Last Monday, at around midnight, President Castillo decreed a state of emergency and total curfew for the province of Lima and the neighboring province of Callao, an area home to nearly 10 million people.
The Castillo government becomes less chaotic when viewed in the context of Peru’s geopolitical needs and constraints.
In 2022, the United States will find that after a few initial signs of hope, the hemisphere to which it is intimately bound by ties of geography, commerce, and family is more dangerous, less democratic, less stable, less willing to cooperate, and more engaged than ever with its extra-regional rivals.
Brazilians learned they have a gay governor; LGBTQ acceptance is expanding in some countries; and Chile adopted full marriage equality.
With his historic inauguration, Pedro Castillo put one crisis to rest and turned his attention to numerous others: foremost among them, how to repair a healthcare system devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and overhaul a brittle and uneven economy that has failed many Peruvians.
¿Cómo surgió esta angustiosa elección? ¿Y qué significa la aparente, y extremadamente ajustada, victoria de Castillo para Perú?
How did Peru’s agonizing choice between Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori come about? And what is Castillo’s extremely narrow apparent victory—by a mere 0.42 percent of total votes cast—likely to mean for Peru?
On April 11, 2021, Peru achieved a dubious distinction that has yet to receive much public attention: for the first time in the history of global electoral democracy, the total of blank and null votes exceeded the amount of votes received by any single candidate running to serve as a country’s head of state.
