“Puno is not Peru,” President Dina Boluarte told foreign journalists on Tuesday, referring to the southern department on the border with Bolivia and the epicenter of the anti-government protests that are shaking the country. Soon, the networks burned. Supporters of the movement, which grew out of peasant anger in the Andean regions over the ouster of the first Andean president, Pedro Castillo, last December, interpreted it as yet another sign of the gap between Lima’s elite and rural areas and impoverished
“He was not referring only to Puno, but to the provinces,” Juan Carlos Ruiz, a human rights lawyer and head of the Indigenous Peoples Area at the Legal Defense Institute, a Peruvian non-profit group, told La Vanguardia. “Lima, located on the coast and where the economy moves, has always turned its back on the Sierra and the Jungle, which have a rugged geography. You have the formal Lima and, later, a deep Peru that is now speaking”. “Behind the discontent there is this entire forgotten population. It is a country where 70% of its inhabitants work in the informal economy, so there is no social safety net, or services…”, affirms the CIDOB senior researcher for Latin America, Anna Ayuso. The president, whose resignation the protesters are calling for, later apologized.
In Puno, 21 of the total 46 civilians who have died in clashes with the police have died. Seventeen of them, including a minor, in a single day, in the city of Juliaca. January 9 was the bloodiest day of the anti-government movement that has also claimed victims in Apurímac, Ayacucho, Arequipa, Junín, La Libertad and Cuzco. None in the capital. That day a policeman was also burned alive by the mob. In addition, another ten people have died due to roadblocks, according to the Ombudsman’s Office.
Boluarte, Castillo’s successor as vice president, returned to defend the police action on Tuesday. But Ruiz assures that the State is making an “arbitrary use of force” and that is thanks to the fact that “in Peru there is a legal framework that promotes the criminalization of protest.” Two years ago the criterion of proportionality in the use of force by the National Police was repealed.
It should be remembered that “almost all the victims of the protests were shot between the neck and the groin,” details the lawyer whose organization handles 90 cases on vulnerable groups and indigenous peoples. Even the Ministry of the Interior itself has recognized in a 2020 report that its agents violate rights.
The flame of the protests was lit with the dismissal of Castillo, a professor with no political experience who promised to address endemic poverty and inequality, but who, after forming a government several times -he had 80 ministers in 16 months- ended up trying to dissolve the Congress that, dominated by the right, fragmented and hostile, accused him of corruption.
“The last presidents that have existed after Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), except the first one that was in transition, were accused of corruption,” Ayuso recalls to La Vanguardia. “In Peru, if you don’t enter the corrupt system, you cannot govern, but once inside sooner or later they can use it against you,” says the expert. The population is fed up.
Trust in Latin American democracies has plummeted over the past two decades, according to the Vanderbilt University AmericasBarometer (pdf). Only 21% of Peruvians are satisfied with their democracy, the worst result after Haitians and below the maximum of 52% a decade ago.
Demonstrations broke out in the poorest regions, government buildings were burned, vital roads blocked and airports seized. The government of Boluarte, which is seen by the left as a traitor in the hands of the right, decreed a state of emergency, sent the police and the army into the streets and branded the protesters “terrorists”. The president, who comes from the central-southern rural region of Apurímac, attributes the responsibility for the riots to groups linked to “drug trafficking, illegal mining and smuggling.” A statement in which “there is some truth,” according to Ruiz.
“The protest in Chala (Arequipa) was for illegal mining and the protest in Huanta (Ayacucho) was for drug trafficking; there the judicial offices were burned because they have criminal proceedings against them,” explains Ruiz. “These are regions that have historically witnessed social conflicts with the exploitation of resources,” agrees Ayuso. According to a recent report by the Judiciary, at least 4,084 judicial files were burned during the attacks against 14 high court headquarters in the southern regions.
But behind the protests there is also the discomfort of feeling abandoned by the State, which worsened with the deaths. “The brutal repression, the causes of which must be sought due to the fact that they are indigenous, caused many more to rebel,” says Ayuso, who believes that a large part already approved of Castillo leaving because his government did not leave any remarkable legacy. .
In addition to Boluarte’s resignation, now the big demands are the closure of Congress and the convening of a constituent assembly, which is supported by 69% of the population, according to a recent survey by the Institute of Peruvian Studies. The aim is to modify a Magna Carta that perpetuates a system doomed to political crises. “For a decade the presidents who left did not have a majority in Congress, which has led them to chain crises, because they cannot govern without their support,” Ruiz explains. “Every time a president has tried to make changes to try to solve this problem of ungovernability, they have thrown him out,” Ayuso emphasizes.
For now, the president has called elections for April 2024. The protesters want them this year, but Congress rejected it on Friday. “Congressmen cannot repeat their mandate immediately, it is one of the reasons why they do not want to advance the elections,” Ayuso stresses.
The way out of the crisis is “complicated”, Ruiz points out: “There are two conflicting narratives: a government that believes that peace can be achieved at the point of a bullet, faced with the intransigence of the people who protest, who say ‘everyone leave ‘”. Even so, the lawyer does not lose hope; after all, they are “two countries that are in dialogue”. “It is a fascinating, adolescent country that is being built… Anything can happen. Peru suffers, but it is loved,” he concludes.
