Opinion: Removal Without Reform
- Valeria Abram (Staff Writer)
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Note: this is an opinion piece
Peru has removed yet another president. Amid the salsa music of a London theatre, I found myself asking the question Mario Vargas Llosa asked decades ago: ¿en qué momento se jodió el Perú? — at what moment did Peru go wrong?
Last night I was standing in a London theatre, packed shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of Venezuelans and other Latinos, waiting for Danny Ocean to take the stage. The queue outside had already felt like a reunion — slang from different countries, accents that sounded funny but familiar and a sense of community I forgot existed for a while. Before the artist even came to the stage, the floor was already moving with old school reggaeton playing, everyone was dancing — the closest thing I can describe is exhaling after holding your breath too long.
Then my phone buzzed. A notification: Peru’s interim president, José Jerí, had been removed from office. It was the 17th of February, 2026 and he had been in power for four months.
A sense of confusion, relief, and guilt overcame me. I felt what many Peruvians abroad likely experienced in that moment: the disorientation of receiving political news from a distance — learning that your country has entered yet another crisis while you are physically removed from its consequences.
The Revolving Door
Jerí’s removal was constitutionally structured not as a traditional “permanent moral incapacity” vote, but as a censure motion — 75 votes in favour, 24 against, 3 abstentions. He became the eighth person to hold the presidency since Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned in 2018, in just over seven years. He is Peru’s third consecutive president to be removed from office, after Dina Boluarte and Pedro Castillo before her. The specific scandal that triggered his fall was dubbed “Chifagate”: video footage emerged showing Jerí entering a Lima restaurant owned by a Chinese businessman, Yang Zhihua, a state concession holder, in a hooded top, late at night, without disclosing the visit on his official presidential agenda as required by law. A second meeting followed in January, this time with sunglasses. He also faces allegations of sexual assault, irregular hiring practices, and illicit enrichment during his time as chair of Congress’s budget committee, where his personal wealth reportedly grew fourteenfold between 2021 and 2024.
None of this is entirely surprising. What is striking is how quickly it happened, and how little it seems to matter. Peru’s economy, for its part, has remained oddly insulated — 3.4% growth in 2025, inflation at 1.7%, public debt among the lowest in Latin America. The country functions despite its politics, not because of them. The mining-heavy economy keeps moving. Lima keeps building. And the presidency keeps emptying.
If We’re So Good at Removing Them, Why Do We Keep Choosing the Same Ones?
There is a paradox at the heart of Peruvian politics that I keep circling: we have become remarkably effective at identifying and removing corrupt leaders. Alejandro Toledo received 20 years in prison for corruption and money laundering. Martín Vizcarra was sentenced to 14 years. Ollanta Humala to 15. Pedro Castillo to 11, for conspiracy and rebellion after his failed attempt to dissolve Congress. These are not minor sanctions — these are prison sentences handed down to former presidents. And yet, the field of candidates for the April 12 general election numbers at least 36, drawn overwhelmingly from the same political class that produced these men, supported by the same congressional blocs that installed and then dismantled each of them.
The impeachment of Jerí was not, in any meaningful sense, a fight against corruption. It was a strategic calculation. The congressional bloc that elevated Jerí to the presidency in October 2025 — Alianza para el Progreso, Fuerza Popular, Acción Popular, Avanza País, and his own party Somos Perú — quietly withdrew their support four months later when he became an electoral liability, each calculating that distancing themselves served them better heading into April's election. That is the architecture of Peruvian politics: not a contest between clean and corrupt, but a negotiation between entrenched positions of power.
This raises an uncomfortable question: should we have left him in power? The elections are less than two months away. Would four more months of Jerí have been more or less damaging than the current vacuum? I don’t think so. I think removing him was right. But the harder question is what comes next — and whether the conditions that produced him will be altered in any way by his removal. I suspect they will not, because removal has become easier than reform.
A Country Forgotten by Its Capital
Peru is coast, Andes, and Amazon — three distinct geographies, three distinct political imaginaries, often governed as if only one of them exists. The historical divide between Lima and the rest of the country is not a talking point; it is the structuring condition of Peruvian political life. Pedro Castillo’s 2021 election was, in part, an eruption of that divide — a rural schoolteacher from Cajamarca winning the presidency on a platform that spoke to the parts of Peru that Lima had spent decades ignoring. His removal was also, in part, a product of that same divide.
Now, with 36 candidates registered for April’s election and polling fragmented beyond legibility, there is a familiar Peruvian joke: “we won’t know who might win until about two weeks before the vote”. It is funny because it is true. Rafael López Aliaga, a conservative businessman and former mayor of Lima, leads fragmented polling with somewhere between 8 and 12 percent support. Keiko Fujimori, running for the fourth time, remains a prominent but polarising figure — she reached the second round in each of her previous three attempts, losing each time by margins of between one and three percentage points. The rest of the f ield is noise. In multiple recent surveys, the plurality of respondents said they were undecided or saw no acceptable candidate.
That is not apathy but a rational response to an irrational system. When trust has been broken as many times as it has been broken in Peru — by every ideological tendency, across every region, in every branch of government — withholding trust is not disengagement. It is a form of protection.
Being Latina From a Distance
Back in that London theatre, Venezuelan flags were waving. Someone near me was singing along to every word. The joy was real. And the guilt I felt at participating in it, in the middle of a political crisis at home, was also part of it. I am aware of the limits of my position. My business is not being extorted. My classes have not been cancelled due to an “emergency status.” I am writing this from another continent, while Peru has no president. There is something uncomfortable about opining from this distance — and also, I think, something necessary. Because the question I keep returning to is not just about Peru. It is about what it means to be Latin American right now, as a generation.
We dance together. We look out for each other. We move across the world and build communities and carry our music with us. And then we go home — or we watch home on our phones — and we find the same governments, the same corruption, the same structures of disappointment. Peru is not alone in this. The rightward turn in Latin American elections over the past two years is, in part, a response to the failures of leftist administrations — but it is also simply a continuation of the cycle. Different ideology, same mechanics.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s greatest novelist, put the question most sharply in “Conversación en La Catedral” (1969), set during the Odría dictatorship of the 1950s: “¿en qué momento se jodió el Perú?” — at what moment did Peru go wrong? It is a question without a single answer, which is perhaps why it has survived long enough to still feel relevant. It is the question I was asking myself while the music played and the flags waved, while my country had no president, and while 36 candidates were preparing to compete for the right to become the next one removed.
I don’t have the answer. I’m not sure anyone does. But I think asking the question honestly — from wherever we are, even from a London theatre mid-song — is the beginning of something. And I think we owe it to the parts of Peru that Lima has forgotten, and to the Peruvians who never had the option of watching from a distance, to keep asking it.
The general election in Peru is scheduled for April 12, 2026. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, a runoff will be held on June 7, 2026. As of the time of writing, Congress has not yet elected a new interim president.