The president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, appointed this Friday (25) as president of the Council of Ministers Minister Betssy Chávez, until then holder of the Culture portfolio and who is being investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office for allegedly having hired her relatives for public office.
“Out of respect for the rule of law and the restitution of balance and separation of powers, I swear,” Chávez said at a ceremony of brief inauguration, in the presence of his predecessor, Aníbal Torres, whose resignation Castillo accepted minutes before midnight.
On November , the Public Ministry announced the opening of an investigation into the alleged commission of crimes of incompatible negotiation and exploitation of office and aggravated influence peddling against Chávez.
The investigation was opened after the Sunday program “Cuarto Poder” denounced that Chávez had hired for the Ministry of Culture – and allegedly facilitated the link with another entity state – relatives of businessman Abel Sotelo, with whom he maintains a relationship.
Chávez, 33 years old, is a lawyer born in the province of Tacna, on the border with Chile, and has served as Minister of Labor and Employment Promotion in the current government, a position she was removed from after being the subject of a motion of censure in Congress.
In addition, she is a deputy elected by Peru Livre, party that calls itself Marxist and which also led Castillo to the presidency.
However, Chávez left the party in December of last year, as well as the president months later.
Chávez thus becomes the fifth president of the Council of Ministers since Castillo took power in July 2021, after the resignation presented the day before by Torres before the decision of the board of directors of Congress to reject “totally” the proposal for a vote of confidence that he presented the week before.
The board of directors of Congress made this decision “because it deals with matters that are banned for its approach”, as announced by the President of Parliament, José Williams.
In this sense, Williams said that the approach taken by Torres “is a clear attempt to take over an exclusive faculty and exclusive right of Congress to approve or not the confidence vote and interpret the meaning” of this type of request.
When presenting the request for a confidence vote to the plenary of Congress last week, Torres, who was in office since February of this year, warned that the Constitution establishes that the refusal of the vote of confidence is established when the request is “refused” and not expressly “rejected”.
Therefore, it considered that if the mere possibility of receiving the bill were declared inadmissible, this would be understood as a denial of the confidence vote.
The Peruvian Constitution establishes that, if Congress rejects a confidence issue, the president must recompose his Cabinet of Ministers and, if that happens, one For the second time, it has the power to dissolve Parliament and immediately call new legislative elections.
Now, Congress must give its vote of confidence to Chávez, so that, if Parliament rejects it and Castillo interpret that a first motion has already been denied, could try to dissolve Congress, something that deputies reject.