Pedro Castillo Renounces Presidential Salary

The President-elect of Peru, Pedro Castillo, announced that he will renounce his presidential salary and will earn a teacher’s salary, while he will ask Congress to reduce the salary of legislators and ministers by half.

During the first national congress of his political party, Peru Libre (PL), held at the Casa del Maestro, in Lima, Castillo thanked the political formation for the support offered during the electoral race, and invoked the support of the PL congressional bench to achieve this change.

According to local media, the President-elect expressed that he is talking with the political forces interested in dialogue and that the Constitution will be changed if the people ask for it.

Pedro Castillo specified that his government will respond to the people and not precisely to a political party.  He added that he is not obliged to follow radical positions or approaches of only one political force, nor can he appoint officials in the new Government just because they belong to Peru Libre.

During the session, the Secretary General of Perú Libre, Vladimir Cerrón, also intervened and denounced the existence of “enemies” who tried to separate him from Castillo during the campaign.  He considered that the triumph at the polls is synonymous that the people share the ideology and objectives of PL, whose campaign proposals include the reform of the current Constitution, which dates back to 1993 and has a neo-liberal accent.

He said that “the people demanded that our natural resources return to the control of the State. Obviously this should not be translated into a necessary nationalization or nationalization, although it should not be discarded”, he specified.

Castillo will take office on Wednesday as head of state, together with the vice-president elect, Dina Boluarte.  In addition, he will be sworn in on Thursday at the Historical Sanctuary of the Pampa de Ayacucho, where the final triumph of the Army over the royalist troops took place and opened the way to the independence of Peru, which now reaches its bicentenary.