While the riots claim the lives of at least 18 protesters and the Government plunges into chaos, Pedro Castillo maintains a referential image for thousands of peasants, workers and residents of the humblest Andean strip
Peru now looks without any veil at a bloodbath. The authorities counted until this past dawn 18 fatalities, all protesters, and more than 350 injured -of them, 119 police officers- as a result of the hundred long riots that are plaguing the country. The epicenter of the confrontations is in Ayacucho, where 7 people have died and 52 have been injured in confrontations with the security forces, especially during the assault on the regional airport. In thirteen of the twenty-four departments of the nation the highways are on fire. There are at least five minors in the morgue. One of them was called Beckham Romario Quispe Garfias. At 17 years old, his hobby was soccer as evidenced by his name. He will never see a stadium. The Government has decreed a state of emergency and, since last night, a curfew in the regions with the highest levels of cholera in the streets.
The violence has escalated since last night, when the judge imposed a total of eighteen months in preventive detention on former President Pedro Castillo while his trial for rebellion and conspiracy is being prepared. To the followers of the leader of Peru Libre, the resolution seems “a punishment.” They already consider that his leader has been “under kidnapping” since December 7, the day he ordered his absurd and ephemeral self-coup and ended up in custody. The Prosecutor’s Office affirms that the judge’s ruling is well founded. He has weighed against the prisoner the risk of flight, especially after he tried to reach the Mexican Embassy minutes after his frustrated personal coup. It also doesn’t help that the ambassador of this country reminds time and time again that he has an open path to request asylum.
The third leg of this devilish chess, the Peruvian Executive, meanwhile, offers a different vision of the seed of the riots. The Interior and Defense ministries are convinced that anti-system groups and Shining Path sympathizers are behind the dizzying escalation of riots who “try to break the social and democratic order.” Between both extremes, the Ombudsman’s Office and several prefects condemn the repression as a key factor of insecurity. In fact, the regional government of Ayacucho has blamed President Dina Boluarte for the deaths and demands a transitional government.
The soldiers enter a municipality in Arequipa this Thursday after the declaration of the state of emergency /
The truth is that there have been more deaths since the application of the state of emergency this Thursday than in the entire previous week of demonstrations. As police forces have become more forceful and reports of fatalities and injuries from gunfire spread, the incidents have become muddied. Right now there are more than a hundred roads blocked throughout the country, thousands of tourists are trapped in Machu Picchu, Cuzco and other places of interest due to the suspension of transport, supermarkets are empty and 2,000 Bolivian truckers remain stuck at the border. waiting to be able to leave the country. A huge police force has been deployed in the center of Lima due to the increasing arrival of protesters from other departments of the nation. They ask for the freedom of Castillo, the resignation of Boluarte, the closure of Congress and urgent general elections.
Castillo contemplates the devastation from the window of the Barbadillo prison, headquarters of the Police Special Operations Directorate. Until now it has remained in a separate module from the one that houses Alberto Fujimori, a former president convicted of multiple crimes and, like him, author of a self-coup, although in his case with enough success to allow him to establish an autocratic regime for years. It is very likely that the two imprisoned ex-presidents can be seen from now on in the common rooms.
Lawyer turnover
The cell of the leader of Perú Libre consists of a room, a private bathroom, and another adjoining room equipped with a table and chairs. He receives the three daily meals typical of the prison regime, although his family has permission to supply him with other foods. The most striking are the visits. There he has so far received some 140 people and it is most likely that this intense rhythm of meetings, unprecedented in a prisoner, will intensify after learning that he will remain detained until 2024. He will need encouragement. Moral. Apart from those close to him, congressmen, leaders of his party, sector representatives, ambassadors and, apparently, a good number of lawyers have visited him to leave him their business card. However, he draws attention to the high turnover of lawyers he has had since his arrest. Most have abandoned him and, according to local media, on Thursday he appeared virtually before the judge represented by a public defender.
A woman crosses in front of a police cordon in the Peruvian capital /
The only one who has had authentic and well-founded reasons to visit the former president is the head of the Program for Persons Deprived of Liberty, Carlos Fernández. However, he was banned when he went to check on his prison conditions. Congresswoman Betssy Chávez, in turn accused of the coup without this preventing her from visiting her boss, told her that Castillo would not receive him. Several social organizations have already denounced his prison privileges.
« It is the first time that our country will be governed by a peasant. I am also a son of this country founded on the sweat of my ancestors. With these words, the rural teacher from Chota became president of Peru on July 28, 2021. This identification with the humble and working class of a nation subjected to serious hardships, where social and economic differences grow incessantly, is one of the the reasons that explain the powerful popular support for a politician who, after all, is in prison for a coup and who this week has received his eighth indictment for corruption.
These masses of farmers, miners, primary workers, teachers and residents of the poor Andean fringe, contemptuously called the “deep Peru”, make up the backbone of the demonstrations. Buses full of natives of Cajamarca and other regions that saw the former president grow arrive in Lima these days in order to mobilize before Congress or replace those who have been in the popular camp in front of his prison for several days. For them, Castillo continues to be a strong character who took the lead to avoid being overwhelmed by the right. He is the rural teacher. The farmer. The unionist. The rondero, as the peasants of the rounds born in the 70s are called to protect agricultural municipalities from robberies. He is the president who has been stolen from the people by the elites. Nepotism, the distribution of public contracts and other corruption is not talked about.
Many residents of Andahuaylas, a rural and forgotten community in the Andes that serves as an example of the perennial lack of reforms in Peru to combat misery, come to the protests. If the region is poor, the drought is now wiping out its last agricultural resources and thousands of small poultry farms that support domestic economies. The coronavirus is also terribly punishing modest Peru. The crisis drowns.
A family takes the opportunity to eat in the middle of a popular mobilization in Cuzco /
Apart from the largest federation of unions in Peru, there are other basic organizations in the mobilizations. They are not only in charge of organizing the marches, but also trying to control the rioters and distributing food among the protesters, many of them coming from municipalities hundreds of kilometers away. Among them are Vraem, which brings together the numerous workers from the valleys of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro rivers; the Red Muqui – a network of environmental and human rights groups based in rural areas – the indigenous associations of the Amazon and Cunarc, the powerful central that brings together the peasant patrols and claims “jurisdictional authority” in seventeen departments from the country. The Cunarc have been in charge, for example, of enforcing the ‘anticovid’ measures in the worst moments of the health emergency. As a sign of his power, he recently asked the government to annul the Penal Code in the indigenous, native, and peasant communities in his area, since their “own justice system” is applied to them.
The anti-Fujimoristas
«The current conflict goes beyond Castillo. It is the revolt of the people and of a multitude of small groups of poor farmers, miners or ranchers against years and years of neglect, injustice and inequalities,” say experts in the Peruvian media. Among these “people”, analysts include thousands of anti-Fujimoristas, fearful that the current political chaos will translate into an upcoming return of Keiko Fujimori to a government that lost to Castillo in the last presidential elections, and the renewal of centralist policies that they have ruined the rest of the nation.
However, Dina Boluarte’s own Executive makes a distinction between the majority of mobilized related to “dissatisfied sectors” with the socioeconomic situation of Peru and the “destabilization elements”, as the Ministry of the Interior calls anti-system groups. The Police have identified several former members of Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) in protests in Lima and in dozens of roadblocks. He considers them promoters of the toughest mobilizations and airport occupations, which have become a new symbol of rebellion.
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