OPINION | Pedro Castillo and the useless revolutionary temptation

Editor’s note: Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor. His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America. Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International. The opinions expressed here are solely his.

(CNN Spanish) – I think there is no need to think about it any more. I think that in Peru the teacher Pedro Castillo will win by a small minority. It should be said that the tight electoral process has not yet produced results as the challenges are still being evaluated, but Castillo has a narrow advantage. A handful of votes.

Of the 100% of the votes counted by the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE), Castillo obtained 50.125% while Keiko Fujimori received 49.875%.

It has been, as they say in Spain, “a heart attack ending”. The majority of the votes for him were rural areas and people with a basic educational level, according to a poll of voting intention.

A single vote is enough. This is democracy, everyone has a voice, the vote of a university professor and an illiterate is equal. I believe that Mr. Castillo is going to triumph galloping on his nag. In 2000, 537 votes in Florida made George W. Bush president of the United States.

In a tweet that has gone around the world, my friend Gloria Álvarez, a prestigious Guatemalan libertarian, blames the right for having created the conditions. It is true that Peru had grown enormously in recent years, as established by the economist José Tomás Esteves Arria, going from a “GDP per person, from 1990 which was US $ 1,196, it went to US $ 6,977 in 2019, that is, six times, which is equivalent to an annual average growth rate of 6.27% ”. But that is not the whole truth.

The truth is that the quality of the goods and services provided by the State are of very low quality. Private schools are good, but public schools are very bad. Private healthcare is great, but public healthcare is horrendous. Drinking water is well “treated” where the service is distributed through the national network, but it is expensive for the people who must pay for pipes where the service does not reach, generally in the “young towns”, where there are no sewers either. This also happens in Lima, where an estimated 700,000 inhabitants lack water and sewer service, out of a total of more than 10 million inhabitants in the country.

The problem lies in the quality of the people recruited by the State. For me, most of them are incompetent and don’t want to work. Generally, they have not been hired through suitability contests, but through cronyism. Many are paid badly badly and balance their income with bribes.

There is an honorable percentage that contradicts these affirmations, but some of the judges sell their sentences, some police officers their persecutions and certain bureaucrats the agility of their procedures. At least, that is the perennial complaint that is heard in the country from Tacna, in southern Peru, to Tumbes, in the north.

But the serious thing is that Pedro Castillo wants to give more resources to that state incapable of wasting it. It does not realize that the private sector has contributed to the development miracle and has reduced the Gini coefficient in recent decades from 55.1 in 1998 to 41.5 in 2019, according to World Bank data. (As is known, the Gini index or coefficient measures the differences in income between the quintile that has the most income versus the one with the least. A society in which everyone has the same income would have 0, while in which only one person monopolized all income would have 100. According to the 2018 measurement, the US is very close to Peru, with an index of 41.4).

Pedro Castillo was not born in 1968. General Juan Velasco Alvarado carried out a military coup in Peru against the democratically elected president Fernando Belaúnde Terry. In short, it endowed the state with banks, minerals, fishing, and electricity. He expropriated the large companies, all of which had profits, and enacted an agrarian reform that ended the large estates (and much of the agricultural production).

What happened? It happened as with Peronism in Argentina. Poverty spread exponentially in the country. Corruption reached the military that Juan Velasco Alvarado put as managers. I remember the sour mockery of the Peruvians. The general who directed the fisheries — Peru was the country that exported the most fishmeal in the world — was named Tantaleán. They called him “Tontoleón.” In record time, production fell due to excess catches.

Until in 1975 General Francisco Morales-Bermúdez gave him a military coup and decreed “the second phase of the Peruvian revolution.” Pedro Castillo was a six-year-old boy (he was born in 1969) and he surely does not remember that time of nationalism and foolishness, but Morales-Bermúdez had enough political judgment and adequate financial weight to fix things.

His grandfather Remigio had been President of the Republic and he himself had passed through the Ministry of Finance and Commerce during the Alvarado government, so the “second phase” was the counterrevolution from power, taking out the left entrenched in the National System of Support for Social Mobilization (Sinamos), the state body that brought together various social organizations and intended to stimulate the participation of the people at all decision-making levels. He convened a Constituent Assembly, chaired by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who proclaimed the 1979 Constitution. On July 28, 1980, Fernando Belaúnde Terry returned to power through exemplary elections.

As I see it, if Pedro Castillo wins and is able to learn from history, he would not try this July 28 to be the Juan Velasco Alvarado of today. Why fail by giving the state more power than it can manage? None of the tasks that Peru requires goes through the “first phase” of the Velasco revolution. The country is deeply divided into halves, but both parties agree that corruption must end. In my opinion, if Castillo dedicates himself to it, he will have the admiration and support of all Peru. But if he spends his time “making revolution” he will fail miserably and probably provoke a civil war. Tempers are very heated.