Peru’s constitution came under threat the moment Pedro Castillo officially won Peru’s contentious presidential election in June of 2021. A formerly obscure teachers union leader who came to media prominence as the candidate for a Marxist-Leninist party (Free Peru), Castillo had no intention of playing by the established rules of the Peruvian republic. Though certainly erratic — the country now has its seventh president in six years — Peru’s institutions had still managed to withstand a series of impeachment trials and other clashes between the executive and Congress. A series of high-profile corruption scandals unleashed the strife. Amid the fallout, two-time former president Alan García committed suicide in 2019. Castillo, however, posed an institutional menace on an altogether different scale.

To begin with, his party’s program for the 2021 election included numerous measures that explicitly sought to violate the constitution’s unequivocal safeguards for private property, which it declares “inviolable.” The constitution also guarantees free enterprise, foreign investment, and press freedom. Castillo’s platform, on the other hand, set out an agenda of nationalizing the mining sector and other major industries, expropriating land, and getting rid of Peru’s successful private pension system, which, at the time, administered over USD $40 billion in citizens’ savings. Free Peru, which openly admires Vladimir Lenin and Fidel Castro, even declared the need to “regulate” the free press, claiming that a “muckraking” media was a “fatal” threat to democracy.

Most aggressively, Castillo’s government program openly called for a new constitution to replace the one in place, which it rejected as “individualistic, mercantilist, privatizing, and defeatist” in the face of foreign interests. Even before his inauguration, Castillo and his allies claimed that there was a need to summon a new constitutional assembly. Since Congress, which Free Peru did not control, was bound to stand in the way of such plans, Vladimir Cerrón, a Cuba-trained doctor and Castillo’s political mentor, argued for a dissolution of parliament. In theory, this would allow the executive to carry out fundamental constitutional changes unopposed.

In 2021, a wafer-thin majority of Peruvian voters chose to ignore such systemic risks. They perceived Castillo as a scourge against corruption and the political class, especially against one of its more emblematic members. His opponent, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former president-turned tyrant Alberto Fujimori, is a career politician who has wielded power since her adolescence and recently served jail time for money laundering.

Some 18 months after his victory, however, Castillo himself stands accused — by no less than the Attorney General — of leading a criminal organization in the heart of government alongside his political allies and family members. At the same time, Congress has managed to resist Castillo’s attempts to undermine its authority. Last November, a majority in Congress voted to reject Castillo’s request to travel to Mexico for a summit. It was the third time he was forbidden from leaving the country due to fears that he would flee as his political power dwindled.

Precious time flew by as Castillo’s struggles with Congress came to a gridlock, which, for the benefit of the economy, left him unable to implement any statist measures of note. Castillo’s attempt at a “self-coup” this morning, when he tried to dissolve Congress and set up a state of emergency, came soon after the former chief of Peru’s intelligence services declared that he had warned the former president of corrupt acts within his inner circle. On Wednesday, Congress was also scheduled to vote for a third time to remove Castillo from his post due to moral incapacity. The vote passed after the coup attempt, in the wake of which the Peruvian authorities arrested Castillo as he apparently tried to flee to the Mexican embassy.

In 1992, former president Fujimori succeeded where Castillo failed by dissolving an opposition-led Congress and ruling by decree until he had a new, favorable Congress elected. Fujimori, however, was extraordinarily popular— his approval rating exceeded 80 percent at the time of the coup— whereas 66 percent of Peruvians disapproved of Castillo’s performance according to a poll published last month. Crucially, Fujimori counted with the support of the military leadership, whereas both the army and the police promptly rejected Castillo’s desperate measures today.

Although Peru’s current constitution originally dates from Fujimori’s time in power, his eventual downfall due to his regime’s abuses of human rights took place under its framework. Upon Castillo’s election, I wondered whether the country’s constitution could survive an imminent onslaught once again, this time of a Marxist variety. As of now, the good news is that it did.