President resigns, undone by scandal
Kuczynski joins long list of leaders leaving in disgrace.
LIMA, PERU — He took office in 2016 as a political outsider boasting that his strong business credentials would buoy Peru’s economy while sweeping away endemic corruption. But with his offer of resignation, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski joins a long list of recent Peruvian presidents undone by scandals that have destroyed voters’ trust in their elected officials.
Kuczynski, flanked by his cabinet, announced his decision to resign Wednesday in a nationally televised address, accusing opponents led by the daughter of former strongman Alberto Fujimori of plotting his overthrow for months and making it impossible to govern.
Shortly after, he exited the back door of the baroque presidential palace built by Spanish conquerors and was driven off, all alone, in an SUV.
Congress was expected to vote Thursday to accept his resignation, or if not, to impeach him.
When Kuczynski, a former Wall Street investor, was elected in 2016, he was immediately thrust to the helm of a conservative revival in South America. Voters had grown tired of once-dominant leftist governments marred by corruption and blamed for squandering a decade-long commodities boom that had ended abruptly.
But the 79-year-old was hobbled almost immediately out of the gate. His self-tailored party, named for his own PPK initials, won just 18 seats in the 130-member congress. And instead of courting supporters on the left who pushed him to victory by a razor-thin margin over opponent Keiko Fujimori, he tried in vain to form an alliance with the former strongman’s power-hungry, vindictive allies.
What most outraged voters, however, was his seeming dishonesty, something that has long dominated Peruvian politics and he had vowed to end.
For months, as three of his predecessors were probed and one even jailed for taking bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, Kuczynski steadfastly denied having any business or political ties with the company at the heart of Latin America’s biggest graft scandal.
Then, Fujimori’s party produced confidential bank documents from Odebrecht showing $780,000 in decadeold payments to his consulting firm. Kuczynski said he had no knowledge of the payments that overlapped with his years as a government minister.
To save his skin he cut the sort of closed-door deal that Peruvians have grown to abhor. A group of lawmakers led by Kenji Fujimori defied his sister to block Kuczynski’s impeachment. Days later, Kuczynski pardoned the feuding siblings’ father from a 25-year jail sentence for human rights abuses.