Protests in Peru’s capital continue as the demonstrators who traveled from across the country for the “takeover of Lima” have been brutally repressed through mass arrests, the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and beatings, and the deployment of armored vehicles.
rom thefreeonline on by agencies/ lamoscatv /almacubanita
June 6, 2021, was the day which shocked many in Peru’s oligarchy. Pedro Castillo Terrones, a rural schoolteacher who had never before been elected to office, won the second round of the presidential election with just over 50.13% of the vote.
More than 8.8 million people voted for Castillo’s program of profound social reforms and the promise of a new constitution against the far-right’s candidate, Keiko Fujimori.
In a dramatic turn of events, the historical agenda of neoliberalism and repression, passed down by former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori to his daughter Keiko, was rejected at the polls.
From that day on, still in disbelief, the Peruvian oligarchy declared war on Castillo. They made the next 18 months for the new president a period of great hostility as they sought to destabilize his government with a multi-pronged attack that included significant use of lawfare.
With a call to “throw out communism,” plans were made by the oligarchy’s leading business group, the National Society of Industries, to make the country ungovernable under Castillo.
In October 2021, recordings were released that revealed that since June 2021 this group of industrialists, along with other members of Peru’s elite and leaders of the right-wing opposition parties, had been planning a series of actions, including financing protests and strikes.
Groups of former military personnel, allied with far-right politicians like Fujimori, began to openly call for the violent overthrow of Castillo, threatening government officials and left-leaning journalists.
The right-wing in Congress also joined in these plans and attempted to impeach Castillo on two occasions during his first year in office. Castillo said in March 2022,
The oligarchic rulers of Peru could never accept that a rural schoolteacher and peasant leader could be brought into office by millions of poor, Black, and Indigenous people who saw their hope for a better future in Castillo. However, in the face of these attacks, Castillo became more and more distanced from his political base.
Castillo formed four different cabinets to appease the business sectors, each time conceding to right-wing demands to remove leftist ministers who challenged the status quo.
He broke with his party, Peru Libre, when openly challenged by its leaders. He sought help from the already discredited Organization of American States in looking for political solutions instead of mobilizing the country’s major peasant and Indigenous movements.
The final crisis for Castillo broke out on December 7, 2022. Weakened by months of corruption allegations, left infighting, and multiple attempts to criminalize him, Castillo was finally overthrown and imprisoned.
He was replaced by his vice president, Dina Boluarte, who was sworn in after Congress impeached Castillo with 101 votes in favor, six against, and ten abstentions.
Castillo also announced the start of an “exceptional emergency government” and the convening of a Constituent Assembly within nine months. He said that until the Constituent Assembly was installed, he would rule by decree. In his last message as president, he also decreed a curfew to begin at 10 o’clock that night. The curfew, as well as his other measures, was never applied.
Hours later, Castillo was overthrown.
Boluarte was sworn in by Congress as Castillo was detained at a police station. A few demonstrations broke out in the capital city of Lima, but nowhere near large enough to reverse the coup which was nearly a year and a half in the making, the latest in Latin America’s long history of violence against radical transformations.
The coup against Pedro Castillo was a major setback for the current wave of progressive governments in Latin America and the people’s movements that elected them. This coup and the arrest of Castillo are stark reminders that the ruling elites of Latin America will not concede any power without a bitter fight to the end.The only winners are the Peruvian oligarchy and their friends in Washington.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Massive Peru protests continue and multiply in face of police state repression
Protests in Peru’s capital continuedas the demonstrators who traveled from across the country for the “takeover of Lima” have been brutally repressed through mass arrests, the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and beatings, and the deployment of armored vehicles.
As the US-backed regime of Dina Boluarte, which was installed in a coup in early December, met last Thursday afternoon with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the police and military carried out a renewed onslaught against the peaceful demonstrators in Lima and elsewhere in the country, resulting in at least one death that day in Arequipa.
Several more protesters have been killed since, as the police continue to use live ammunition. There have been 56 confirmed deaths of civilians and one of a policeman, and hundreds have been injured. Other reports have placed the number killed by the security forces at 62 or more.
The epicenter of the protests remains the impoverished south. The largest demonstrations and most persistent roadblocks are taking place in the cities of Arequipa—the second largest after Lima—Juliaca, Ayacucho, Cusco and Tacna. While sporadic roadblocks have been reported in La Libertad and Amazonas, as well as a fire in an oil pipeline close to the Ecuadorian border, the north of the country and the formal mining, energy and industrial workers have not participated en masse in the protests.
The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) veered from initially recognizing the Boluarte regime to feigning support for the demonstrations and calling a series of “national strikes.” At the same time, however, the trade unions that belong to it have kept workers in all key sectors on the job, showing that they stand on the regime’s side of the barricades in defending the profit interests of the transnational corporations and the oligarchy.
The heroism of the protesters notwithstanding, the limitations of seeking to disrupt economic activities and topple the regime through roadblocks, airport occupations and scattered marches are becoming clear. By their very nature, these tactics can be isolated and crushed by the armed forces. Similar tactics were followed—in some cases more massively than in Peru—in Nicaragua in 2018, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Honduras in 2019, Paraguay in 2021 and Colombia in 2021-2022, to the same effect.
As a result, the leadership of the Boluarte regime, the military and intelligence apparatus and, undoubtedly, behind them the US Embassy, felt confident enough to carry out the highly provocative move of crashing through the gates of Lima’s San Marcos National University with an armored vehicle and invading the campus with hundreds of heavily armed police on Saturday.
At the emblematic campus of the most important university in the country—and the oldest in the hemisphere—police arrested more than 200 students and demonstrators who had traveled from the interior and were being sheltered by the students. Those arrested at the university, including a mother and her eight-year-old child, were treated as “terrorists,” forced to lie on the ground before screaming police in scenes reminiscent of the darkest days of the Peruvian dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, or even Chile in 1973.
The continued defiance of this murderous police-military violence by demonstrators drawn from the most impoverished and heavily indigenous regions of Peru has won the attention and admiration of workers and youth all over the world. But bravery is not enough. Despite being the largest wave of demonstrations in Peru in recent memory, without a revolutionary program and leadership, it cannot achieve the fundamental political and social aspirations driving the mass popular anger that is gripping the country.
There are several fundamental aspects of the current mobilizations that workers in Peru and internationally need to assess. Firstly, the protests are part of a global resurgence of the class struggle triggered by the policies of ruling elites.
Everywhere, their aim is to intensify the exploitation of the working class and plunder semi-colonial countries like Peru to sustain the record profits of the financial and corporate oligarchy in US and Europe, pay for the repeated financial bailouts of the rich, and feed the US-NATO war drive for hegemony against Russia and China.
The Boluarte regime does not merely represent the Peruvian oligarchy, but it primarily oversees the interests of US and European imperialism.
Washington and the European Union are working, both openly and behind the scenes, to bolster the regime’s ability to “pacify” the country to safeguard the continued extraction of the strategic mineral wealth of Peru.
On January 9, as the police was carrying out a massacre of demonstrators in Juliaca, killing 19 demonstrators and injuring over 100 more, the US Embassy congratulated the Boluarte government for confiscating drugs, declaring that the State Department is “glad to collaborate with the National Police in Peru, providing advanced training in the fight against drugs and organized crime.”
In fact, the Biden administration has openly poured millions in aid into the Peruvian repressive apparatus during the crackdown and supported the “state of emergency,” which criminalizes the protests and involves the deployment of the military.
Last Thursday, the first day of the “takeover of Lima,” the US ambassador in Lima and CIA veteran Lisa Kenna met with Boluarte’s Energy and Mining Ministry in a “high-level dialogue between Peru and the United States on the subjects of mining development.”
Support for Peru coup all about Canadian mining companies – Yves Engler
The ministry officially “thanked the support of the American government in the subjects of mining and energy and reasserted the determination of the national government” to expand natural gas production and develop petrochemical production in the south of the country, the epicenter of the protests. Peru’s natural gas exports have almost doubled during the war in Ukraine and have gone primarily to Europe as an alternative to Russian energy.
Washington’s overriding concern over the Peruvian mass protests centers on their shutdown of massive mining operations, such as those of Glencore in Antapaccay and MMG’s Las Bambas facility, and the continuing blockade of key highways linking the mines to port facilities. While the US Embassy issued a carefully worded statement lamenting the mass killing of protesters, behind the scenes the Pentagon and CIA are collaborating in the bloody repression in the defense of profit interests.
OAS
It is shameful that the “concern” of the OAS is expressed ten days after Peru suffered the loss of its children
During a lightning visit to Washington, the current Peruvian Foreign Minister, Cecilia Gervasi, found a constant among her hosts, officials of the Joe Biden government and the US Congress: the “commitment of the United States to support democratic institutions in Peru” .
This could be the “sign” of support that President Dina Boluarte needed to undertake a solution to what is happening in her country.
A few days earlier, also from its hideout in the US capital, the OAS had expressed its “concern” about the excessive use of force against protesters in that nation.
Dramatic footage of the massive reistance to the rightwing Coup. Marcha de los 4 Suyos en Lima [Especial Global Contrainfos]
Coincidentally, the number of Peruvian civilians killed by police repression already exceeds 60, while the number of wounded is over one hundred.
What a shame that in the Biden administration “democratic institutionalism” is confused with repression, death, a coup d’état and everything that happens in the Andean nation!
What a pity, in the same way, that the “concern” of the OAS is expressed ten days after Peru suffered the loss of its children and the mutilation of its democracy!
Who can explain to Peruvians, and moreover to Latin Americans, what the OAS is for, the same institution that exactly 61 years ago expelled Cuba from that ministry of colonies?
Now, while Washington’s positions are being argued once again, in Lima, where the blood of a people protesting in the streets is shed, Congress rejected, for the third time, the advancement of the general elections. The resignation of President Dina Boluarte or the dissolution of Congress itself is not accepted there either.
The toxic and destabilizing environment is not at all new in a Peru that holds a top place on issues such as government instability, with the number of six presidents who have gone through the supposed office of “governing” in just six years.
Some of them are in jail, others outside the country and wanted by the courts, one chose to take his own life and the last one, Pedro Castillo, democratically elected, is in jail after the Peruvian Congress, or rather the Peruvian oligarchy, opposed the social transformations that the teacher and union leader who became President intended to carry out.
Peru protests continue in face of police state repression
Protests in Peru’s capital continue as the demonstrators who traveled from across the country for the “takeover of Lima” have been brutally repressed through mass arrests, the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and beatings, and the deployment of armored vehicles.
As the US-backed regime of Dina Boluarte, which was installed in a coup in early December, met last Thursday afternoon with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the police and military carried out a renewed onslaught against the peaceful demonstrators in Lima and elsewhere in the country, resulting in at least one death that day in Arequipa.
Several more protesters have been killed since, as the police continue to use live ammunition. There have been 56 confirmed deaths of civilians and one of a policeman, and hundreds have been injured. Other reports have placed the number killed by the security forces at 62 or more.
The epicenter of the protests remains the impoverished south. The largest demonstrations and most persistent roadblocks are taking place in the cities of Arequipa—the second largest after Lima—Juliaca, Ayacucho, Cusco and Tacna. While sporadic roadblocks have been reported in La Libertad and Amazonas, as well as a fire in an oil pipeline close to the Ecuadorian border, the north of the country and the formal mining, energy and industrial workers have not participated en masse in the protests.
The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) veered from initially recognizing the Boluarte regime to feigning support for the demonstrations and calling a series of “national strikes.” At the same time, however, the trade unions that belong to it have kept workers in all key sectors on the job, showing that they stand on the regime’s side of the barricades in defending the profit interests of the transnational corporations and the oligarchy.
The leadership of the Boluarte regime, the military and intelligence apparatus and, undoubtedly, behind them the US Embassy, felt confident enough to carry out the highly provocative move of crashing through the gates of Lima’s San Marcos National University with an armored vehicle and invading the campus with hundreds of heavily armed police .
At the emblematic campus of the most important university in the country—and the oldest in the hemisphere—police arrested more than 200 students and demonstrators who had traveled from the interior and were being sheltered by the students.
Those arrested at the university, including a mother and her eight-year-old child, were treated as “terrorists,” forced to lie on the ground before screaming police in scenes reminiscent of the darkest days of the Peruvian dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, or even Chile in 1973.
The continued defiance of this murderous police-military violence by demonstrators drawn from the most impoverished and heavily indigenous regions of Peru has won the attention and admiration of workers and youth all over the world.
#Perú, entre la represión y las «señas» de #Washington
#OEA
Es vergonzoso que la «preocupación» de la OEA se exprese pasados diez días desde que Perú sufre la pérdida de sus hijos
Durante una visita relámpago a Washington, la actual canciller peruana, Cecilia Gervasi, encontró una constante entre sus anfitriones, los funcionarios del gobierno de Joe Biden y el Congreso estadounidense: el «compromiso de Estados Unidos de apoyar la institucionalidad democrática en Perú».
Podría ser esta la «seña» de apoyo que necesitaba la presidenta Dina Boluarte, para emprender alguna solución a lo que ocurre en su país.
Unos días antes, también desde su guarida en la capital estadounidense, la OEA había expresado su «preocupación» por el uso excesivo de la fuerza contra los manifestantes en esa nación.
Coincidentemente, la cifra de civiles peruanos muertos por la represión policial ya supera los 60, mientras que los heridos son más de cien.
¡Qué pena que en la administración Biden se confunda «institucionalidad democrática» con represión, muerte, golpe de Estado y todo lo que sucede en la nación andina!
¡Qué pena, de igual forma, que la «preocupación» de la OEA se exprese pasados los diez días desde que Perú sufre la pérdida de sus hijos y la mutilación de su democracia!
¿Quién puede explicar a los peruanos, y por añadidura a los latinoamericanos, para qué sirve la OEA, la misma institución que hace exactamente 61 años expulsó a Cuba de aquel ministerio de colonias?
Ahora, mientras se argumentan, una vez más, las posiciones de Washington, en Lima, donde se derrama sangre de un pueblo protestando en las calles, el Congreso rechazó, por tercera ocasión, el adelanto de las elecciones generales. Ahí tampoco se acepta la renuncia de la presidenta Dina Boluarte ni la disolución del propio Congreso.
El ambiente tóxico y desestabilizador para nada es nuevo en un Perú que ostenta un lugar cimero en temas como la inestabilidad gubernamental, con la cifra de seis presidentes que han pasado por el supuesto oficio de «gobernar» en solo seis años.
De ellos, unos están presos, otros fuera del país y reclamados por la justicia, uno optó por quitarse la vida y el último, Pedro Castillo, elegido democráticamente, guarda prisión luego de que el Congreso peruano, o más bien la oligarquía peruana, se opusiera a las transformaciones sociales que pretendía llevar adelante el maestro y dirigente gremial devenido Presidente.
The Free 
One thought on “Perú, brutal Repression of Massive Resistance against US inspired Coup + Videos /La Mosca /entrevista”