Above Photo: Rosangella Barbarán Reyes, Peruvian Congresswoman.
And International Far Right.
The U.S. isn’t the only country with a duplicitous Black political class. The coup government in Peru has Black “leaders” who protect and defend the right wing who ousted an elected president and violate the people’s human rights.
National Strike, Day 182
As the parliamentary coup against Pedro Castillo heads into its seventh month, the popular uprising against the Boluarte dictatorship has remained mobilized in the streets and organized by neighborhoods and regions, with a major mobilization coming up on July 19th. But as protesters continue to make their voices heard, Congress has entrenched its powers even deeper into state institutions, giving it free reign and enacting what people have called a congressional dictatorship with Boluarte as a puppet leader. Late last month, the Constitutional Tribunal gave Congress the sole power in votes of confidence and impeachment procedures. This, along with a $323 million budget to the armed forces as well as the arrival of over 1000 US troops, exemplifies what people have been saying the past 7 months, that this is a civic-military dictatorship headed by the far right Congress led by the Fujimori Fuerza Popular party.
At the end of the Afro Peruvian Culture month of June, we take a look at some of the members of the Black Misleadership Class in Perú in Congress. Rather than addressing the material needs of their specifically Afro descendant constituents and bases, these politicians have lined up with the rest of the hardliners in Fuerza Popular to delegitimize Pedro Castillo at every turn and work to overturn the popular will of the Peruvian peoples.
Occupying coastal areas in the South and partially North of the country as well as the capital city, Afro Peruvians make up about 8% of the population, roughly over a million. In both rural and urban settings, the poverty rates are far above their representation in the overall population, with many living in extreme poverty in underserved rural areas, such as in Ica or in the Northern Coast of Piura in Yapatera. While some of the most famous dishes, musical acts and fútbol stars are African, many Afro Peruvian organizations continue to point out that racism against the Black population is very much a national problem. However, any political representation in Congress and national politics seem to be very entrenched with the ruling elite and in particular the Fuerza Popular party, and not poor and working class Afro Peruvians.
Congress women Rosangella Barbarán Reyes and Martha Moyano Delgado, both members of the Fujimorista far right Fuerza Popular party, were among those leading the charge to oust Castillo since even before him taking office. In an interview with Willax TV , Moyano, sister of Maria Elena Moyano who was an AfroPeruvian community organizer murdered by Sendero Luminoso in Villa El Salvador in 1992, claimed that Castillo would have no idea what to do once he entered the presidential palace and that the people could feel that, leading to a vote of no confidence, already plotting against Castillo. Once in office, she refused to recognize him as the legitimate president, clinging to Keiko Fujimori’s claims of irregular voting in the presidential race. And while in office, she acted as one of the obstructionists in her party to derail any reforms Castillo wanted to pursue, to the point that there was leaked audio of her in April of 2022 acknowledging the Fujimorista strategy to impeach Castillo.
Willax TV, who spent most of its airwaves dedicated to trashing Castillo and now justifying the massacres, is owned by Erasmo Wong Lu, owner of Wong Supermarkets and a Fujimorista right winger who has signed onto the Madrid Charter from Spain’s far right Vox Party “to confront the threat posed by the growth of communism on both sides of the Atlantic”. Among the participants at the last two meetings of the Foro Madrid , including this past March in Lima was Rosángela Barbarán of the Fuerza Popular party. As the youngest Congress member, Barbarán has been effective on Tik Tok at communicating to a younger generation the reactionary politics of Fuerza Popular, including a video with over a million views saying that former Bolivian president Evo Morales is no longer allowed in Perú after allegations that he was supporting anti coup protests. And in the lead up to Castillo’s final impeachment attempt, she publicly asked her Fuerza Popular colleagues to not be distracted by fighting with ministers but instead focus on ousting Castillo .
Soon after the second massacre in Juliaca, Puno, Afro Peruvian organizations released a statement demanding an end to the killings and immediate elections to end the political crisis while these Congress women, along with others in their party, continued to blame the deaths on the protesters themselves and claimed they had terrorist ties, which even the de facto Foreign Minister Ana Gervasi had to concede they had no evidence for. Far from legislating for the interests of their constituents and Afro Peruvians, both Moyana and Barbarán have sold out their people and Perú to act as the Black misleaders going along with a US backed coup that will continue the looting of the country while Peruvians, in particular Afro Peruvians, remain mired in poverty.