A rural school teacher who has never held public office has been sworn in as Peru’s new president pledging to govern “with the people and for the people” in a ceremony steeped in historic symbolism on Peru’s bicentenary of independence from Spain. Wearing his typical wide-brimmed straw hat, Pedro Castillo promised to make sweeping changes to the country in his inaugural speech, he paid homage to Peru’s indigenous people and teachers and vowed to combat corruption, rein in monopolies and boost public spending on education and health. The symbolic import of the occasion was not lost on Castillo, the son of rural peasant farmers who never learned to read or write. “This country is founded on the sweat of my ancestors. The story of this silenced Peru is also my story,” he said. But the 51-year-old union leader will face huge challenges as Peru fights the world’s deadliest Covid-19 outbreak and he wrangles with tensions within his leftist Perú Libre party and faces weak congressional support in a divided nation. Two hundred years since Peru ceased to be a Spanish colony, Castillo said it was Spain’s colonisation that created the “caste system” that sowed differences among Peruvians, as the Spanish King Felipe VI sat in the audience. “The three centuries during which this territory belonged to the Spanish crown allowed them to exploit the minerals that sustained the development of Europe, in large part with the labour of many of our grandparents,” he said pointedly. In a highly symbolic gesture, he said he would not govern from the capital’s presidential palace, known as the “House of Pizarro” after the leader of the Spanish conquest of Peru, Francisco Pizarro, who founded Lima in 1535. We will give up this palace to the ministry of cultures so it can be used as a display of our history, from its origins to today,” he said. He said his first priority as president would be to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 196,000 Peruvians and left one in every 100 children orphaned, according to a study by the Lancet. The teacher of 25 years experience declared a state of emergency in public education and pledged to boost its budget. He vowed to create a ministry of science and technology and rename the ministry of culture as the ministry of cultures to reflect Peru’s many indigenous peoples. Despite his promise to make sweeping changes there remains lingering uncertainty about the makeup of his government. Castillo has postponed until Friday the appointment of his cabinet, which was scheduled to be announced on Wednesday. He is expected to announce his prime minister on Thursday on a trip to the Andean region of Ayacucho.