In the 19 months he has been behind bars, Pedro Castillo has had almost fifty lawyers who let him go, several of his entourage went from fugitives to collaborators of justice and his support networks have clashed with each other. But if something has not changed, it has been his defense strategy: during all this time he has maintained that on December 7, 2022, he did not carry out a coup d’état, because he did not take up arms and only read a speech, and since when do speeches have ammunition?
What the union leader who governed Peru also retains is his desire to continue doing politics, even from prison. He recently published on his social networks his membership card for Todo con el Pueblo, a movement that is just building its foundations: it is not yet listed in the Registry of Political Organizations (ROP) of the National Elections Board and will probably not get its registration to participate in the 2026 elections —the deadline expires on July 12—, but it gives him the possibility of having a window to remain active on the political board.
The loopholes in the system are permissive: since he has neither a first-instance criminal sentence against him nor a disqualification from Congress to exercise public office, Pedro Castillo could try for a seat in the next Congress. He would not be the first. It is enough to remember Gregorio Santos, a Cajamarcan like him, who ran for President in the 2016 elections while serving a preventive detention order. He obtained 600,000 votes and came in sixth place, being decisive in the contest by limiting the reach of the left-wing candidate who had more traction: the anthropologist Verónika Mendoza. In the case of Castillo, as he leads the ticket that won the 2021 elections, he could not aspire to be president, since re-election is prohibited, but he could run for a seat.
“I will return and we will be millions,” says the poster with which Castillo announced his entry into Everything with the People. It is not a random phrase. It is inspired by the last words of an 18th century Aymara leader named Túpac Katari before being assassinated. Words that former Bolivian President Evo Morales clung to when he was forced to resign from power in 2019. In that sense, Pedro Castillo has put himself in the place of the victims from the very beginning. He has said on more than one occasion that the coup d’état was done to him, ignoring the Message to the Nation where he dissolved Congress and called for an exceptional government.
The 54-year-old rural teacher is being held in the Barbadillo prison, in the district of Ate Vitarte, east of Lima. He is serving two preventive detention orders: one for the alleged crime of rebellion and conspiracy, and another for leading an alleged criminal organization during his term. If for the latter he was sentenced to 36 months (until March 8, 2026), for the first he has just been given an additional fourteen months (until August 6, 2025). His stay in prison will be prolonged. In fact, he has already spent the same amount of time in prison as he did in the Palace: seventeen months. In addition, for the failed breach of the constitutional order, the Prosecutor’s Office is asking for 34 years in prison.
Without the pencil that popularized his candidacy with Free PeruIt is Pedro Castillo’s hat that has returned to the fore by decorating the logo of Todo con el Pueblo, an organization that will have until the end of this year to achieve its registration as a political party. For now, there are thirty groups registered for the 2026 elections, one week before the final stretch. In fact, his affiliation to this budding party was announced in February through a handwritten letter.
“In response to the clamor of thousands of compatriots who have been asking me to lead the construction of a political instrument that safeguards the interests of the Peruvian people, from my unjust captivity, my current trench of struggle for my freedom and restitution, I assume this historic responsibility,” he said. The national coordinator of Todos con el Pueblo is an old acquaintance of Castillo. He is the lawyer Nicolás Bustamante Coronado, who was his fleeting Minister of Transport and Communications between March and May 2022. He is from Cajamarca and Chotano like him. Bustamante is faced with the challenge of promoting the signing of the forms and guaranteeing that the party exists for the National Elections Jury.
Walter Ayala, one of Pedro Castillo’s lawyers, has said that his client is convinced that he still has a political future. “If we look at history, what happened to President Castillo has happened in other countries. There is Lula in Brazil or (Manuel) Zelaya in Honduras. His wife (Xiomara Castro) is now the president. He still plans to return to power later. I cannot say. But there are many politicians who appear on television every day who are looking for President Castillo,” he says.
For political analyst César Campos, on the other hand, Castillo’s decision to promote and join a political organization is rather an act that lacks support. “It is a phantom signing. The party does not exist. It is in the process of collecting signatures. What Mr. Pedro Castillo has done is create a fiction that he wants to remain in politics, like all those who want to kick forward like Martín Vizcarra. In other words, scoundrels who expect citizens to forget their inequities, their errors and all their crimes so that they can continue doing politics,” he emphasized on Canal N.
In the last hearing he gave from the Barbadillo prison, the rural teacher said that he never tried to escape and that if he took his family to the Mexican embassy, immediately after his Message to the Nation, it was only “to keep them safe.” To prove this, his defense showed a document from the Mexican Embassy in Peru where they report that they did not receive any asylum request from him. Some statements by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador the day after his frustrated self-coup deny this. “He called the office here to tell me that he was going to the embassy. Surely his phone was already tapped and he was going to request asylum. I looked for Marcelo Ebrard and told him to speak to the ambassador (Pablo Monroy) and open the door for him,” he said at that time. Castillo’s wife, Lilia Paredes, and his two children have lived in Mexico as asylum seekers since then.
Just as Pedro Castillo is fighting to remain in the political picture, his former cellmate, Alberto Fujimori, joined Fuerza Popular a couple of weeks ago, the party led by his daughter Keiko. According to the law, as the author of a wilful crime, he cannot run for any public office. The presidential pardon he received does not exonerate him. However, his lawyers and spokesmen for the orange bench have already gone to the media to say that he cannot be denied the right to be elected. Beyond their ideological differences, the abyss between their criminal records and the effects of their self-coups, Castillo and Fujimori are proof of how difficult it is to eradicate populism. The slogan of the professor’s new group could not be other than: Everything with the people, nothing without them.
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