Peru jailed four ex-presidents for corruption. Its new leaders may be worse.
The prosecutions wiped out an old elite, then gave way to a splintered Congress accused of sheltering illicit interests.
Atlantic Council · Peru at a breaking point: How ten years of political chaos opened the door to organized crimePolice were coming through the door to detain him over bribery accusations when former President Alan Garcia took his own life.
The suicide was the starkest turn in Peru's reckoning after Operation Car Wash, the Brazilian kickback scandal that Peruvian prosecutors followed to open sweeping graft cases against people who had run politics before 2016.
Those cases convicted four former presidents of corruption, and pulled in cabinet officials, presidential hopefuls, executives, and town and city leaders. The sweep cleared out the establishment that had promised a fresh start after the fall of strongman rule in 2000.
The clearout did not bring cleaner government, but a more splintered, locally focused, and self-serving set of leaders. Analyst Martin Cassinelli, who studies Peru, writes that the new political class was "far easier for organized crime to penetrate."
Congress shows how that vulnerability took hold. The legislature, which Cassinelli describes as "one of the least trusted institutions in the hemisphere," has repeatedly sheltered questionable interests. Legislators have discreetly pushed bills that softened punishment for some offenses, loosened oversight of campaign money, and blocked attempts to screen local officials for graft.
Driving those efforts is a newer crop of officeholders, many facing criminal inquiries over graft and other alleged wrongdoing.
Questions people ask
Who was Alan Garcia?
Garcia was a two-time president of Peru, first in the 1980s and again from 2006 to 2011. He was known as a charismatic speaker from the APRA party, and he died in 2019 as police arrived to arrest him in a bribery inquiry tied to Brazilian construction contracts.
Who was Alberto Fujimori?
Fujimori ruled Peru through the 1990s, defeating a guerrilla insurgency while concentrating power and overseeing corruption and human rights abuses. He fled in 2000, was later extradited and jailed, and his movement remained a powerful force in Congress after 2016.
Why has Peru had so many presidents?
Peru lets Congress remove a president for loosely defined incapacity, and a fragmented Congress has used that tool often since 2016. That, plus resignations and criminal cases, has produced eight presidents in ten years and left each newcomer with little time to govern.