Peru’s president is its seventh in six years. It may soon be on its eighth. As vice-president, Dina Boluarte legitimately inherited the top job when Pedro Castillo was ousted and detained last month after attempting a “self-coup” – dissolving the congress in the hope of avoiding a third impeachment trial. But the deadly violence turned upon protests by his supporters has increased the anger. Thirty-nine civilians and one police officer have now died, with 17 killed on Monday alone in the southern region of Puno. Even by the security forces’ brutal standards, this is an appalling escalation. The UN human rights office demanded an investigation and Peru’s top prosecutor has now opened a genocide investigation into the new president.
Peru has struggled to establish political stability since its return to democracy in 2000 after the ousting of the autocrat Alberto Fujimori, now serving a 25-year sentence on human rights abuse and corruption charges. The situation deteriorated from 2016, particularly with the emergence of Fujimori’s daughter Keiko as a political force on the right. One of Mr Castillo’s predecessors lasted just a week. Congress and presidents are unable to function together, with many legislators essentially dedicated to pursuing their own economic interests – even exploiting the current chaos by pushing through unpalatable new measures, including removing essential protections for Indigenous peoples, with little attention.
The turmoil is all the more alarming in the context of threats to democracy elsewhere in the region, most glaringly in Brazil, where former president Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters last week attempted to topple his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The domestic background is the longstanding gulf between a wealthy, white political elite in Lima and rural poor and Indigenous people elsewhere, facing discrimination and unable to access basic services. The anger and sense of abandonment mushroomed in the pandemic, when lockdowns ravaged the economy but Peru still had by far the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world.
Mr Castillo – a former rural schoolteacher with no political experience – appealingly promised “no more poor people in a rich country”, but had no way of realising that pledge and packed the government with similarly inexperienced cronies. Yet his supporters feel that their man’s real crime was representing them and challenging the oligopoly. Though he identified as working class, rather than as a member of an ethnic group, his support for Indigenous groups spurred racist attacks on him. Even critics – found across the spectrum, given his social conservatism and worrying stance on human rights – acknowledge that prosecutors pursued the allegations against him with unusual speed and vigour in a country where corruption is rife.
The priority now is to stop the killings by security forces. The political path ahead is harder to identify. Should Ms Boluarte step down, she would be succeeded by the far-right speaker of the congress, hardly likely to pursue the dialogue and mediation needed. Given the utter distrust in political institutions, bringing forward elections by two years to 2024 – the current plan – is clearly insufficient; but if a new president and congress were elected this year, it is unclear that they would fare any better than their predecessors. Longer-term hope may lie in the demands of ordinary citizens for better representation, and in the activism of civil society, which brought Mr Fujimori to account for brutal state killings, challenged Mr Castillo and continues to mobilise to build a better Peru.
