Second time as farce: Peru’s president falls

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman.

And in London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Electronic cigarettes, which produce nicotine enriched vapor rather than tar filled smoke, are unquestionably less harmful than regular cigarettes. But they're not without risk. And getting policy right around e cigarettes is proving tricky.

And the first thing you notice about the funerals held for motorcycle taxi drivers in Kenya is that they're loud and raucous. But look closer and the growing number of them reveals something about how the country is changing.

But first.

When Pedro Castillo was elected president of Peru in 2021, he promised responsibility, order and respect.

Por los pueblo del Peru, por un.

Pais si incorruption y poru na Nueva Constitucion.

But 16 months of Shambhalic governance later, his presidency is over in dramatic fashion. After weeks of mounting political pressure, it all unraveled on Wednesday, a whirlwind day that lurched the country into a state of near total chaos.

Well, it was an apparently chaotic, confusing and fast moving day for Peru's political system.

Mike Reid is the Economist Bayo columnist.

Pedro Castillo, the president for the past 16 months, announced a coup against the Congress and against the judiciary. But within very few hours, it unraveled, it failed miserably and he found himself arrested by the police. And then the vice president was sworn in. This after the Congress voted to remove him formally in an impeachment proceeding.

So take us through the day. How did it all unfold?

Well, tensions which had been building for weeks came to a head. Suddenly, the Congress was due to to vote to impeach Mr. Castillo. And although it had tried to do so twice before, there was a sense that this time it might have the numbers to do so. And he suddenly went on television to give an address por Lo que en.

Attencion al reclamos ciudadano a lolargo llancho del pais tomamos la decicion de establish.

He said that, quote, in response to citizen demands that he was going to dissolve the Congress, reorganize the judiciary, draw up a new constitution, and set up an emergency government. That, in effect, was an attempted coup. And he also said he would impose a nationwide curfew. That produced protests. It was met by widespread rejection. The police and the army said they would have nothing to do with enforcing it. The Congress speeded up its vote to impeach him and voted by 101 to 6 to do so. And then very shortly afterwards, they swore in his successor, Dina Boluarte.

Como todos conocemos.

Who confirmed that there had been an attempted coup. And meanwhile, now ex president Castillo tried to get to the Mexican embassy, hoping to claim asylum. But his police driver stopped the car en route to the embassy because the police commanders had decided to arrest him for rebellion. Then he was driven into custody and charged with breaching the constitutional order.

So he began the day as president and ended it behind bars. Why did he do it?

I think it was a desperate action of a president who had never been up to the job. He won extremely unexpectedly in 2021. He was a rural schoolteacher and trade unionist with no previous political experience, and he won by just 50,000 out of about 17 million votes. He never really showed himself up to the job. He got through five cabinets and 81 ministers in 16 months. The ministers came and went almost weekly. Many of them were as unqualified as he was. According to the chief prosecutor, he and several members of his family corruptly conspired to award public contracts. And there were various prosecutions underway against him which could not be brought while he enjoyed presidential immunity. He denies the allegations and claims that he was a victim of political persecution. But the real drama was what was going to happen in Congress, because on the previous two attempts to impeach him, the numbers weren't there. But the effect of his action was to bring forward the denouement, which had been kind of building for some weeks.

So it was really just a last throw of the dice for him. A desperate attempt.

Yes. I mean, what was interesting about it, and what for Peruvians was very kind of unnerving, was that in 1992, Alberto Fukimori, another elected president, had gone on television to announce the dissolution of Congress.

Dissolver. Dissolver.

Indeed. He said armored class to shut it down. He took over the judiciary for practical purposes, and he ruled as an autocrat for the next eight years. Now, there were big differences. Fukimori at the time was popular. He justified what he did, rightly or wrongly, as necessary to tackle a terrorist campaign by the Shining Path Maoist group. But Mr. Castillo was weak, incompetent, unpopular. And by evoking that antecedent of 1992, he actually turned quite a lot of the left against him because Bukimori became a bete noire for the left. So it was a pretty disastrous move all around.

And now that he's out of office, where does this leave the country and his successor?

Firstly, I think most Peruvians will feel relief that this was resolved quickly and that Pedro Castillo has gone because most of them wanted him to go. Right. The issue is whether Dina Boluarte will be able to form a stable, coherent and competent government or whether she will come under immediate pressure to call a fresh general election. In fact, we don't really know very much about her. I mean, she was a very unknown figure when she was picked to be the vice president. She was a minister in Castillo's government, but a fairly low profile one. She said when she was sworn in that she wanted to form a government of unity. I think Peru needs that at the moment. It also needs a competent government. So one hopes that Dina Voluarte will put competent people in. But I think there will be a running debate as to whether Peru needs a fresh election. There will also be a running debate as to whether it needs political reforms to prevent this chronic instability that there has been since 2016.

So, Mike, you mentioned chronic political instability in Peru. How do you fix that? What does the country need to achieve a measure of stability?

Well, Peru was a success story until fairly recently. I mean, its economy was one of the fastest growing in Latin America. Poverty fell a lot. The weakness was always in the institutions and the politics. Peru needs to build some serious political parties, and that's much easier said than done. Secondly, Fukimorismo is now represented by Alberto Fukimori's daughter, Keiko Fukimori. But Anti Fukimorismo is now the strongest political current in the country. And that's purely negative. And there's been this battle between the Fukimori people and the anti Fukimori state, which has been very destructive. And you also need to make some reforms to the workings of the Congress and so on and the qualifications that political parties need to fulfill to compete in elections. What you don't need is a new constitution. You need to make some more limited reforms, because as a whole the constitution functioned quite well for quite a long time. And the people who want a new constitution want it in order to seize power, essentially. And it's important that Peru should avoid that kind of situation.

All right, Mike, thanks so much for your time today.

Thank you.

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We've come a long way from the days of Audrey Hepburn smoking cigarettes from long holders, making the act look just glamorous.

You have a cigarette.

These days, pop culture has stopped glamorizing smoking and pays more attention to its dangers.

You get that thing in your mouth, there you go.

And you take that drag and you.

Feel that cancer causing chemical rush. Yep. And you're like, I'll take it.

Eight million people are estimated to have died globally in 2019 from the effects of smoking, and it remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Cigarettes are addictive, and getting people to fully kick the habit is tough. But enter e cigarettes.

E cigarettes could be a game changer.

In public health, helping millions of people to quit smoking.

But while vaping may be better than smoking, it's not without its dangers.

Medical research has concluded the vapor from e cigarette devices can be harmful.

You hid your vape underneath your pillows.

And you would come and smoke. How often?

Oh, I couldn't go longer than like 10, 15 minutes without hitting it.

Getting policy right around vaping, which has both vast upsides and downsides, is tough. But jurisdictions are trying.

Vaping had become a really big problem in the US A few years ago. Particularly, people were very concerned about juul. Juul is a type of e cigarette that sells high nicotine and fruity virgins and. And it became very popular among teenagers.

Tamara jokes. Bohr is the Economist's U.S. policy correspondent.

So slowly the U.S. government began chipping away, first limiting flavors and then eventually banning juul. But teens are still using e cigarettes today. According to the Food and Drug administration, more than 2 million American high schoolers, which is about 14% of them, reported using E cigarettes in 2022.

Well, that's a lot of people who vape, but that's still better than them smoking regular cigarettes. Right.

E cigarettes are much less harmful than regular traditional cigarettes, but they still have some health consequences. Vaping is associated with a higher risk of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or copd. And there are fears that e cigarette use could be particularly harmful for young adults. There are fears that it can harm brain development and it can trigger a lifelong addiction to nicotine, which is clearly not a good thing. And today, all states ban e cigarettes to people under the age of 21.

So it sounds like that ban, though, isn't stopping young people from getting their hands on e cigarettes. Are there policy solutions that could?

Yes, teens are still getting their hands on e cigarettes, but it does seem like there are a couple of policies that could prevent them from using e cigarettes. One study from the center for Health, Economics and Policy Studies at San Diego State University found that a tax could be helpful. They found that a $1 increase in e cigarette taxes is associated with a 14 to 26% decrease in vaping among high school students. And it seems like this tax also tempers teen alcohol use. They found that a $1 increase in e cigarette taxes is associated with a 10 to 11% reduction in teenage binge drinking.

That's really interesting. Why is that?

It is interesting, and the reason is that smoking and drinking tend to go together. Teens who drink are twice as likely as others to light up. And another study found that raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 in America actually reduce smoking among the affected age group. And interestingly, it seems to work in reverse too. Raising taxes on cigarettes has been found to actually taper teen drinking. And you can think about this, right? Often people are lighting up while also drinking. This makes sense in the end. Drinking and driving is also especially deadly for young people. And the study found that a $1 rise in e cigarette taxes brings a 10 to 14% decline and in the number of alcohol related traffic fatalities per 100,000among 16 to 20 year olds.

Well, that's a striking array of benefits. Tamara, it sounds like raising taxes on e cigarettes is absolutely what should be done, right?

It does sound like that at first, but unfortunately it's not so simple. Often when vaping is discouraged, it actually encourages other forms of substance use, such as traditional smoking. A review of 78 studies conducted in America, Britain and Italy found that people were more likely to stop smoking for at least six months when they used nicotine e cigarettes compared to using other methods. So there's a big fear that by raising taxes on e cigarettes to prevent teen use, you will actually prohibit people from being able to use e cigarettes to quit smoking. So the policy has to be carefully applied.

Well Are there other policy options besides imposing taxes that might have some benefits?

There are some interesting policies happening in other countries. The National Health Service in the UK announced in October that they are considering prescriptions for E cigarettes. This type of policy would thread the needle. It'd be able to discourage teen use while also allowing people who smoke to use e cigarettes to quit smoking. But this might work in the United Kingdom, but it could be tricky in the United States. Smokers in the US tend to be lower income and tend to have less access to the healthcare system. So a prescription could be a big barrier for those people and they might end up then turning to regular cigarettes to get their nicotine fixed.

So, Tamara, you've thought very deeply about this and I know from working with you that you have a very clear eyed view of balancing policy trade offs. If governments came to you and asked for advice, what would you suggest?

I would suggest that we take a look at history and remember what happened during Prohibition. Prohibition in the US occurred between 1920 and 1933 and we know that while it was meant to stop drinking, it actually increased alcohol consumption and crime and drug use actually rose. We have to be really careful about how we apply policies so that we do not end up with unintended consequences. A good policy solution has to discourage teen use while also allowing smokers, current smokers, to use e cigarettes to help themselves quit. I think that there's three different things that we should consider. The first is prescriptions, as we are seeing potentially being rolled out by the National Health Service in the uk. The second is tighter regulation. The EU and UK both regulate the amount of nicotine in E cigarettes and that could be really helpful in the US as well. The third is an interesting solution that I heard from one of the study authors. She recommended stacking taxes so that while we can tax all harmful products like cigarettes and e cigarettes, we actually stack them so that the most harmful products are taxed the highest and the least harmful are taxed the least. And that way we can encourage use appropriately. So I think that we have to look overall at the big picture and be very careful about what we are doing, making sure that we are not leaning too hard into one direction and then causing unintended consequence in another direction.

All right, Tamara, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

In Kenya, you can hear the funeral of a motorbike taxi driver from miles away. There's music blasting from loudspeakers mounted on a minibus covered with flowers. There are the shouts of the mourners, the honks of passing lorries and adding to the cacophony the horns of dozens of fellow motorbike taxi drivers.

One of the easiest ways to get around Kenya is on a motorbike because of the rough roads and limited ways of public transportation.

Azania Patel writes about foreign affairs for the Economist.

This has meant that there's been a growing number of motorbike riders which function as taxis in the country. And these are called boda boda drivers. The estimates range from there being about 900,000 to about 2.4 million drivers. In a country that has a population of about 55 million people, these motorbikes are a risky business. Driving them on these rough streets is not easy. And as the numbers of these drivers has grown, so has the death toll of these motorbike taxi drivers. About 1,634 motorbike riders and billions died last year. So in response to this, the drivers have taken to holding these sort of massive funeral processions for their peers and colleagues. And these funerals tell us a lot more about Kenya than just poor road safety.

Wait, what more does it tell us about Kenya?

Historically, the Kenyan society has been split on lines of ethnicity and tribes. And funerals, as most sort of religious events are part of this sort of tribal identity. And honoring the dead, especially in older Kenyans in the countryside, has had to do with keeping the tribal ways of the past and with the Buddha. Buddha funerals. What we see is a change in Kenyan society. Now, these younger men who have moved away to the cities and now are in communities that are not quite tribal, but far more on the lines of their profession, have started making this a way of honoring their own people, creating community. And in fact, these boda boda drivers vote along these lines as well, which is, again, a stark difference from the sort of ethnic line voting that has previously been seen. So young Kenyans are now casting off ethnic labels and are driving these new political allegiances. And boda boda drivers exemplify this trend.

It sounds as if these boda boda drivers are not just a symbol of where Kenya is heading, but a kind of, I don't know, a voting bloc unto themselves.

Oh, absolutely. This year, during the elections that happened in Kenya, William Ruto, who was finally actually elected president, campaigned very hard to get the boda boda drive award. He championed them and called them the sort of frontline of his hustler Kenya. And I mean, to an extent, it is true. One Kenyan insurer has estimated that they bring in about 3% of Kenya's GDP each year. So drivers voting for Mr. Ruto over competition was a very big thing for his win, and they aligned to his idea of being praised and being taken. Taken as serious members of society, which was taken over other incentives that competitors offered, like, say, fuel subsidies or, you know, just cash for words. So Boda Boda drivers have often been thought of this sort of public menace. What happened with them being seen as a political block is them getting this sort of legitimacy as that they are a very important part of Kenyan society and you can't really do without them, whether it's in elections or whether it's just in, like, simple everyday travel.

Why were these drivers considered a public menace before?

So, again, one of the things to remember is that these are mostly very young men between the ages of, say, 18 to early 30s. And of course, that group in and of itself is often seen in societies with suspicion. But with the Boda Boda drivers, we've had a lot of issues that can be seen in Kenya, whether it's this turf war, this allegiance only to themselves, which means that they will publicly lynch someone who's suspected of being a motorbike. There's been incidents of rape and assault of female pillions. And this danger has exemplified their image as this thing that's a bit scary to have on the roads. Another thing to note is that most of them are unlicensed. They don't actually have any sort of driver's license and drive fairly rashly. They also disregard road safety and often drive while intoxicated. So there has been enough reason for them to be seen as a bit scary to have on Kenya streets unchecked. And that kind of contributes to their images, this public menace.

But nevertheless, they are both a reflection and a direction of the way Kenya is going.

Absolutely. I think, again, it's less about being like, oh, Boda Boda driveways are completely bad and should be thrown off. They're, in fact, very important for this developing economy. And this has been a very big source of income for people who lost employment, whether it was through Covid or just through. Through regular churns in the economy. So Buddha Buddha drivers are going nowhere. And it doesn't look like the changes in Kenyan society are either.

Azania, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin, Jack Gill, John Jo Devlin and Rory Galloway. Our creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize, Jean Baptiste and Kevin Kaynors and assistant producer Barkley Bram. With extra production help this week from Maggie Khedifa, Elna Schutz and Sarah Laurinuk. We'll all see you back here on Monday, Sam.