Almost four years have passed since former president Pedro Castillo failed in his attempt to subvert the constitutional order to prevent his acts of corruption from being exposed by justice, and there are still those who seek lenient treatment towards him and his coup plot. From those who postulated that he had been “drugged” to deliver the message with which he launched his clumsy ‘coup d’état’ to those who maintain that it was just a political harangue in the face of a state of affairs against which he could do little, Castillo’s traveling companions have not rested in all this time in their desire to obtain his freedom, arguing that he is a “political prisoner” and ignoring the fact that he is serving a sentence of more than 11 years in prison sentenced by the Judiciary. As is known, he is also awaiting what can be resolved in the other cases that are following him, precisely because of the acts of corruption that led him to carry out the coup.
Now, from Congress, no less than 44 deputies are promoting an amnesty that includes all the people who participated in the previous or preparatory acts, the preparation, writing, reading, dissemination, endorsement, accompaniment or administrative execution of the coup speech of December 7, 2022. The authors of the initiative are the deputy Catherin Palomino of Together for Peru (JP) and her colleague César Holguín ( Ahora Nación ), and they have the support of another 29 deputies from JP and 14 from the Civic Obras Party. The purpose is supposedly to “contribute to pacification and reconciliation (…), favoring democratic coexistence, social cohesion and the strengthening of the constitutional rule of law.” An absolute contradiction, since it is obvious that such strengthening can hardly be achieved by turning a blind eye to the attempt to bring down the Constitution and the order it maintains.
In reality, of course, we are simply facing the same political desire that Roberto Sánchez and other candidates pursued during the last presidential campaign: to free Castillo from the sanction that weighs on him at any cost. The rest is rhetoric. It is also symptomatic that one of the promoters of the amnesty is Representative Palomino, who, according to a recent report by “Panorama”, would have been pressured by the former president himself to hire personnel close to him in Congress. The most worrying thing of all, however, is the little commitment to democracy exhibited by the parliamentarians who have signed the motion we are discussing. Or, in other words, his contumacious coup.
