Alberto Otárola, Prime Minister of Peru, resigns, questioned for a case of harassment

The Prime Minister of Peru presented his immediate resignation this Tuesday. Alberto Otárola, Dina Boluarte’s right-hand man, has fallen 48 hours after it became known that he offered work to a woman whom he then harassed through messages and pursued with declarations of love. The president, who has very low popularity, has not wanted to keep him in office. Otárola has assured that he is innocent and that it is all an orchestrated campaign against him. He did so after landing in Lima on a plane from Canada, where he had to interrupt his participation in a mining convention.

“The country has witnessed a plot, a conspiracy, a media operation, planned for months in which various characters who act from the shadows and have subordinate interests participated. “They have falsely tried to make the population believe that they had intervened in the hiring of one or several people in the State, when this is a hoax,” said the lawyer at a press conference, after meeting with President Dina Boluarte in the Palace. Shortly after, Otárola blamed former President Martín Vizcarra for the audio broadcast on a Sunday program, where he asked for his resume and called Yaziré Pinedo Vásquez, a worker who in the summer of 2023 benefited from two contracts with the State for 53,000 soles (14,324 thousand dollars).

“I have no doubt that Mr. Martín Vizcarra is behind all this. “Him and his team of corrupt people,” he said, displeased. Vizcarra succeeded Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in the Palace and governed Peru between 2018 and 2020. He was vacated for alleged corruption crimes. Furthermore, his image was tarnished by Vacunagate, an international scandal that uncovered the trafficking of vaccines against Covid-19 in Peru during the first wave. Vizcarra was secretly inoculated with the vaccine against the virus. In the last hours, Pinedo, who acknowledged having had a brief romantic relationship with Otárola, assured that the audio in question was manipulated and that said conversation occurred in January 2021, when Otárola did not hold any public position.

It was Pinedo herself who denounced that Nicanor Boluarte, the president’s brother, was behind the alleged plot, questioned in recent months for favoring close associates of his with contracts with the State. Otárola, however, freed him from the plot. “I was surprised that they appointed Mr. Nicanor Boluarte. I am sure that he is not in this conspiracy,” she perhaps said, as the last gesture of loyalty to the president.

The day before, Alberto Otárola’s fate was doomed: nine of the eleven groups in Congress called on him to resign. In addition, a group of legislators filed three constitutional complaints against him. One of them proposes that he be disqualified for 10 years from holding any public office. The rosary of crimes: influence peddling, collusion and incompatible negotiation.

Alberto Otárola’s departure was announced hours before his conference through Foreign Minister Javier González Olaechea. “The only thing I can convey to you, after having been with the president from seven in the morning until one in the afternoon, is that there is going to be a relaunch of the Government’s general policies. […] so that the presentation and support of the confidence of the next cabinet is not a procedure, but a second opportunity and a second oxygen with prospects for 2024,” he said. This was taken as a betrayal by the outgoing premier: “I should have made that message and not a misplaced and stupid chancellor.”

Precisely, the Minister of Foreign Affairs is one of the possibilities that Boluarte is considering to lead the new cabinet. Another of the strongest options is the Minister of Justice and Human Rights, Eduardo Arana, who enjoys the approval of Fuerza Popular – a group with great power in the Chamber – for having endorsed the pardon for Alberto Fujimori, but who is not free of dust and straw: he is investigated for alleged influence peddling in the Los Cuellos Blancos del Puerto case, a corruption scandal between judges of the defunct National Council of the Judiciary.

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