00:00And in this context we want to invite Yvonne Tellez from Ecuador. She is an
00:05international law expert. Hello Yvonne, welcome to From the South. Thank you for
00:09joining us today. Thank you very much for the invitation. Yvonne, what are the main
00:16factors behind these circumstances being faced by Peru, this political
00:20instability in the nation? What can you explain regarding the precedent of this
00:25event? Well, I think the immediate facts are, as we know, this removal of the
00:40precedent for the investigations of these undisclosed meetings with Chinese
00:46business people, allegations of this influence peddling, the questions also
00:54surrounding certain public appointments. However, as you state in your question,
01:01I think one of the things that we have to highlight is how Peru's Constitution
01:08allows Congress to remove a precedent just under the concept of something that is
01:15called permanent moral incapacity. This concept has not been clearly defined in
01:21the constitutional Peruvian doctrine. It has a broad, flexible, interpretive
01:29flexibility. It has also been repeatedly used in the recent years. This is why we
01:36have had eight presidents in Peru. So the structural concern here is one of the
01:44things I think is that this standard seems to be political rather than strictly
01:50judicial. That's one thing. It does not require a prior criminal conviction. It
01:57allows also the Congress to act based on this political evaluation of the
02:04legitimacy. But how does this moral incapacity tend or not to strengthen this
02:13democratic accountability? So I think this absence of this judicial finality creates structural tensions.
02:25It brings political responsibility before any legal determination. I think that there's not a
02:35and concrete evidence that there's not a concrete evidentiary threshold. And this, what we have seen, brings, of course, this
02:47political legitimacy crisis. And how this, also this structural political fragmentation comes
02:57is ahead due to this crucial factors. We know that all of the last presidents, almost seven, have failed to
03:08complete their terms.
03:09This structural, also another factor is the highly fragmented party system, this weak institutional political parties, this lack of stable
03:21governing coalitions, and this strong powers,
03:26is in the Congress for removal of the executive. Also, you also were stating that there's elections coming up. There's
03:37an electoral context. We have dozens of parties competing at the same, at this time. And there's no dominant force,
03:46political force that's capable of guaranteeing a stable governance.
03:50So, what we have as a result is that presidents are governing without strong legislative backing. And that Congress, in
04:00the end, retains this structural leverage over the executive.
04:05You mentioned the current electoral process that is underway in the nation. And I wanted to ask you, what does
04:11this appointment of a new interim president is saying regarding the state of the nation's political and also democratic institutions
04:21ahead of this election? What's the current state?
04:25Okay, well, we know that we, I think we have competing interpretations over here, because one of them is this
04:35democratic accountability, right? So, the Congress is like, fulfilling, it's a, let's say, constitutional role, or this oversight role.
04:48We can, we can, we can see that this is like a prevention, this removal is like a prevention of
04:55the political abuse of power. And we can also state, and that's one of the things that some people of
05:03the Congress are stating, that this early intervention was protecting or is supposed to protect institutional integrity.
05:10integrity. I am not here to qualify the outgoing president. However, what we have to see is the whole, the
05:18whole picture here. There's another thesis, and that's the political instrumentalization, as I was saying before, this ambiguity, for example,
05:28of this moral incapacity requirement. And there's another one, and that, and I was, I will stick to that one.
05:37And this is the structural crisis, and this is what we see is current and recurrent removals. And this, I
05:50think, signal a systemic design problem of the institutions and of the state. I think the constitutional framework, what what
06:00it does is incentivize this confrontation. And I think that presidentialism,
06:06residentialism functions under conditions of permanent instability so what we have seen here
06:13is this structural patterns uh current and coming elections uh probably one of the of the lectures
06:23could be that there's removal before elections could sign uh kind of a tendency or a trend
06:31regarding who's going to be running or who's going to be possibly the the candidate with the most
06:38uh approval or the most support from some uh political uh groups uh so but this also brings
06:47a very suspicious theory regarding how is transparency um gonna be guaranteed in this
06:56coming elections if this whole panorama that we are looking at right now is not changing the
07:03structural basis of the constitutional state of peru thank you very much yvonne for your time
07:10hearing from the south and helping us to go deep into what is happening today in peru
07:16thank you very much for the invitation as always we were speaking to yvonne tayez international law
07:22experts in the context of the political instability that is taking place in peru at this moment
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