Hello, and welcome to the Latin America Weekly newsletter! In this issue: a rare bit of common ground for the far-left and far-right in Peru: university reform. Fires in Colombia’s Amazon are on the up. The Dominican Republic scraps all coronavirus restrictions, hoping to continue to attract tourists.
Far-right and far-left make for strange bedfellows in Peru’s university reform
From the outside looking in, Peruvian politics might seem to be a classic case of left-right polarization. In a narrowly-contested runoff last year, President Pedro Castillo — a trade union leader representing the Marxist Perú Libre party — beat Keiko Fujimori — daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori. Since then, the Castillo administration has been chaotically conflictive, with the right constantly threatening him with impeachment.
- But while all the attention in Peru was focused on the latest cabinet crisis, the far-left and far-right joined forces to quietly pass a crucial education bill where they stood on the same side.
Autonomy or regulation. The so-called university counter-reform strips oversight powers from the Sunedu superintendency, a regulatory body created in 2014 to stop the surge of new, low-quality colleges, making universities more autonomous from the state once more.
- Sunedu would now no...