This week, a Cold War relic was revived in the service of inimical ends: the coup d’état.
In Peru, facing his second impeachment proceedings, far-left president Pedro Castillo attempted to remain in power, only to be ousted by Congress after trying to dissolve the body. Castillo is a leftist who’s personally praised Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, and his party has applauded the Marxist-Leninist government of Cuba. Castillo also appointed Shining Path sympathizers to the highest levels of his government. Shining Path is a Maoist Peruvian guerilla movement responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands during the ’80s and ’90s.
This attempted self-coup comes after Peru’s political system had languished through five years of political instability that began when President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned in disgrace amid a vote-buying scandal.
It’s easy to claim to see parallels between every coup attempt and the events that transpired in the U.S. between November 3, 2020, and January 6, 2021. But there’s a much bigger takeaway here than the loutish Trump.
Despite what postmodern relativists might have you believe, evil lives. The specter of communism, one of the most monstrous and destructive ideologies to ever haunt humanity, is still with us. As conservatives, we must brandish all we carry in our rhetorical quivers in the struggle against this totalitarian philosophy of enslavement. So the next time the media gushes over some leftist wannabe autocrat riding the crest of the latest pink tide drowning Latin America, extolling him as the authentic “voice of the poor,” remember Pedro Castillo.