Peru’s Supreme Court has sentenced former president Pedro Castillo to 11.5 years in prison for conspiracy to commit rebellion, closing a major chapter in the case over his failed attempt to dissolve Congress in 2022.
The ruling was issued on Thursday by a special panel of the country’s highest court. Castillo had tried to dissolve Congress as lawmakers were preparing to impeach him, a move prosecutors said amounted to an attempt to subvert the constitutional order. The court also barred him from public office for two years, adding a political penalty to the prison term.
Castillo has been in custody since his arrest in December 2022. The court’s decision means he remains far from any return to public life, even if he succeeds in appealing. The sentence also reached two of his former ministers, who were given the same 11.5-year term for the same offense. One of them, ex-prime minister Betssy Chávez, is now inside the Mexican embassy in Lima after Mexico granted her asylum, a development that has already pushed Peru and Mexico into a diplomatic rupture.
The case has become one of the defining episodes of Peru’s recent political turmoil. Castillo came to power in 2021 without prior political experience, and as the first president from a poor farming community. He cultivated the image of a man from outside the elite, but his presidency ended in chaos when his attempt to dissolve Congress failed and he was arrested.
The broader context matters because Peru has spent years cycling through presidents, prosecutions and institutional crises. Castillo’s conviction does not solve that instability, but it does show that the courts are prepared to impose a heavy sentence on a former head of state for trying to override the legislature. That is a serious statement in a country where executive-legislative conflict has repeatedly spilled into the streets and the courts.
The ruling also lands in a week when another former Peruvian president, Martín Vizcarra, was sentenced in a separate corruption case. Together, the decisions point to a judiciary still willing to punish former leaders even as public trust in politics remains low. Castillo’s backers argue that he was the victim of a political order hostile to outsiders. The court, however, has now made clear that it sees the 2022 move as a criminal conspiracy rather than a defensible act of political force.
The sentence also reinforces how Castillo’s case has become a test of whether Peru’s political system can still punish a president who tries to break its rules. Courts in the region have often struggled to enforce accountability at the top, especially when an ousted leader retains a loyal base. Here, the Supreme Court’s decision shows no willingness to soften the legal line around the attempt to dissolve Congress.
That matters because the episode was not a routine policy fight. It was a direct confrontation between an elected president and the legislature over who had the authority to govern. By labeling the act conspiracy to commit rebellion, the court has turned an attempted constitutional rupture into a criminal act with a long prison term attached.
