On July 9th, Peruvian news outlet El Foco reported that on November 14, 2025 Opinion 78/2025 (dated June 2026) of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that “Peru’s detention of former president Pedro Castillo was arbitrary and lacked legal basis” and recommended his “immediate release, compensation, an independent investigation and measures against those responsible for the violations.”
According to the Rio Times, two members dissented outright; The president-rapporteur filed a partial dissent, finding only the pre-trial detention arbitrary. President Castillo is serving eleven years and four months at Penal Barbadillo for “conspiracy to rebel” for giving a televised speech that then prompted the parliamentary coup. Dr. Wilfredo Robles, Castillo’s lawyer in Lima, Peru has already demanded the UN recommendation be followed and Juntos Por el Perú candidate Roberto Sanchez has called for days of action to demand Castillo’s immediate release, before Keiko Fujimori is sworn in on July 28, 2026, Peruvian Independence Day.
Of course, this is what President Pedro Castillo, his national and international lawyers, and his supporters and the millions of Peruvians that voted for him and defended their vote, many with their lives in December and January of 2022/23. That parliamentary coup ended in a tense standoff between National Peruvian Police brandishing arms against President Castillo and his family.
A scene that would have stopped the world in the West easily went unnoticed for someone described as a “cholo,” wrongfully in the Presidential Palace, according to the elites in La Molina and San Isidro. “Que se regrese a su chacra,” or “let him go back to his dirt mound,” would often be heard in the streets of the wealthier parts of the colonial capital city. Perhaps the world should have taken notice of what would eventually happen on January 3rd, 2026 in Caracas, and what did happen in Haiti in 2004. As Black Agenda Report editor and contributor Dr. Jemima Pierre has consistently stated, Haiti is a laboratory for empire in the Western Hemisphere. What happens in Port-au-Prince, will inevitably come back to all in Our Americas, and Peru felt that imperial shock doctrine on December 7th, 2022.
As Pedro Castillo remains locked up inside Penal Barbadillo, under conditions that have been described as torture by his national and international lawyers, the real criminals remain in the halls of power in Congress, in the courts, in the police stations and in the elite social clubs in Miraflores, San Isidro and in La Molina where the US embassy is located that looks like any other SOUTHCOM military base in the region. Perhaps his biggest sin wasn’t reading a simple declaration to the masses of Peru that had voted for him to overturn the dictatorial constitution and nationalize and industrialize our resources - primarily the lithium and rare earth minerals in Puno and the mining corridor of the Andes Mountains, the petroleum of the Amazon, and the geostrategic location of the Pacific Coast, evidenced by the Port of Chancay and the ongoing construction of SOUTHCOM and Space Command base in Talara, Piura. Perhaps his biggest sin was ever stepping foot in Lima in the first place - a la casa de los grandes señores.
As Foreign Minister under President Castillo’s truncated term Hector Bejar stated recently for HispanTV,
“el asesinato del ayatolá Jamenei, atribuido a criminales de guerra estadounidenses, no solo confirma el carácter de delincuentes internacionales que se atribuye a integrantes de la actual administración del presidente Trump, sino que tambien ha contribuido a proyectar una nueva imagen de Iran en América Latina (y el Caribe).”
With the current state of US led lawlessness on the international stage, as evidenced from 7 December 2022 in Peru to 28 February 2026 in Tehran when Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, was martyred as part of a series of Israeli airstrikes. Imran Khan has suffered a similar fate to Pedro Castillo, and Evo Morales remains under virtual arrest in Cochabamba awaiting the US and comprador Paz regime to execute Plan Delta Ñ in a similar fashion to the kidnapping plot that saw the legitimate president of a sovereign nation and the first combatant stolen and brought to another nation to stand trial for supposed narcotrafficking. What hope does international law provide after almost 3 years into a livestreamed genocide? At what point do the masses of the people around the world rise up and say ¡BASTA YA!
Peruvian journalist in Spain, Laura Arroyo, made clear this: “establish(ed) a parallel between what Castillo said on December 7, 2022 to what Fujimori did on April 5, 1992, which was an actual coup. That second objective is crucial here to create some equidistance to these acts by presidents.” This UN decision and the energy this gives the movement to free Castillo is a welcome development in the continued struggle to support our political prisoners, including the Congressional coupmongers’ first political prisoner, President Jose Pedro Castillo Terrones.
MONDEP (Movimiento Nacional por los Derechos del Pueblo Peruano/National Movement for the Rights of the Peruvian People, a civil society and human rights organization advocating for the political, social, economic and international human rights laws and treaties) founder and President Pedro Castillo’s lawyer based in Lima, Dr. Wilfredo Robles, stated that this UN decision by the highest court in international law on the matter of political prisoners and arbitrary detention has breathed new life to the struggle for President Castillo’s freedom.
Of course for the vendepatria local comprador class, the game is to sell off the land to the highest bidders. The Yankee Epstein imperialist class and Fujimori wasted no time in pumping up speculation around the lithium in Macusani, Puno. “American Lithium's Falchani Lithium Project is one of the world's largest hard-rock lithium deposits, and its Macusani Uranium Project is the largest undeveloped uranium project in Latin America.”
But we must understand that history is written by the masses - and the working poor, largely rural Quechua and Aymara masses of Puno, have vowed to lay their lives down (and almost 100 already have since the 2022 coup) before Europeans take our lithium.
written by Micaela Bastidas