"Politics must be understood, not as an adventure of people eager for personal power, or full of well or poorly concealed cynicism and magnificent impiety, or to entertain themselves in games of engolada or vague rhetoric."
? Jorge Basadre, Peruvian historian.
Listen to this note:
Many may argue that the Peruvian problem arose a long time ago, that the national question was never resolved with independence from Spain and that there was only a simple change of owners and that what is happening now is only the manifestation of the worsening of tensions. social problems that originated at the time of the conquest or even long before and that were never resolved. In fact, if we delve slightly into our history we will have to admit that they are somewhat right.
Now, if we only look at the last five years, the six successive presidents of the republic (with the sole exception of Francisco Sagasti) have multiple corruption investigations and processes, as well as complaints for serious crimes against human rights.
We must say that, in the last elections, a large sector of the electorate pinned its hopes on a teacher from a rural school who apparently represented social change and who possessed proven honesty, a product of the moral values provided by his environment of humble origins ( We are people like you used to say), but everything turned out to be another betrayal of those ideals.
Currently, with a serious crisis of institutionality reflected in a Congress with an evident mafia bias (anti-forestry law, pro-illegal mining law, untitled educators law) that protects and shields the current president who has two investigations for corruption, but above all all because it is linked to the intellectual authorship of the 49 deaths during the latest protests, with a Constitutional Court chosen to suit its parliamentary partners and with a Judiciary with unclear questions.
Peru has become, then, a country where the only priority is survival and not only survival from the scourge of extreme poverty, but also moral survival given the poor quality of integrity of our leaders, which would explain, perhaps , the little or almost non-existent participation of citizens in the political debate.
Sometimes, we tend to think that we have already reached the bottom of the abyss and that there is no more space to continue descending, we imagine that we have already reached the end, but we continue to be surprised when we realize that apparently it is something like falling off a deep cliff where the end of the slope is imperceptible.
But even so, I prefer to believe that there is still a light of hope, trusting in the accurate reflection of Jorge Basadre, our illustrious historian who verbalized: "Peru is much bigger than its problems."
More from the author: Victor
