Peru after the soft coup

By Jaime Bravo and Jorge Coulon

Dina Boluarte’s removal from office is not a victory for the people, but an internal readjustment of power.

Congress did not obey the clamour of the streets, but rather the need to preserve a system that is crumbling from within. The fuse was changed so that the same machinery could continue to run: the pact between plutocracy, corruption and fear.

Boluarte was useful as long as she maintained the order imposed after the fall of Pedro Castillo. Her dismissal now serves as a symbolic sacrifice to calm collective outrage.

But the country has not awakened: it has only changed its executioner. The structure that allowed repression, unpunished deaths and institutional degradation remains intact.

One of the factors that triggered this crisis – and at the same time turned it into an opportunity for the oligarchies – is the degradation of political parties.

The new movements were not born as spaces for popular deliberation, but as extensions of personal fiefdoms without a base or programme. In this vacuum, economic and media power found the perfect terrain to reorganise.

Today, it is easier to co-ordinate a mobilisation than to lead a transition, easier to be outraged than to build an alternative. This organisational fragility turns each outbreak into a parenthesis without continuity.

The challenge, then, is not only to resist but to institute: to give shape to permanent, collective expressions capable of legitimising themselves from below and exercising real leadership. Without this political and ethical framework, rebellions will continue to be absorbed by the very mechanisms they claim to combat.

This problem is not unique to Peru: it runs throughout Latin America, where the breakdown of political parties has left people without vehicles to channel their social energy and without structures to sustain change.

José Jerí, the new President by parliamentary succession, represents the continuity of that regime. His arrival does not usher in a democratic transition: it consolidates the power of a Congress that acts as a closed caste, without legitimacy or ethical horizons.

The problem is not who governs, but who continues to make decisions behind the scenes.

The Peruvian people, who marched, bled and resisted, are once again left out in the cold: without justice, without representation and without confidence. But they are also more lucid.

They have understood that it is not enough to change names; that real change requires breaking the mould, dismantling the constitution inherited from Fujimorism, and re-founding the social pact from the bottom up, with real participation and living memory.

The soft coup does not close history: it lays it bare.

And in that nakedness – between the wound and the conscience – the word ‘people’ can begin to be written with the ink of their own destiny. –Globetrotter

Jaime Bravo is the president of Corporación Encuentro Ciudadano. He is an economist with training in government techniques and studies in psychology. He advises public and private institutions in Chile and internationally on situational planning and organisational development.

Jorge Coulon is a writer and essayist on thinking, economics, strategy and analysis of different dimensions of national reality. A musician, writer and cultural manager, he is also a founding member of the group Inti Illimani. He has published Al vuelo (1989), La sonrisa de Víctor Jara (2009), Flores de mall (2011), and recently En las cuerdas del tiempo. Una historia de Inti-Illimani (2024).

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