Lima, Peru

For the last 17 months, Peruvians have been wondering what it would take to see the back of Pedro Castillo, their staggeringly incompetent and deeply unpopular far left president.

On Wednesday, they got their answer — when Castillo made a botched attempt to metamorphise from an elected head-of-state into an even more inept version of that trope of Latin American history, the caudillo or authoritarian strongman.