For the past few weeks the cry of “Dina asesina! Dina asesina!” has rung out across the streets of several of Peru’s bigger towns and cities. It is unfortunate for the country’s president that her first name rhymes with the Spanish word for “murderer”. Dina Boluarte is the legal, constitutional head of state. But since she took over on December 7th at least 58 people have died during protests, 46 of them civilians in clashes with the security forces, according to the ombudsman’s office. Her name has become toxic, and for many Peruvians her government has lost any legitimacy.
Peru is suffering an explosion of conflict on the streets of the kind experienced in Chile in 2019, in Colombia in 2021 and in Ecuador last year. Peru’s has been especially violent, seditious and dangerous. It also has a racial edge: the country’s indigenous population has long been disadvantaged and has been at the forefront of the protests. At stake is whether democracy can survive. The society has become so polarised that some Peruvians talk of an impending civil war, far-fetched though that seems.
At least ten people have died as a result of the protesters’ actions in blocking roads. One policeman was burned to death and some 580 of his colleagues have been injured, some seriously. Scores of highways, especially in the southern highlands, remain blocked and several big mines and the tourist railway to the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu closed. Several airports were out of action for much of January. Food, petrol and oxygen for hospitals are running short in some towns. Intimidation of travellers and businesses that defy roadblocks and orders to stop work is widespread
According to the economy ministry, the conflict had cost around $625m in lost production by late January, besides the damage to public infrastructure and factories and farms. The centre of Lima is ghostly behind protective fencing erected by the police; the trinket shops empty of tourists. Almost every evening demonstrators try to reach the Congress building. Groups of youths wielding sharpened staves, stones, slingshots and Molotov cocktails attack the police. On January 28th a demonstrator was killed, the first fatality in the capital.
The immediate trigger for the conflict was the announcement on December 7th by Pedro Castillo, a left-wing president narrowly elected in 2021, that he was ordering the closure of Congress and the takeover of the judiciary. This failed and Mr Castillo was arrested. It echoed a more successful “self-coup” by Alberto Fujimori in 1992, who governed Peru as an elected autocrat until 2000. For that reason, many on the left as well as Mr Castillo’s conservative opponents initially denounced it. Congress voted swiftly to remove him by 101 votes to six with ten abstentions, and appointed Ms Boluarte, his elected vice-president.
But Mr Castillo and his supporters swiftly broadcast an alternative narrative in which the perpetrator of a coup became its victim. A leader of a teachers‘ union and of indigenous heritage, as president he misgoverned, naming more than 70 different ministers, few of whom survived more than a few weeks. According to prosecutors, he and his circle were corrupt, though he denies that. He placed many ill-qualified far-left activists in state jobs. His defenders argue that the right and the Lima elite never let him govern. His opponents claimed, without evidence, that he had won fraudulently, and set about trying to impeach him from the start.
He retained the support of around 30% of Peruvians, mainly in the Andes, who identified with him. “The rural world is distant, neglected and they had a president whom they recognised,” says Carolina Trivelli, a former social-affairs minister. “He was useless, corrupt, whatever you like, but he was one of them.” Now, according to Alfredo Torres, a pollster, around half of Peru’s people—and two-thirds in the Andes—believe his false claim of victimhood and think that Ms Boluarte is a usurper who has allied with the right-wing. That is echoed by four left-wing presidents in Latin America, whose governments have refused to recognise Ms Boluarte. Peru’s diplomats see this as an unwarranted intervention in their country’s internal affairs as well as a betrayal of democracy.
The protesters want Ms Boluarte to resign, the closure of Congress and an immediate general election. An election this year may indeed be the only way to restore calm. But they also want a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution. And they want Mr Castillo to be freed, although that demand is fading. Many of these causes are hugely popular. Almost 90% of respondents in a poll published on January 29th by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, a research institute, disapproved of Congress and 74% think Ms Boluarte should resign. These demands both reflect and hasten the collapse of the political system in a country that for much of this century seemed a Latin American success story.
The seeds of wrath
In the 1980s, as today, Peru reached an impasse. It suffered hyperinflation, an economic slump and the terrorist insurgency of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a fundamentalist Maoist outfit founded in Ayacucho, a town in the Andes. In the eyes of many, Mr Fujimori rescued the country. His authoritarian government quashed the terrorists. His free-market policies, reflected in a new constitution in 1993, unleashed more than two decades of rapid economic growth. Income per person rose at an annual average rate of 3% between 1990 and 2013, compared with a Latin American average of 1.7%. Whereas around 55% of Peruvians were officially poor in 1992, by 2014 that share had fallen to 23%, the fastest reduction in the region.
But Mr Fujimori, who is serving a jail sentence for human-rights abuses in the same prison where Mr Castillo is held, also planted some of the seeds of the current malaise. His regime practised bribery and corruption to get its way. He had no time for political parties. And in some ways he weakened the state. Economic growth and free-market policies continued under democratic governments since 2000. But corruption flourished and the political system decayed.
Growth was not accompanied by institutional development. Three-quarters of the workforce labours in the informal economy of unregistered businesses. In recent years, unlawful economic activity has expanded. According to Carlos Basombrío, a former interior minister, up to 200,000 people work as illegal miners, mainly of gold and copper. Illicit businesses, including mining and drug-trafficking, generate at least $7bn a year (or 3% of GDP), he reckons. Others put the figure much higher.
Political instability has intensified. Ms Boluarte is the sixth president since 2016. None has had a legislative majority. Six of the nine presidents since 2001 have been accused of corruption. The party system has fractured: the 130 members of Congress are divided among a dozen parties. Many of these are run as businesses by the holders of their legal registration. For many Peruvians the state is a tenuous presence. With such a large informal economy “the role of parties becomes irrelevant,” says Carlos Meléndez, a political scientist.
Poorly designed decentralisation has helped reproduce many of these vices at the regional level. Local governments lack trained staff. Between 2019 and 2022 regional and municipal administrations left around $10bn of their investment budgets unspent. Several regional governors have been elected by coalitions of construction companies, seeking contracts, and illegal businesses, according to Mr Meléndez.
The protests reflect this landscape. They “express structural fatigue with politics and the lack of responses of the state” to the population’s problems, says Raúl Molina, an adviser to Ms Boluarte. This fatigue is especially acute among the mainly indigenous population of the rural southern Andes, who enjoyed fewer benefits from economic growth and whose farms have suffered from drought and Mr Castillo’s failure last year to import fertiliser, The pandemic, too, heightened economic stress among poorer Peruvians. The poverty rate rose to 30% in 2020 and was 26% in 2021.
Since December spontaneous anger has increasingly given way to organised and co-ordinated action by a range of forces of questionable democratic pedigree. These start with the parties of the Marxist left which backed Mr Castillo and have ties to Cuba and Venezuela. They also include the remnants of the Shining Path, which has reorganised as a far-left party and controls a teachers’ union. It has a presence in Ayacucho and Puno in particular. Co-ordinated attempts to seize airports in the south smack of the Shining Path, according to Mr Basombrío. Nearly all the civilian deaths attributed to the security forces arose from their attempts to defend airports.
The Aymara population in southern Puno shares cultural ties with the people of the Bolivian altiplano. Aides to Evo Morales, a former Bolivian president of Aymara descent, have been active in southern Peru in the cause of Runasur, an organisation he founded in 2021 aimed at uniting indigenous Latin American peoples. Then there are illegal miners, who appear to be behind roadblocks in several areas, including Madre de Dios in the Amazon. Officials say that common criminals may be behind arson attacks on 15 courthouses, 26 offices of the prosecution service and 47 police stations.
“You want to generate chaos and disorder and use that chaos and disorder to take power,” Ms Boluarte complained of the protesters on January 19th. That ambition does indeed seem to be behind the idea of a constituent assembly, a device used by Mr Morales and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to gain absolute power, taking control of the judiciary and other state institutions. Until recently few in Peru supported convening one. Now polls show that around 70% like the sound of such an assembly, perhaps because Congress is so hated. A referendum on a constituent assembly would be “very dangerous”, according to Luis Miguel Castilla, the economy minister in a centre-left government from 2011 to 2014. The economy recovered from the pandemic despite Mr Castillo, because the constitution “imposes a lot of padlocks”, Mr Castilla says. He adds that the left wants to resurrect the state companies and price controls of the 1980s.
Protest is fanned by the blunders of Ms Boluarte and a self-serving Congress. The first deaths were at the hands of the army and police when protests began in December. Anger flared again after 18 died in Juliaca where a vastly outnumbered police detachment apparently panicked. The government says the police have orders not to fire, but in the provinces they are less well-trained and equipped than in Lima. Perhaps the government’s biggest mistake was not to order a swift independent investigation into the deaths. It says these are a matter for the prosecutor’s office, which grinds slowly. Matters were further inflamed by an unnecessarily heavy-handed police raid in Lima on San Marcos University, the oldest in the Americas, where some demonstrators were lodging.
Ms Boluarte is from the highlands and unlike Mr Castillo speaks Quechua, the main indigenous language. She was a mid-level civil servant and is a political neophyte. She has appointed some competent ministers but in other ways has blundered. “The government is losing the communications battle,” says Mr Castilla. “The issue has become government excesses.”
So an early election seems the only way out. But Congress, whose members enjoy lavish salaries and perks, has stalled and the government was slow to press for one. The necessary constitutional amendment must be approved on first reading by February 14th. Fail to take this chance and “Peru will become pandemonium,” says an official. But the left insists on linking the election to a constituent assembly. The right wants an election next year. They are fiddling while Peru burns. ■
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