Monthly Archives: December 2022

LIMA, Peru — The political crisis roiling Peru deepened Saturday, as President Dina Boluarte’s new government edged toward collapse and protesters across the country refused to back down despite the military enforcing a state of emergency. A total of 20 demonstrators are reported to have been killed in clashes with security forces, including eight allegedly shot Thursday by soldiers using live ammunition in the southern mountain region of Ayacucho. Protesters have stormed several regional airports, looted businesses and blocked roads, primarily in the impoverished mountain regions of the Andean nation. Last year, those areas voted…Read more …

After the successful fast-track impeachment of Peru’s former president, Pedro Castillo, on Dec. 7, euphoric lawmakers posed for photographs on the floor of the country’s Congress, laughing and giving thumbs-up. Their elation was understandable. For nearly 17 months, Castillo’s chaotic administration had staggered from corruption scandal to policy failure and back again while repeatedly clashing with lawmakers, climaxing in Castillo’s abrupt TV announcement just hours earlier that—in a flagrant violation of the nation’s constitution—he was going to dissolve Congress and rule by decree. But the triumphalism could hardly have been more inappropriate. Not because Castillo,…Read more …

LIMA, Peru — Violent protests spread across Peru on Tuesday as an international dispute broke out over the dramatic ouster and arrest of former president Pedro Castillo last week by a congress he attempted to dissolve. The leftist presidents of Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Bolivia insisted that the jailed leader remains the rightful president of this troubled South American nation. Peru has had five presidents in 25 years. Can Boluarte stick? Seven demonstrators, all teenagers, are reported to have died and 15 police injured in fierce clashes, mainly in poverty-wracked mountain regions that…Read more …

SAN PEDRO DE CASTA, Peru — On a mountainside high above Peru’s capital, Javier Obispo pauses from the backbreaking work of renovating an amuna. The abandoned irrigation dike distributed water before Europeans came to South America. With Lima’s water supply under increasing pressure, the 42-year-old veterinary technician has been working with other villagers here to bring the ancient technology back to life. The steep Andean slopes, dotted with small cactuses wielding outsize thorns, tower around us, a parched shade of light brown. Climate change is making itself felt. “Twenty years ago, the soil would…Read more …

For the last 17 months, Peruvians have been wondering what it would take to see the back of Pedro Castillo, their staggeringly incompetent and deeply unpopular far left president. On Wednesday, they got their answer — when Castillo made a botched attempt to metamorphise from an elected head-of-state into an even more inept version of that trope of Latin American history, the caudillo or authoritarian strongman. Cornered by anticorruption prosecutors and facing an impeachment vote that evening, the 53-year-old former rural schoolteacher and wildcat strike leader decided to take the bull by the horns. In…Read more …

Read more …

LIMA, Peru — At her abrupt swearing-in ceremony as Peru’s seventh president in as many years, Dina Boluarte called for an end to the relentless political warring that has undermined this nation’s governability for much of the last decade. Repeated clashes between successive governments and cohorts of lawmakers have allowed a range of grave social problems — widespread hunger, the world’s deadliest per capita covid-19 outbreak, systemic graft at all levels of government — to spin out of control. The infighting within a political class that’s widely seen as criminally venal has alienated…Read more …

LIMA, Peru — Pedro Castillo began Wednesday as the beleaguered but still lawful president of Peru. By the day’s end, he was out of office and behind bars, ousted by furious legislators after he tried to dissolve the Congress of the Republic of Peru without the constitutional authority or the political support to succeed. Castillo was arrested in Lima after lawmakers, including several erstwhile allies, voted overwhelmingly to remove him. Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn as Peru’s first female president. Castillo’s dramatic ouster — and the sight of him in custody —…Read more …