Crisis in Peru: a war between the destitute interior and the capital that ignores and despises it

After the first day of protests, President Dina Boluarte delivered a speech Thursday evening from the Government Palace, which began with warm congratulations to the National Police, for having acted resolutely against the demonstrators roaming downtown Lima and for not no deaths have been recorded.

Boluarte did not mention that, in the south of the country, in Arequipa, the police killed a citizen with three bullets, with which the number of deceased rose to 44, counting from the beginning of his term. They all lived in the provinces, not in Lima.

This discriminatory disdain in differentiating the dead of Lima from those of the interior of the country, or in mistreating those who come from within the national territory, is a historical characteristic of Peruvian rulers, a characteristic that was accentuated when in the decade the 1940s of the last century the migratory waves towards the City of Kings began.

In 1952, Senator Manuel Faura Bedoya, who represented dictator Manuel Odría, introduced a bill to prevent provincials from entering Lima.

In 2009, the president Alan Garcia they treated the indigenous Awajún as second-class citizens or “dogs in the manger” for having opposed the exploitation of natural resources in their territories. García ordered to repress them, which cost 33 dead, including police and indigenous people.

And he was the former president Peter Paul Kuczynski who said, alluding to voters in the Andes in the south of the country, who tend to lean towards leftist candidates: “Height prevents oxygen from reaching the brain.”

Boluarte is not very different, even though it comes from the southern Andean region of Apurímac.

The president has sought a “violent minority” who intends to “infringe the rule of law, generate chaos and disorder, and within that chaos and disorder, take power over the nation”, to whom they are asking for his resignation.

It’s amazing that Boluarte treats anti-government protesters as a minority who are calling for his resignation for having led a government imposed by gunfire, allying themselves with political parties that did not accept the defeat of their candidates for the 2021 presidential elections and who then denounced false electoral fraud, in the style of the followers of Jair Bolsonaro.

Minority? According to a recent poll by the Institute of Peruvian Studies, disapproval of President Boluarte is very high throughout the country: 72% in the north, 87% in the centre, 80% in the south and 61% in Lima.

The same survey reveals it 60% considered the demonstrations justified anti-government and 35% spoke out against.

Opposition to President Boluarte has grown due to mistakes she has made, such as claiming, without presenting evidence, that the protests are led by the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso and that they are financed by drug trafficking and criminal organizations dedicated to the illegal exploitation of gold . .

The National Directorate of Police Intelligence has identified 16 different organizations, which do not communicate with each other, as protagonists of the demonstrations.

There is not a single political party, there is no single identified leadership, which is responsible for the wave of protests across the country. But Boluarte prefers to listen to his allies who claim without presenting evidence that the Sendero Luminoso terrorists are the perpetrators of the violence.

With this justification, the government arrested 7 people in Ayacucho -in the southern Andes of the country-, accused of links with the Sendero Luminoso and of having organized the protests of December 15, 2022, which ended with the death of 10 people.

The arrest warrant included as incriminating evidence that the suspects had books by Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, characteristic of the repression in the lead years, from 1980 to 2000.

However, the authorities were unwilling to arrest military leaders who ordered army soldiers to shoot and kill 10 citizens, many of them with no connection to the demonstrations and some trying to help the injured.

Nor did they order the arrest of police chiefs in charge of the repression in the mountain town of Juliaca, Puno, which ended in the killing of 18 people.

If there is one thing that most irritates the demonstrators who have come to Lima to demand the resignation of Boluarte, the closure of the Congress, the immediate calling of general elections and a new constitution, it is that the president despises themas well as other rulers of Lima.

And they are even more indignant because it is of Andean origin, precisely from Chalhuanca, from the Apurímac region.

Another factor that also encourages opponents is what they call the betrayal of Boluarte. You were elected vice president of the coup plotter Pedro Castillo, on December 7, 2021, you declared that in the event of the president’s fall, you would resign.

Beyond the lawsuit that justified the dismissal of the president, the truth is that Boluarte joined the parties of Lima Fuerza Popular -which nominated Keiko Fujimori for the third time and failed- Renovación Popular and Avanza País, above all and l ‘consecrated Peru’s first president, supported by the armed forces. and the police.

In short, Boluarte ended up representing the opposite of what the Peruvians chose in 2021. In the end, the usual ones return.