The Peruvian Congress building houses a pretty unpopular legislature. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Peruvian Congress voted 65-36 last Friday to approve beginning impeachment proceedings against President Martín Vizcarra, who has been accused of misuse of public funds and obstruction of justice. Lawmakers will debate this week whether or not Vizcarra should be removed from office.

Only a year ago, Vizcarra found himself embroiled in a political crisis after dissolving Congress. While he emerged victorious then, he may not find himself so lucky this time. To predict the embattled president’s future, it is important to understand how Peru got to this point.

Something Rotten in the State of Peru

Vizcarra entered office in 2016 as the vice president of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, an Oxford-and-Princeton-trained economist who narrowly beat the Popular Force’s (PF) Keiko Fujimori. When Kuczynski was sworn into office, he was heralded as someone who would tackle Peru’s corruption problem. However, his administration found itself in the middle of a massive corruption scandal. Although Kuczynski staved off impeachment, he resigned after a vote-buying scandal several months later.

The scandal that implicated Kuczynski, involving Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, also implicated nearly every living former Peruvian president: Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia, and Ollanta Humala.

Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht was found to have bribed politicians across Latin America in return for preferential treatment. (Wikimedia Commons)

The police swiftly arrested former president Humala, and former president Toledo awaits extradition from the United States. Rather than surrendering himself to authorities, former president Garcia locked himself in his bedroom and shot himself in the head; he died at the hospital.

When Vizcarra took office following Kuczynski’s resignation, he wasted little time pushing anti-corruption reforms in Congress. Because the PF, which dominated the Congress, repeatedly blocked his efforts, Vizcarra dissolved Congress. Peruvians cheered the move as a victory against the corrupt political elites, and the snap elections held in January effectively wiped out the PF’s influence in Congress.

Singing the Same Old Song

Now Vizcarra finds himself facing impeachment, just like his predecessor. Allegedly, he obstructed an investigation into around $50,000 in government contracts awarded to an obscure singer named Richard Cisneros. On Thursday, opposition lawmaker Edgar Alarcón presented to Congress three audio recordings he claims show the president asking his aides to downplay the two meetings he had with Cisneros.

The speed with which Congress is acting is alarming to many. Steve Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, said that “the removal of the president is a really big deal, and it requires serious deliberation, public debate and investigation. There has been none." The President has not been formally charged, and the investigation has only just begun.

Vizcarra has remained defiant, saying the impeachment is “a plot to destabilise the government,” and that he will not resign. The public seems to agree with him. In a recent poll, 60 percent of Peruvians approved of his government compared to 32 percent for Congress. Given his popularity among the public, analysts fear his hasty removal will result in a wave of unrest across Peru.

In the short-term, impeaching Vizcarra only increases political uncertainty in a country caught in an economic crisis; long-term, however, it may decrease the longevity of all future presidents. As Abhijit Surya, the Peru analyst for the Economist’s Intelligence Unit, stated, “the next president could be similarly impeached by Congress without necessarily having to go through a rigorous process of investigation or anything of the kind.”

It Must Be Something in the Water

From Mexico to Argentina, Latin America has been a region plagued with scandal, where structural corruption has regularly been discovered at the highest levels of government. Like many other countries in the region, Peru has been neither persistent nor successful in prosecuting systemic corruption at any level of government, much less its highest. In 2014, 22 out of 25 outgoing regional presidents were investigated for embezzlement. Corruption could cost the country more than $3.5 billion per year.

The truth is, the powerful are pretty much exempt from punishment. In 2015, the U.S. Department of State reported that Peru “provides criminal penalties for officials engaged in corruption: however, the government did not always implement the law effectively, and officials often engaged in corrupt practices with impunity.” Of the thousands of criminal charges Peru’s Office of the Comptroller General initiated, the judiciary only handed out a few hundred sentences.

Most scholars believe that colonial patrimony and its resulting weak post-independence institutions set Peru on a path to systemic corruption. But the abuses of dictator-president Alberto Fujimori a few decades ago made everything worse. Today, when his daughter leads the opposition to Vizcarra, and when many of Fujimori's allies are still around in national politics, it's no surprise that high-level corruption is as brazen as it is.

Keiko Fujimori is the daugher of former dictator-president Alberto Fujimori and the current leader of Peru's Popular Force party. She and her party openly oppose Vizcarra. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Fight Begins at the Top

Things are not all bad. Some scholars have argued that the damning Odebrecht discovery is a result of growing regional democratization enabled by international anti-corruption initiatives.
In Peru, José Pérez and Rafael Vela, the two prosecutors originally in charge of the Odebrecht case, are leading the charge. Both men frequently ignored the chain of command at the Department of Justice, often leaking not only details about the case, but also the infighting, corruption, and barriers to justice in a strategy Pérez called a “hierarchical rebellion.”

When Attorney General Pedro Chávarry attempted to break up the special prosecution team, he was shortly forced to resign after facing mounting pressure from the public and President Vizcarra. His resignation marked the first time in modern Peru that the judicial class held its own against the political class.

The massive number of corruption cases opened against Peruvian leaders is a sign of good things to come for the country. In the hands of aggressive prosecutors such as Pérez and Vela, there will no longer be impunity for corrupt politicians who can enrich themselves at the expense of the Peruvian people. These high-profile cases, implicating even former presidents, are merely the first step in Peru’s crusade against corruption. As President Kuczynski once said—quite ironically, given the circumstances—“the fight [against corruption] begins at the top.”