In just one month, state forces murdered 39 people in Andean cities. The massive mobilization calls for the resignation of the de facto government, new elections this year and a constituent assembly.
On December 14, 2022, seven days after Dina Boluarte assumed the presidency, the final step in establishing a civil-military dictatorship in Peru was taken: the army was ordered to suppress the massive demonstrations against the de facto government.
In the first month of the state of emergency, 39 people – including six under 18s – were killed by gunfire from the military and police in Quechua and Aymara-majority Andean towns. Another six died in roadblock-related incidents, and more than 500 injuries have been reported so far.
On the most violent day of the outbreak, this Monday (9), the repression left 17 victims in Juliaca (Puno region), including a minor and a volunteer doctor. On the other hand, the death of a police officer in a burned-out vehicle is investigated. It would be a montage as the body was raised without prosecutors present.
The unanimous demands of the mobilizations are the holding of general elections this year, the closure of the current Congress, the resignation of Boluarte and the demand for a Constituent Assembly as conditions to legitimize a new government to succeed Pedro Castillo from the legislative power after his defunct Attempt to dissolve this institution, dismissed. A coup d’état Congress itself orchestrated ahead of the July 2021 inauguration of the rural teacher and union leader. The conflict is exacerbated by the parliamentary decision to hold elections in 2024 to defend the concentration of power at gunpoint now threatens to spread through electoral bodies.
The National Organization of Indigenous and Amazonian Women (Onamiap) describes it as a “civilian-military-economic dictatorship”. “Fascism takes its historic revenge on those who dare to speak out in defense of life and dignity. It’s colonial class racism,” he noted in a statement.
Protests in Tacna, southern Peru
Boluarte, vice president in Castillo’s government, is the sixth person to hold the presidency in the past six years. A prominent figure in the global history of modern democracies. Thus culminating, intensified since Castillo’s inauguration, a cycle of political and legal coercion by Congress – in the hands of the corporate oligarchy and the radicalized right – to seize the executive branch. The previous trial, the November 2020 presidential vacancy, ended in a week-long riot in which police harassed two young people in central Lima.
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The order of the ultra-conservative de facto government to use the army in the capital was not followed by the barracks. The impact of the deaths in the centralized city and the response at the national level forced the usurpers to resign immediately. Today, soldiers and military vehicles occupy Lima’s public streets to repel the demonstrations.
extreme oppression
In the southern Andean regions, those who deposited the bulk of their votes in Castillo, the most brutal repressions were used. In Ayacucho, where an attempt was made to take over the airport, the 10 victims registered shots in the stomach and head. One was a family man, seen on video leaving the front of his home to tend to an injured man and collapsing on the spot from gunfire, as civilians faced a controlled confrontation in a clear fled the environment. In Apurímac, hundreds of peasants managed to take over the airport and set fire to the facilities, a situation calmed with six bodies showing bullet and firearm impacts. The uniformed men shoot the corpse with shot, tear gas and rubber bullets.
In the Juliaca massacre, state forces used expansive bullets with more lethal effects. “There are no exit holes, patients come in with destroyed internal organs like they’re stupid explosive bullets,” explained one doctor.
At this point in the crisis, the regime is using extreme methods to terrorize the population: mass arrests in the capital, intervention by leaders in cars without ID, attacks and threats against the press, gathering of evidence, trials for terrorism, torture, raids on houses and premises of social organizations.
Protests in Puno
Protests in Cusco
The rejection of this dictatorial government and its conditions for the transfer of power – the realization of which is beginning to be doubted – comes from all sections of the population. Farmers, miners, multiple unions, peasant and indigenous communities, neighborhood committees, provincial fronts, students, collectives, social organizations and the general public declare the uprising. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are constantly mobilizing in their territories.
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The ceasefire granted since the last week of last year was interrupted on January 4 by the start of an indefinite strike in at least a third of Peru’s 25 regions. The eight departments grouped in the southern macro-region, including Puno, Cusco and Arequipa, are leading the strongest protests. In the Andean regions, the slogan of putting Pedro Castillo back in office is solid.
The militarized response of the Executive Branch and Congress is complemented by a policy of stigmatizing protest, creating the enemy – terrorism – which is put into practice in the power to decide which lives are valid and which are not. They claim that the demonstrations are being manipulated by violent groups or organized directly by terrorists. This resonates with periods of extreme violence returning to the same places swamped by state terrorism and subversion, such as Ayacucho, the epicenter of Sendero Luminoso and the insurgency-insurgency war (1980-1992).
The position of the civil-military alliance occupied by the government, represented by Defense Ministry-promoted President of the Council of Ministers Alberto Otárola, is unchanging. As is usual in Latin America, the dictatorship has the support of the United States while also accusing foreign interference, according to the script, that of former President of Bolivia Evo Morales, who was barred from entering the country. With 39 murders at their hands in what local human rights organizations see as extrajudicial executions, the oppressors insist on criminalizing the protesters and denying their responsibility, supporting the prolongation of the massacres and warning of a genocide against Peru’s social movements.