that can be changed, but not inherently that it must. That it must get rid of its institutional decay that has led to racist outcomes, but that it must also keep democratic and re-establish ‘liberal democratic’ institutions.
But to not note the fact that Peru is failing is a failure of analysis that engages in structural failure of one’s own nature. Or rather, existentialist and constructivist ideals applied practically can result in: something. Something more than nothing is better than nothing. Or rather, if we are to think and speak and act, then something may be done about what can be done.
Taken from the Democratic Socialists of America, which this writer has been previously an active organizer and card-carrying member of since 2020, “a better future is possible.” Not likely, or inevitable, but possible. In the choice between socialism and barbarism, we will often find that many will hesitate. But one should always not choose fascism.
One can say that there is no purpose, or that life is simply for the living to be made. But that, to this writer’s mind, is reductive. To think of Iris Young, in her work “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”, we must as humans, simply understand implicitly what is right and wrong. That this concept of good and bad, while not necessarily always the same for all people, must be allowed to be the supreme concept in moral philosophy. Because, if we cannot agree on that simple idea, what may we agree on?
In the mind of this writer, however, the pursuit of that trivially, without purpose, and without cause is frustrating. And its values will go with it, without an America or any other power backing the ideals of liberal democracy, as is the case in the modern world. There will be no more committees. There will be Keiko Fujimori, guns, and bloodshed on the streets. And, that’s not a future any Peruvian wants for their own nation, their people, and their constitution. The best way to do this, is to implement constitutional change, and renewal, through means that are democratically legitimate.
The President of the poor is now rotting in jail, because the congress that arguably illegally removed him, was of a more right-leaning composition. Now, in Peru, our current constitution has produced since the removal of Pedro Pablo Kuzcinsky in 2018, eight presidents. Without a leader, without a congress with checks on their power, we have no effective government. This will, at some point in time, lead to more blood on the streets than it already has. And this writer would greatly prefer that no life is lost in the pursuit of something as trivial as politics.
