LIMA, Peru -- Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra survived an impeachment vote Friday night after opposition lawmakers failed to garner enough support to oust the leader as the country copes with one of the world's worst coronavirus outbreaks.
The decision came after long hours of debate in which legislators blasted Vizcarra, but also questioned whether a rushed impeachment process would only create more turmoil in the middle of the health and economic crisis.
His ability to carry forward the anti-corruption agenda he has sought to make the hallmark of his short administration could be further jeopardized if Vizcarra is perceived as having engaged in influence peddling himself.
"His credibility in carrying through that agenda is already problematic," said Jo-Marie Burt, a senior fellow with the Washington Office on Latin America.
At the center of the ordeal is Vizcarra's relationship with a little-known musician known as Richard Swing and nearly $50,000 in questionable contracts that he was given by the Ministry of Culture for activities like motivational speaking.
A covert audio recording shared by Edgar Alarcon -- a lawmaker himself charged with embezzlement -- appears to show Vizcarra coordinating a defense strategy with two aides, trying to get their stories straight on how many times the musician had visited him.
In remarks before Congress on Friday, Vizcarra asked for forgiveness for the upheaval the audios have generated but insisted he has committed no crime. He called for a proper investigation and urged lawmakers not to aggravate the nation's already precarious situation by rushing through an impeachment proceeding.
"Let's not generate a new crisis, unnecessarily, that would primarily affect the most vulnerable," he said
As lawmakers began arriving Friday morning, several had expressed doubt that the impeachment would succeed but cautioned that anything could happen.
Vizcarra became president in 2018 after Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned the presidency under pressure by from Congress after the discovery of about $782,000 in undisclosed payments to his private consulting firm by Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which is at the center of a regionwide corruption scandal.
Odebrecht has admitted to paying some $800 million in bribes to officials across Latin America, and nearly every living former Peruvian president has been implicated in the scandal.
Vizcarra, at the time a vice president serving as Peru's ambassador to Canada, is an engineer by training and was considered an unknown political novice. But he has managed to become a highly popular president, recently getting a 57% approval rating in a poll.
Many Peruvians see him as a frank-talking leader who has taken on corruption, dismissing Congress last year in a brash move cheered by citizens as a victory against a dishonest class of politicians and pushing through initiatives to reform how judges are chosen and bar politicians charged with crimes from running for office.
Steve Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist, said Vizcarra has made "some modest steps forward" when it comes to corruption.
"He hasn't been able to carry out all the political reform that he and his allies hope to," Levitsky said. "But corruption in middle-income countries is never eliminated in a single presidency."
Information for this article was contributed by Christine Armario of The Associated Press.
