Peru is still a powder keg. A month and a half after the impeachment and arrest of former President Pedro Castillo, after his self-coup attempt, the protests of his supporters do not stop and there are already 62 deaths throughout the country due to the violent actions of the military and police. President Dina Boluarte calls for a truce to the protesters, while she tries to force Congress to accept an electoral advance to this year, one of the demands of the protests. Boluarte had planned to intervene by videoconference before the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS), late this Wednesday.
"I call on my beloved homeland for a national truce to be able to start the dialogue tables and, even better, to be able to set the agenda for each region and develop our towns," Boluarte said Tuesday in a meeting with foreign correspondents.
The petition of the president -elected in 2021 as vice president of Castillo, whom she replaced after his dismissal- was not very successful, because on the afternoon and night of Tuesday Lima once again became the scene of a pitched battle between police and protesters, those that Boluarte had equated with "radicals" and criminals. "This is not a peaceful protest, it is a violent action generated by a group of radical people whose political and economic agenda is based on drug trafficking, illegal mining, and smuggling," the president had said.
Boluarte described the situation in the country as "chaos" and defended the actions of the forces of order in the repression of the protests, despite the 62 deaths, of which only one is a policeman, who was lynched in early January and burned alive after being doused with gasoline in the town of Juliaca, in the Puno region.
However, the Peruvian government promised this Wednesday before the United Nations to investigate the complaints of police violence launched by human rights organizations. Peru's ambassador in Geneva, Luis Chuquihuara, assured the UN Human Rights Council that his country has responded to the protests "within international standards." Chuquihura affirmed that "Peru is committed to peaceful social protests, but when unfortunately some minority sector of the protesters has committed violence against State property or against other citizens, the forces of order have tried to restore social peace."
Police violence and the deaths in Peru were denounced by various leaders of the region at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), on Tuesday in Buenos Aires. One of the most belligerent was the Chilean Gabriel Boric -former student leader- who referred to the police entry last Saturday on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos -the oldest in America-, in Lima, where about 200 students were arrested. “It is also unacceptable that the universities of the Americas relive the sad scenes of the times of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone, as happened recently with the violent entry of the Police into the University of San Marcos,” said Boric. The police broke down the front door with an armored vehicle.
The Peruvian Foreign Minister, Ana Gervasi, complained at the Celac summit about the lack of support from some of her neighbors in the face of the self-coup attempt perpetrated by Castillo. “It is regrettable that some governments of particularly close countries have not accompanied Peru in this difficult institutional situation and have prioritized ideological affinity over unequivocal support for the rule of law and constitutional succession,” Gervasi declared.
For his part, the Colombian Gustavo Petro, called on the US on Wednesday to "help open a political dialogue table to help Peruvian society to a democratic transition in Peru."
And also this Wednesday, the Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for the release of Castillo, "unjustly imprisoned" -he said-, and the call for elections. "The best thing in this case is that elections be called, that the people decide, that the democratic method be used," said López Obrador.
In this sense, the Peruvian Prime Minister, Alberto Otárola, went to Congress this Wednesday to try to convince the unicameral parliament table to advance the presidential elections to this year, after the legislators already accepted an advance to April 2024. .
