From a hillside, Reynaldo Puma watched, heart pounding and sweating cold, last Monday’s massacre in Juliaca, one of the towns in the southern Peruvian highlands that rose up against the government of Dina Boluarte. On Independence Avenue – a symbolic name given to it by fate – in front of Manco Cápac Airport, he clearly distinguished the unequal struggle: on the one hand shields, helmets, bombs and weapons; on the other hand, sticks, stones and slingshots. The result was clearly foreseeable.
Puma didn’t dare to go under. Except when he began to hear bursts of fire amid the acidic smoke of the tear gas. He felt a shiver. He remembered an old massacre at the same place. In June 2011, six Juliaqueños lost their lives trying to take over the airport. Their demand: the restoration of a river affected by informal mining. But this time he knew from the first shot that his compatriots could be worse off. And he wasn’t wrong. That afternoon, 17 protesters died. They were then joined by a 15-year-old boy who was tormented for three days.
Cougar is a journalist. He has covered police cases and thus various crimes. You could say he’s hardened in misfortune. That trade has built him an iron shell. But that Monday she cried. He saw the Carlos Mongue Medrano become a war hospital. When the bled corpses arrived in motorcycles, tricycles and even linear motorcycles. The scene that rocked him was when a doctor jumped onto a stretcher and tried to revive a corpse. He administered first aid, but he was not breathing. Horror is the word he repeats the most on the other end of the phone. “It wasn’t a confrontation,” summarizes the Pachamama radio reporter.
Of the 52 injured in the province facing Lake Titicaca, three are still in intensive care for an induced coma due to the severity of their injuries. José Danilo Gutiérrez, 19, was shot in the back, affecting his colon and colon. His only family is his maternal aunt Luz Enríquez, who, like other families, has only the helplessness to wait. When will he wake up, but most importantly in what condition. “It’s not fair that they kill us like we’re animals. I feel frustrated, angry. We don’t know how long his rehabilitation will take,” he says.
The day after this horror film, the city of Juliaca demonstrated a greatness above its authorities. The Association of Funeral Directors of the Province of San Román donated coffins for all the victims.
That same Tuesday, the Interior Ministry announced that a local police officer had been burned to death by a mob of protesters in Juliaca. It was Sergeant José Luis Soncco Quispe, 29 years old. What followed was so inhuman, like setting a person on fire. For the first time in the entire conflict that began with the ouster of President Pedro Castillo on December 7 and the succession of Dina Boluarte, most media stopped reporting the aftermath of the protests (how many millions are lost every day because of the road blockade, how it affects tourism, the mines shut down) to worry about the dead. For a very special one. In this sense, Congressman Jorge Montoya proposed that José Luis Soncco be declared a martyr to the National Police and the Defense of Democracy.
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They looked for his parents, farmers from the Qolliri community, in Canas. Eulogio Soncco, the father, said a sentence between sobs, for which the channels no longer broadcast it at the speed of light: “Because of this president, the Peruvians are killing each other.” During the funeral, Don Eulogio did not rule out exhuming the body to carry out a DNA test and confirm that it was his son.
Demonstrators stage a blockade on the Pan-American highway January 12 to demand the resignation of Dina Boluarte in Arequipa. DIEGO RAMOS (AFP)
The tragedy moved to Cusco in the middle of the week. The rest were thirty injured and one deceased. Remo Candia Guevara, president of the Anansaya Urinsaya Ccollana de Anta farming community, was shot in the chest. His farewell, as happened with the deceased of Juliaca, was powerful. Even the football club Cienciano del Cusco publicly expressed its condolences to his relatives. For Josue Marocho, President of the Cusco Regional Youth Assembly, Candia’s death is no coincidence. He suspects he was a target of law enforcement. “A representative of Paruro province was also shot dead but was able to recover. The two were leaders, heads of the organization,” he emphasizes.
The organization, led by Marocho, has bases in the 13 provinces of Cusco and brings together young people between the ages of 15 and 29. He says their members have been concentrated in the capital, Cusco, and are currently 25,000, so they had to make common pots and collections to be able to support themselves. “We’re not vandals. Since the strike began, they have tried to sully the protest. We are no longer a democracy. Democracy is a screen to justify the killings,” he adds. According to the ombudsman, 49 have died, 41 of them as a result of repression by the armed forces. And there could be more: Rosalino Flores, a 20-year-old student, is torn between life and death after being hit in the upper body by 36 bullets. They could only extract nine.
Cusco Congresswoman Ruth Luque has criminally and constitutionally denounced Boluarte and a group of his former ministers for the deaths of the protesters. Luque maintains that the path to unity and peace cannot be reached with bullets. “You have to understand that there are real actors within all these protests. I am referring to the Quechua and Aymara farming communities who, in different ways, feel that a violation of their right to life, integrity, security and even the need to seek truth and justice has been produced,” he says.
Luque has a theory that other analysts have also outlined: that the discontent in the southern zone of Peru that Lima looks down on lies in a rejection of the power of a man with whom they identified. “It was a justification vote that Cusco gave to Pedro Castillo, a teacher, farmer and rondero. As they described it to me: “One like us,” he says. “Beyond the guilt of Castillo and his corrupt circle, for a large segment of our compatriots, this means that their entitlements and exclusion have been deprived of hope,” he adds.
Last Friday, President Boluarte addressed the nation asking for forgiveness but in return minimizing the noise from citizens. And he made it clear that he has no intention of leaving office. “I will govern for the millions of Peruvians, not for this tiny group of extremist sectors that are setting the country on fire and destroying it,” noted the president, who met with a delegation from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) days. The prospects are not encouraging. The collectives continue to organize to follow the protests, this time to be heard in Lima.
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