Juan Bromley tells in “Las Viejas Calles de Lima” (the old streets of Lima) that in 1601 a flood of the Rímac partially destroyed the breakwater that protected the convent of San Francisco. The prefecture then ordered a repair that prevented the total destruction of the breakwater by the current, which “approached and ate up the site and the coast behind the convent, where there is a large ravine and a cliff”.
Just two hundred meters away is currently the Government Palace of Peru, where the president has his office. The distance between Pedro Castillo’s current situation and that of the convent at the beginning of the 17th century is equally small: the political breakwater that protects it is largely collapsed, the current threatens to devour what little remains of it, and behind him a great cliff opens.
The work with which Castilho intends to restore his battered ditch is no less: nothing less than a new Constitution. But regardless of its dimensions, the project so far has all the characteristics of a poorly done job. Precisely in the same year that the city of Lima repaired its breakwater, the word “chapucero” appeared for the first time in Castilian, taken from the French “chapuisier”: official who carries out the works crudely, according to the etymological dictionary of Corominas.
Let us then analyze the plans drawn up by the architect Castillo for its construction. Let’s start with the form: in a text of only a dozen pages, about thirty errors can be detected: spelling, grammatical, syntactic, typing and formatting.
Now let’s move on to the content. The document has two sections: the Bill and the Explanatory Memorandum.
The first, while brief and mostly technical, includes some details worth paying attention to. It states, for example, that the Constituent Assembly will have a popular and plurinational character. So far, Peru is not a plurinational state. The current Constitution states that “the State recognizes and protects the ethnic and cultural plurality of the Nation” (article 2, item 19). Ethnic plurality, not national plurality.
This is not a question of denying the plurinational character of the Peruvian State, but of warning of a flagrant contradiction. Although almost the entire document is dedicated to the participation of the people and the exaltation of democracy (let us remember the popular character it attributes to the Constituent Assembly), it nevertheless decrees the plurinational nature of the Peruvian State with a stroke of the pen, without prior consultation with the people. The debate about the essence of the nation, which in other countries reaches phenomenal proportions, is settled by Castillo in a row.
The bill goes on to indicate that the plenary of the National Jury of Elections regulates the distribution of seats in the Constituent Assembly, and that it should be composed of 40% representatives of political organizations, 30% of independent candidates, 26% of representatives of the peoples. indigenous people and 4% by representatives of Afro-Peruvian peoples. What distribution of seats is, then, the one that the National Jury of Elections regulates if the bill has already done so?
Let’s move on to the Explanatory Memorandum: What do you think you will find there? Perhaps, as the name implies, the reasons for proposing the writing of a new Constitution? Don’t get your hopes up, dear reader: there is anything but that.
The first section deals with the Constituent Power and the total reform of the Constitution. In other words, it explains –with surprising inopia– the people’s ability to establish themselves as a Constituent Power and the difference between a partial constitutional reform and a total one. There is no trace of arguments that support the need for these fundamental changes, presenting the defects and inadequacies of the current Constitution.
The second part, “On the right to public participation”, points out an already sharpened pencil: it extols the importance of citizen participation, as if the constituent process marked the end of an authoritarian period in which participation was restricted or directly prohibited. He appeals to academic authorities to give weight, even a certain solemnity, to such obvious concepts as democracy favors public participation. He even cites the American Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as apparently necessary evidence to validate a radical novelty: the right to public participation.
The next epigraph strictly follows the line of the previous ones: it explains the unnecessary and leaves what requires justification without reasons. It is dedicated to the constituent moments; or, better said, to the theory of constituent moments. Because there are no more than general academic categories; not the slightest bit of argument about why Peru would find itself at such a time.
The sloppiness of the project reaches one of its high points here: it cites an academic piece that describes the constituent moment as a circumstance of consensus. Consensus! An interesting concept to refer to an initiative that only managed to gather 50,000 signatures during a campaign that covered the entire country, led by Vladimir Cerrón, leader of Perú Libre, the party with which Castillo reached the presidency.
It is an initiative that is a priority for only 8% of Peruvians and that has been rejected by 60% of them, according to an Ipsos survey, precisely because they believe that it is not the right time and that a process of this caliber requires discussion. more extensive; and which is opposed by a large part of the parliamentary arc.
“Comparative legislation” is the title of the following epigraph. Under this title, an opera magna was expected that would mark the fate of Latin American legal thought. The reality, however, is a little less generous: three lines. No exaggeration. Three lines, with their corresponding spelling errors, followed by a hungry graphic with its corresponding formatting errors.
The Explanatory Memorandum continues with the positions of the political parties. If you don’t take the time to read the fine print, you might think this is an effective strategy to address the national consensus around the need for constitutional change. But the editor of the document wanted to start the section by taking up a statement from Alianza Para el Progreso: the party would accept a reform of the Constitution “as long as it is done in compliance with the laws and with a broad social and political consensus, and through Congress.” We reiterate: as long as it is done with a broad social and political consensus. It is truly astonishing: the president offers in the Explanatory Memorandum the arguments against his own project.
The next section, “Object and Purpose of the Proposal”, establishes the procedure for the constitutional reform, the corresponding to a referendum, the election of the assembly members, the deadlines for the elaboration of the constitutional text… The reasons for the reform continue, for while, glowing by its absence.
Determined to sustain that glow to the last page, the president saved a truly memorable scene for the end. “Cost-benefit analysis”. Let him read these three words as many times as necessary until he is convinced that his eyes do not deceive him. Cost-benefit analysis. If Castillo’s rivals in the 2021 election campaign expressed their fears that the professor would lead Peru to communism, rest assured: the president has embraced capitalism and business thinking to such an extreme that he assesses the desirability of constitutional reform through a vocabulary of Goldman Sachs.
But not everything is in the title: the content of the epigraph deserves similar attention. The great benefit of renewing the political foundations of the country would be – always according to the document – that citizens could participate in the process, electing their representatives and thus taking democracy to levels never imagined. The cost, on the other hand… Oh, the cost! Where did the editor leave it? What an oversight… Finally, we must conclude that, as befits the neophyte neophyte Castillo, it is an operation typical of a Wall Street hawk: all profit, zero cost.
Let’s finish: the last three paragraphs deal with the analysis of the impact of the rule’s validity on national legislation. At this point, the reader can already imagine what is hidden behind such a grandiloquent title. And make no mistake: more of the same. In other words, emptier. That it proposes to reform the Constitution, that it encourages citizen participation and that it is up to the president to convene the referendum in question.
The Convent of São Francisco de Lima is a World Heritage Site. Thanks to the suitability of the work designed in 1601, which saved it from the destructive currents, it remains standing for our enjoyment four centuries later. The same ones where it would have been swallowed by the sheer cliff if the engineers of Lima had planned something badly done like Pedro Castillo did.
