Global Research

In the strategy for maintaining hegemonic control over what the United States still considers its neocolonial provinces, there is a technique, a series of doctrinal practices that make legal warfare viable to neutralize regional independence and delegitimize governments that do not align with US interests in the New Cold War. The Peruvian congress holds political power while the Peruvian oligarchy wields economic power and the mass media, which empowers legal and information warfare as part of an integral Hybrid War. Andrew Korybko called these regional dynamics Operation Condor 2.0, instead of rigid military coups, regime change is promoted by the law itself, under the allegation that the objective is to protect the rule of law. The power of the legislature and the judiciary of Peru sharpens more acutely as it becomes more complex within the geopolitical calculation of the New Cold War due to the global systemic transition to multipolarity, where the US and its vassals strive to slow down indefinitely this global transition and if possible reverse it.

Going back to July 2021, Castillo became the president of Peru with more than 50% of the votes, and the National Jury of Elections – which oversees the electoral processes – declared Pedro Castillo, the candidate of Peru Libre, the winner, after a recount of votes from the second round of the election with weeks of challenges and legal battles. Keiko Fujimori’s original allegation of fraud served to stall the results of the election, thus Castillo had to wait more than a month to be sworn in, signaling how his government’s always on the defensive, even since the election campaign, and in the end, he was not allowed to govern. Similarly, the Peruvian press has sought to create divisions within the PPNPL movement to weaken it and thus dismantle and/or co-opt it more easily.

It was in the media and social networks where K. Fujimori and her party promoted the idea of fraud, an allegation that was denied by the Peruvian electoral body just on the eve of Pedro Castillo’s victory. Since the goal is to externally provoke asymmetrical conflicts predicated on sabotaging concrete geo-economic interests, the info-war was woven into the Hybrid War against Castillo’s government from the beginning by a significant variety of national, regional, and international media that regulate and promote the ideological/legal matrix through lawfare. Those who executed the arrest of President Castillo Terrones acted in close coordination with the nation’s prosecutor Patricia Vargas, with the supreme judge Juan Carlos Checkley Soria who along with the magistrate captain Cesar San Martin Castro coordinated with the leaders of Congress especially the president of Congress Jose Zapata.

This Hybrid War coup d’etat has been executed from the same legislative branch and the judicial branch of Peru, which have been hacked and co-opted so to speak by the US government and its multiple agencies and departments that make such penetration and neo-colonization viable. Castillo failed to regroup the popular force without succeeding in deepening and implementing changes to the Peruvian legal-political system to break with the status quo by relying on the incipient popular movement that generated his election. Lawfare works under the pretext of the fight against corruption and the defense of democracy is promoting flawed judicial processes that do not withstand the slightest legal scrutiny. Castillo wanted to stabilize the country within an intense Hybrid War with information warfare that increased the potency of lawfare.

Dina Boluarte as the current president is facing several demonstrations demanding her resignation, which thus far have left 60 people dead and thousands injured. The coup d’état against the government of Pedro Castillo was executed with clear US support from the US Southern Command and the US State Department itself. The Peruvian police have used brute force, using live ammunition, to deal with the protests demanding the closure of congress and the resignation of Boluarte. The strong repression suffered by the Peruvian people is explained by the persistence of the National Security Doctrine policies guiding the Peruvian Security Forces. In addition to receiving regular intelligence and training from the Pentagon, US officers are frequently incorporated into the Peruvian military. The link between US and Peru militaries is strong, indicating they continually conduct joint exercises and training, leaving the entire Peruvian chain of command interpenetrated by the US Southern Command.

The subsequent years of the government of Alberto Kenya Fujimori Inomoto, who was President of Peru from 1990 to 2000, have been characterized by an evident imbalance between the republican branches of government, being in turn coupled to U.S. control devices. If Fujimori embodied neocolonialism by concentrating power in the executive branch proxies, in this post-Fujimori era it is the congress that now embodies tyranny.

While the Fujimoristas are not the only proxy Peruvian supporters of the US in the South American country, they are certainly the most powerful and serve as a nexus between the US and the smaller US proxies there. Fujimorism went from being mere remnants of a dominant network shaken by the imprisonment of the leading figure of Alberto Fujimori back in early 2000 to a movement that together with his daughter Keiko Fujimori, has become a force of their own, heirs to the regional military-oligarch legacy now reformulated and updated to the times of legal warfare as part of a comprehensive US Hybrid War against regional sovereignty.

Hybrid War had already been declared against Castillo long before he took office and even before he was a candidate. In the colonial provinces of the US and its Billion Dollar allies in the Americas, Hybrid Warfare is the norm. Castillo’s position within the PPNPL was never solid enough as a mere candidate welcomed by the party, he would not count on unconditional support from all. The PPNPL had to deal with the rest of the parties joining an unofficial alliance within Fujimorism reaching more than the 2/3 required to approve a vacancy process.

Since 2011, Peru has had eight different presidents, the last of which was Dina Boluarte who assumed the presidency after the dismissal of Pedro Castillo. Peru has had an unprecedented amount of presidents in the last ten years from Ollanta Humala (2011-2016), Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018), Martin Vizcarra (2018-2020), to finally Manuel Merino (2020) just before Castillo. However, Fujimorism, as the prominent US-proxy network in that country, is not limited to systemically enabling fraudulent vacancy appeals but has crafted significant changes in the judicial landscape, like the change to the Law on the Rights of Participation and Citizen Control that forces any referendum on constitutional reform to be called by order of Congress.

The U.S. ambassador to Peru since 2020, Lisa Kenna, is a veteran CIA agent and was among the first to recognize the interim government of Dina Boluarte, the current president of Peru. She met suspiciously with the Minister of Defense of the Andean country just one day before the coup d’état through imprisonment without trial of the president. Castillo’s inability to appoint a cabinet that shares his vision of government is very striking, given that the appointments of Miguel Angel Rodriguez Mackay and Cesar Landa to Foreign Minister bring with them too much history of ties to the US-Peruvian joint legal and Hybrid Warfare matrix.

The pro-US proxies swarm in the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and all over the mass media managed to neutralize the democratic mandate of the Peruvian people. The systemic attacks through the legal system plus their control of perception through info-warfare subtracted internal cohesion in the Legislative Chamber, fragmenting and isolating the PPNPL. The mechanical practice of lawfare from the point of view of a proxy agent legislator translates into putting into practice all the tools of parliamentary filibustering to block any advance made by Castillo and the PPNPL overall, forcing and ensnaring them to deal with legislature lawfare. The fragmentation of the Peruvian political landscape limits its capacity for political action, since although many political observers in the country can identify threats to its Democratic Security, as a State they do not have the sufficient political will to articulate the structures and personnel necessary to deal with these threats in a coherent manner.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution, the ongoing New Cold War and the transition towards multipolarity.

Featured image is from Kurt Nimmo