Peruvian Congress Rejects Martín Vizcarra’s Impeachment

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Friday, September 18th evening, the Peruvian Congress rejected the ousting of the country’s president, Martín Vizcarra, who thereby defeated a motion to impeach him after being accused of irregularly granting contracts.

The proceeding, forced by six of the nine party groups in Parliament a week ago, failed because of the two majority forces. Political leaders who days ago were in favor of vacating the president’s office, changed their position. After a full day of debates, 78 congressmen voted against impeachment, 32 in favor and 15 abstained. It would have taken 87 votes to approve the impeachment.

The Popular Action parties (with the exception of two of its legislators), Alliance for Progress, Popular Force (with the exception of one legislator) and Morado voted collectively “no”, while the political group of Antauro Humala, Union for Peru, and the Popular Agricultural Front party of Peru voted for impeachment.

Podemos Peru, led by two politicians under investigation, Luna Gálvez and Luna Morales, chose abstention, and on the leftist Frente Amplio there were two votes against and five abstentions. Nine members of Somos Peru were against and one in favor. Several of those who voted against the ousting said they did so against their personal position, either by following the party leader (as in the case of Popular Action and the Alliance for Progress), or by placing the country’s interests first. Others said their rejection of impeachment did not relieve the president of responsibility.

Last week, the Alliance for Progress was the party that contributed the most votes for Congress to open the proceeding to oust the head of state. However, César Acuña, the party leader and a former presidential candidate, issued a statement considering it “unnecessary and inappropriate to force a presidential vacancy”. His brother, legislator Humberto Acuña, was declared ineligible to hold public office in early September for offering a bribe to a police officer connected to a criminal network, but is still holding his seat in Congress.

Under house arrest, the leader of the Popular Force, former presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, also expressed her opposition to the impeachment. She is under investigation for money laundering after receiving illegal funds from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht for her electoral campaigns in 2011 and 2016. These opinions weighed heavily on the decision taken Thursday by the Constitutional Court, to which the government appealed for an injunction to suspend the impeachment process. The request was rejected. “We understand from the spokespeople’s statements and from those who have party representation that they are not inclined to support the presidential vacancy,” commented the court’s president, Marianella Ledesma, to Radioprogramas on Friday morning.

Vizcarra was put on the spot after legislator Edgar Alarcón, in coordination with the president of the Congress, Manuel Merino, from Acción Popular, disclosed three audio files recorded by the president’s personal secretary on September 10th. In one of them, Vizcarra, his assistant and the secretary general of the presidency agree on the version they should provide the Prosecutor’s Office and the Congressional Oversight Committee on visits by Richard Cisneros – a singer who won state contracts worth almost R$270,000 during the mandates of former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Vizcarra – to the Government Palace.

Alarcón, president of the Oversight Committee, faces two constitutional charges that Parliament has yet to debate. Prosecutor General Zoraida Ávalos has indicted him for corruption and unjust enrichment, crimes he allegedly committed when he headed the Comptroller’s Office, a position he was removed from by Congress in 2017. On September 11th, in addition to the Alliance for Progress, they voted en bloc to debate the removal of Vizcarra from the Union Peru and Podemos Peru parties, whose leaders have judicial issues: one was arrested for the murder of four police officers and the other is under investigation for money laundering in the Odebrecht case.

During the impeachment debate, President Vizcarra’s attorney Roberto Pereira pointed out the failures that Congress committed by disclosing the so-called “scandal audios”. “One cannot ask for a vacancy on an embryonic, presumed, doubtful basis,” he said. “It is illegal evidence because the normal paths were not followed [in the parliamentary investigation of the contracts with Cisneros] and the veracity of the audios was not confirmed,” he added.

In his speech, Vizcarra stated that “the only thing proven so far has been the illegal recording,” and asked Congress to allow the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate whatever is necessary. In another of the audios disclosed, the head of state comments with his personal secretary that it was an issue that her relatives had been benefited with contracts when he was governor of Moquegua, in the south of the country, and that relatives of the secretary general of the presidency – who resigned on Saturday – had obtained government positions.

Despite the fact that the president has escaped impeachment, he is facing another ten months of government affected by suspicion, and he does not rely on a constant party bench in Parliament.

In one of the audios disclosed, Vizcarra agrees with his circle how to eliminate the traces of some of Cisneros’ visits to the Executive headquarters. In May, when he answered the press about his connection with the singer, he said he was just an acquaintance from Kuczynski’s election campaign, but the disclosures do not support this version. On Friday, the president’s former personal assistant and the former secretary general of the presidency were subject to an investigation in the case of the contracts: the first, for concealing evidence to the detriment of the state; the second, for aggravated collusion.

Vizcarra will be faced with a difficult agenda all at once: containing the Covid-19 pandemic – Peru has the world’s highest mortality rate per 100,000 inhabitants – and completing the political reform for the April general elections. Both the former and the current Congress have constantly rejected changes in electoral rules that penalize illegal financing of political parties. In addition, the end of preferential voting to allow parity and alternation in candidate lists remains to be approved. As a result, tension between the Executive and Legislative will continue, as it has since March when the current Congress was sworn in.

Source: El Pais