After police kill protesters in Peru there are early elections
After police kill protesters in Peru there are early elections
Vanessa Baird writes about how political problems in Peru quickly started state violence.
Riot police and supporters of former president Pedro Castillo during a protest near the Congress in Lima on December 12, 2022. The problem is worse after they accused Castillo of an attempted coup, and impeached and arrested him last week. (Photo by ERNESTO BENAVIDES / AFP)
They buried the dead. The dead were all civilians. Most of them were very young. The government forces killed them but of course their job is to protect them. Bullets were the most common reason for their death. So far, 22 died directly and six indirectly in the protests across more than half of Peru’s departments after the failed ‘self-coup’ and the arrest of ex-president Pedro Castillo.
Most of the dead were in the poorer, southern Andean regions of Ayacucho and Apurimac. Army and police repression is the worst there and support for Castillo is the strongest.
Here are a few of the dead: Wilfredo Lizarme Barboza, aged 18, he wanted to be a doctor; Clemer Rojas García, he loved traditional dancing, aged 22; Beckham Quispe Grafias, 18, he loved football and was a bit of a local star; Cristian Rojas Vásquez, a ‘kind and serious’ 19-year-old, he wanted to be a police officer but was not tall enough; and finally, a 15-year-old known by his initials DAQ, a student and working child, he dreamed of ‘building a big house’.
During many days of protest, about 600 people were injured, almost half of them police.
Shock and anger
The deadly force against people by police and the army resulted in shock and anger across the country. The police and army acted under a state of emergency declared by the new government of the new president Dina Boluarte.
Many human-rights and civil-society organizations, including unions, criticised the violence and called for the immediate return of human rights and civil liberties, the dissolution of Congress, and for early elections.
Peru’s National Coordinator of Human Rights criticised the terrible police violence and the use of live bullets against protesters and called for ‘the full respect for the right to protest.’ It also criticises the fact there was no explanation for the use of force and no one seemed to be responsible. Boluarte’s education minister Patricia Correa resigned, saying, ‘There is no possible reason for the killing of our people’.
Margot Palacios is a Congress member for Free Peru (Boluarte’s leftist former party). She protested against Boluarte and the new Prime Minister Luis Alberto Otárola to the Interamerican Court of Human Rights and accused them of ‘genocide’.
She also named the former Prime Minister, and the police and army chiefs in Ayacucho, where there were 10 dead. Officials from the Interamerican Court of Human Rights will visit Peru soon.
To try to stop the protests, Congress this week agreed to have presidential and congressional elections two years earlier in April 2024.
But will this be enough to stop the protests?
What do they want?
The protesters want the dissolution of Congress, the resignation of the president, and for elections as soon as possible.
The public support their anger against the government. A recent poll shows 87 per cent were against the government, more than the critics of Castillo for his poor job as president and the accusations of corruption against him.
After Castillo’s attempted ‘coup’ against Congress on 7 December, they quickly impeached him and a few days later he received 18-months of detention for ‘rebellion’ against the constitution.
Boluarte was Castillo’s former running mate. But Castillo’s supporters see Boluarte as a ‘traitor’ and her takeover, supported by Congress, as a ‘coup’ against a democratically elected leader. A number of lawyers and politicians, including former president Martin Vizcarra, also think that Congress did not follow proper procedures in a hurry to remove Castillo and appoint Boluarte.
People expect Castillo to appeal, and they gave his wife political asylum with the couple’s two children in Mexico. She is also under investigation for corruption.
Peru is deeply divided and many protesters support Castillo. He was a rural schoolteacher and saw himself as ‘a president of the poor’, very different from the political elite represented by most of Congress. This is perhaps why Boluarte gave her speech in the Quechua language, her native language, when she criticised the deaths of protesters. People say Castillo never tried to learn Quechua when people advised him to.
What now?
There are no road blocks now, airports are open again, and protest movements in parts of the country stopped until 2 January.
AIDESEP is the indigenous organization of Amazonian peoples. It said it will be ready for elections in 2024 elections. But it said that it is not defending Castillo or asking for him to be free. Congress will need to accept the new date for elections and there will also need to be changes to the political system.
When Boluarte took over, people worried the political Right in Congress could stop new changes. Boluarte is in a difficult and weak position. She is of the Left, but it now seems that most of her support in Congress comes from the Far Right.
The president of Congress, José Williams would be president if they removed Boluarte or she resigned. He is a member of the far-right Avanza País. He was also an army general.
Things don’t look good for what Peru’s National Coordinator of Human Rights calls the ‘militarization of protest and growing authoritarianism’ in the country.
NOW TRY THE ORIGINAL:
https://newint.org/features/2022/12/22/killing-protesters-sparks-early-elections-peru
(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)
