Accountability without anarchy: Peru’s hard brake, America’s failing guardrails

Accountability without anarchy: Peru’s hard brake, America’s failing guardrails

If Peru’s Congress has indeed ousted the president after a gruesome attack at a Lima concert and amid swirling ethics scandals, it would fit a now-familiar pattern: a system that can eject a chief executive swiftly, but cannot build sustained governance. Since 2018, Peru has cycled through presidents with dizzying speed, using the constitutional lever of “permanent moral incapacity” to depose leaders accused of corruption, mismanagement, or both. The impulse is understandable. Citizens face real fear—rising extortion, contract killings, and brazen attacks—and they want someone accountable. When a leader appears both ineffective on crime and ethically compromised, Congress acts.

There is a virtue here. Swift political accountability signals that a president is not above the law and that public trust matters. In a region scarred by impunity, Peru’s willingness to topple leaders over ethical breaches or failures can look like democratic antibodies working as designed.

But there is a vice paired to that virtue: volatility. Removing presidents in quick succession does not dismantle criminal networks, professionalize policing, or reform courts. It can, however, paralyze ministries, chill long-horizon planning, and incentivize performative crackdowns over patient state-building. Crime thrives where institutions are weak and leadership churns. A dramatic “reset” may satisfy rage, yet without durable reforms—merit-based police promotion, internal affairs with teeth, modern forensics, witness protection, trusted prosecutors, and social prevention—Peru will get more theater than safety.

Contrast that with the United States, where the executive is bounded by law yet often insulated by politics. The constitutional bar to removing a president is intentionally high: impeachment requires a two‑thirds Senate vote; criminal cases move slowly; and the Constitution does not even prohibit a convicted felon from running for or serving as president. In recent cycles, Americans have watched a former president face criminal trials—including charges related to obstructing or subverting an election—and still dominate political life. Whatever one thinks of the merits, the system’s deference to electoral judgment and judicial process means leaders can campaign through indictments and even convictions.

There is a virtue here, too: stability. The U.S. resists using momentary majorities to yank presidents from office. It prizes due process, judicial independence, and voter adjudication at the next election. But the vice is complacency shading into impunity. When leaders deploy inflammatory rhetoric about “toughness,” wink at political violence, or block even modest gun-safety measures after mass shootings, the structure that was meant to protect liberty ends up protecting inertia. America has normalized a policy non-response to a distinctly American level of gun carnage.

Peru’s rapid-fire removals and America’s near-immunity reveal the same core problem from opposite directions: mistaking executive spectacle for public safety. Presidents in both countries promise to “restore order,” yet neither executive alone controls the levers that reduce violence. Crime is an ecosystem issue. It yields to coordination, consistency, and credibility—not to one leader’s bluster or one Congress’s purge.

Three lessons stand out.

- Accountability must be rule-bound, not opportunistic. Peru should tighten and clarify the “moral incapacity” standard so it cannot be a catch-all political tool. Independent investigative bodies and fixed procedures that separate fact-finding from partisan advantage will keep accountability credible. In the U.S., clearer ethical red lines for candidates—enforced by parties, donors, and voters—are necessary where the Constitution is permissive. “Let the courts sort it out” cannot substitute for civic standards.

- Safety is built institutionally, not theatrically. Peru needs continuity to professionalize policing and prosecution: crime labs, case management, witness security, anti-extortion task forces, financial intelligence to follow money, and oversight that punishes abuse while protecting good cops. The U.S. needs policy congruent with its problem: universal background checks, strong red-flag laws, licensing for high-risk weapons, safe-storage requirements, investment in community violence interruption and youth opportunity, and focused deterrence against the small share of repeat violent offenders. None of this is radical; all of it is harder than a press conference.

- Rhetoric matters because it sets the permission structure. Leaders who flirt with violent imagery or treat mass shootings as the price of freedom encourage social resignation. Leaders who declare “war” on crime but ignore corruption, due process, and human rights breed cycles of abuse and impunity. The voice from the top should be boringly consistent: we will enforce the law without fear or favor; we will measure what works; we will stick with it long enough to see results.

It is tempting to praise Peru’s “toughness” in sacking a president after a public horror, or to defend America’s “restraint” in letting ballots and courts decide a leader’s fate. But safety and democracy are not advanced by punitive spectacle or by permissive drift. They are advanced by systems that can discipline leaders without blowing up governance, and that can pursue evidence-based violence reduction without waiting for the next atrocity to reset the conversation.

Peru does not need another purge as much as it needs an unglamorous decade of institution-building. The United States does not need more performative outrage as much as it needs the political courage to pass and implement the gun policies that its own research institutions have validated for years. Both countries should aim for the same destination: executives constrained by law and ethics, legislatures willing to legislate, courts that move efficiently, and public safety strategies that survive any one leader’s rise or fall.

That is accountability without anarchy, stability without impunity. It is less dramatic than the headlines—but far more likely to save lives.