The Congress of Peru Thursday denied President Pedro Castillo permission to travel to Bogotá, where he planned to attend the next August 7 to the acts of transmission of command of the elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro.
In total, 67 congressmen voted against granting Castillo permission, 42 voted in favor and there were 5 abstentions, with which Parliament denied the permission that Peruvian presidents must obtain from the chamber for any trip abroad.
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When speaking in plenary, the deputies used different arguments to deny the permit; some claimed there was a flight risk, since the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating Castillo for several cases of possible corruption, while others alleged that there is “an unprecedented presidential crisis.”
“We are in an unprecedented presidential crisis and I think that at this moment the president should send (to Colombia) his vice president or the foreign minister, but I think that the president should be here, show his face and declare and explain the acts in which he is “, said the former president of Congress María del Carmen Alva, of the right-wing Popular Action party.
For his part, Congressman Juan Carlos Martin Lizarzaburu, of the Fujimori Popular Force, affirmed that Castillo “will want to escape” if he goes to Colombia, for which he asked that “he send the foreign minister and he stays assuming responsibility.”
In the same sense, his fellow bench member Héctor Ventura expressed himself, who stated that “there is an obvious danger of flight.”
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The president of Peru, Pedro Castillo.
For her part, Katy Ugarte, from the Peru Libre party – with which Castillo became president – affirmed that the Peruvian head of state “has been collaborating in the investigations that the Prosecutor’s Office has opened against him” and stressed that “he has never I would flee the country.”
“I ask my colleagues not to get carried away by hatred or irrational theories,” he claimed without success.
Precisely, Castillo went to the Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday, where he stated that he is not part “of any criminal network,” as he later clarified to the press.
According to the complaint opened in the Prosecutor’s Office, Castillo is suspected of having granted promotions to two Army officers, three from the Air Force and two from the National Police in an irregular manner and with the participation of former Defense Minister Walter Ayala and his former presidential secretary Bruno Pacheco, also implicated in other cases against the president.
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Pacheco surrendered to Justice in July, after several months on the run, and has offered himself as a collaborator with the Prosecutor’s Office in the open investigations against Castillo, which include the crime of criminal organization, among others.
The head of state, who served one year in the Executive on July 28, is also being investigated for alleged irregularities in the award of the construction of the Tarata bridge and in the purchase of biodiesel.
Also in the alleged plagiarism of his master’s thesis, in military promotions and in the alleged obstruction of the search and capture of former Minister Juan Silva and his nephew Fray Vásquez, implicated in these cases.
*With information from EFE
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