Peru, which erupted last December in the region where the Inca empire was born centuries ago, has sparked the largest social mobilizations of the 21st century in this South American country, leaving at least 44 deaths. What has ignited the anger of thousands of indigenous people?
The trigger was the rejection of the sudden dismissal on December 7 in Congress of the leftist president Pedro Castillo for a failed coup with which he tried to close the Parliament, with a right-wing majority, govern by decrees and convene a Constituent Assembly.
The dismissal occurred hours before the Legislature voted on a motion to remove Castillo, whom the prosecutor’s office was investigating for corruption. Then a judge sentenced him to 18 months in pretrial detention for the crime of rebellion in flagrante.
Vice President Dina Boluarte, who was estranged from Castillo, replaced him, according to law. But the popular repudiation of the bloody repression of the protests relegated Castillo to the background, boosting the request for the resignation of the new president and the closure of Congress. The protests began in the “deep Peru” the Andean areas of southern Peru and have spread to Lima.
Racism
One of the fundamental factors is the feeling of discrimination and poor quality of daily lifeaffirms to AFP the political analyst Mirko Lauer.
“It is an old, complex discontent. These are people who bring the fury and pain of having been victims of the feudal system, of having had to separate from their families due to internal migrations (in search of better living conditions), of having been victims of radicalism and reactionism. Discontent does not work as a political program but as a cry of anger from the heart,” Lauer notes.
These are people who bring the furies and sorrows of having been victims of the feudal system. Discontent does not work as a political program but as a cry of anger from the heart
Historian Antonio Zapata believes that issues of “identity” also largely explain the protests. The peasants imagined having “one of their own” in power with Castillo, a rural teacher and union leader of Andean origin. “He represented rural Peru…(the protests) are saying they have taken away our historic opportunity,” Zapata maintains in the newspaper La República.
That sector of the peasantry also demands the closure of Parliament because it considers that it “did not allow” the ousted president to govern. “That population judges that it is not fair that those who have messed with Professor Castillo govern,” reflects Zapata.
Added to this is the demand for a Constituent Assembly to draw up a Magna Carta to replace that of 1993, which consecrates the market economy as the axis of development, the root of social inequalities from his point of view. That was Castillo’s main electoral promise.
polarization
“The polarization is one of the causes of the protests; it is not ideological: it is that of the ‘Lima establishment'” versus the poor provinces of the south, Carlos Meléndez, a political scientist and professor at the Diego Portales University in Chile, told AFP.
Polarization is one of the causes of the protests; It is not ideological: it is that of the ‘Lima establishment’
This It is explained by the centralism of Peru, where the Andean or Amazon regions were the least benefited of the economic ‘boom’ of the last 30 years.
On the ‘establishment’ side are the formal economy, right-wing parties, law enforcement, media corporations, the upper and upper-middle classes, and the country’s industrialized north coast.
On the other side there is a coalition “that has its own powers such as the illegal economy (smuggling, drug trafficking, mining), which is mixed with leftist radicalism, unions and the political arm of the Maoist guerrilla of Sendero Luminoso,” explains Meléndez. Added to this is “the fragmentation and multiplication of mini-parties, without socially based support, creating the absence of interlocutors.”
Poverty
“We have had an important stage of growth that began to end in 2016, coinciding with the political turbulence that broke out that year with the war between Congress and the Executive Power, then came the pandemic and poverty grew by 10 points,” described to AFP the economist and analyst Augusto Alvarez Rodrich.
“That exacerbated the situation (in the Andean regions) and is what expresses the discomfort that exists in the country, where we have a faceless protest, without leadership,” he adds.
During the economic boom, poverty fell from more than 40% to 10% in three decades before skyrocketing to the current 26% in 2022. Andean protests have a globalizing element: discontent with the elites. And the populism in vogue, left or right, it is built on hatred of elites, Lauer muses.
AFP
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