2023-11-28 18:50:39
Peru has once again taken the path of political scandal. The Prosecutor of the Nation, Patricia Benavides, is accused of being the head of a mafia organization that has its ramifications in the most unpopular Congress in the recent history of that country. Benavides does not want to be dragged down by the crisis. In an act of survival she threw aconstitutional accusation against provisional president Dina Boluarte and its premier Alberto Otárola for the deaths of the protesters who took to the streets in the south of the country to demand the resignation of the interim government at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. Peruvians observe this new fight in political and institutional power in astonishment. . “This lawsuit looks like a Mexican soap opera,” said legislator Sandra Paredes.
It all started hours ago when the Special Team against Corruption of Power intervened at the headquarters of the Public Ministry. The investigations reach not only Benavides but to his immediate advisors Alberto Hurtado Espinoza, Miguel Ángel Girado Isidro and, especially, Jaime Javier Villanueva Barreto. The latter is the one that is most compromised as a result of some chats that illuminated the mechanisms of corruption within the judiciary and the legislature. In one of the conversations that became public, Villanueva Barreto asserted his status as Benavides’ right-hand man to get an uncomfortable prosecutor, Zoraida Ávalos, disqualified. This shadowy operator brought a touch of comedy to the crisis. Cornered, he checked himself into a Lima clinic alleging health problems. The doctors refuted it. The accused abandoned the stretcher where he had taken refuge and surrendered to the police.
Prosecutors Pablo Sánchez and Juan Carlos Villena requested Benavides’ resignation “in order not to affect the investigation.” She doesn’t want to give up on her. Boluarte has defied her by waiving her presidential immunity to face the investigations. “She is not afraid that it will be effectively demonstrated that she does not have criminal responsibility in the events that occurred,” reported her Minister of Justice and Human Rights, Eduardo Arana Ysa. Boluarte’s lawyer, Joseph Campos, considered that the constitutional complaint is a political response by the prosecutor as part of “an internal war” in the Public Ministry. He assured that the complaint filed by Benavides “He has neither head nor tail.”
Resignation requests
The dispute has an open end at this time. Congress is silent. The Lima newspaper Trade considered in his editorial that “Mrs. Benavides cannot continue” in his position. “The fact that she and her advisors are involved in an investigation for alleged criminal organization is already enough to demand her departure.” That she has removed prosecutor Marita Barreto from the work she had been doing to advance the investigations “also suggests an obstruction of justice.”
Trade He also requested the resignation of the Ombudsman, Josué Gutiérrez, involved in the scandal conversations. “The revealed chats show that his appointment – suspicious from the beginning due to his lack of suitability for the position – responded, to a large extent, to a negotiation between Villanueva Barreto (presumably acting on behalf of Benavides) and a significant number of parliamentarians.”
The deaths resulting from the protests, the publication highlights, should have been investigated a long time ago but in this case the suspicion remains in the air that it is a counterattack by the Attorney General. “Here there is no room to talk about right or left; The earthquake that shakes the Public Ministry and whose reverberations impact other institutions will bring a tail end in the coming days. But, for now, the facts demand the departure of Benavides. The continuity of it is unsustainable.”
According to The Republic The charges against the Attorney General and her three main advisors are extremely serious. “Congress, which constitutes the third leg of the table in this affair, has not had any institutional position, despite the fact that 35 parliamentarians have been involved, who would have been pressured to exercise their vote in favor of the agenda items of interest. of the prosecutor, through the offer to eliminate complaints against them in processes followed before the Public Ministry”.
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