(Puno) Peru, plunged into a serious institutional and political crisis, decreed on Tuesday a three-day curfew in the region of Puno, on the border with Bolivia, where violent anti-government demonstrations have left 18 dead since Monday.
“The Council of Ministers has approved the decree” imposing a curfew in the region of Puno (south) “for a period of three days, from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.,” Prime Minister Alberto Otarola announced during a meeting. plenary session of Parliament.
The demonstrators demand in particular the resignation of Dina Boluarte, who arrived at the head of Peru after the dismissal and arrest on December 7 of the socialist Pedro Castillo.
The protests, which have claimed 40 lives in a month, continued on Tuesday with road blockades in six regions of the country. Pickets are disrupting road traffic in the regions of Puno, Cusco, Apurimac, Arequipa and Madre de Dios in the south of the country, as well as in the Amazonas region in the north. Authorities reported a total of 53 road sections blocked.
In the region of Ayacucho, in the southern Andes, thousands of people marched through the streets of the town of Huamanga.
The epicenter of the protests, however, remains the Aymara (Amerindian people) region of Puno, on the border with Bolivia and on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where looting of shops and attacks on police vehicles took place overnight. from Monday to Tuesday.
In this region where an indefinite strike was declared on January 4, at least 14 people lost their lives on Monday during violent clashes between police and demonstrators near Juliaca airport.
“More than 9,000 people approached Juliaca airport and about 2,000 of them launched a merciless attack on the police and the facilities,” Mr. Otarola lamented on Monday, referring to an “extreme situation”.
Three other people died during the looting in the night from Monday to Tuesday of a shopping center in this city located 1300 km south of Lima. A police officer was also found dead on Tuesday after the attack on his vehicle, according to local police.
three days of mourning
In a statement on Tuesday, the UN Human Rights Office said it was “very concerned about the escalation of violence in Peru” and called on “demonstrators to show restraint” and the police to “ensure that that force be used only when strictly necessary”.
“We are in the hands of barbarism”, denounced the cardinal and archbishop of Huancayo, Pedro Barreto, on RPP radio, while the people’s ombudsman, Eliana Revollar, considered that “the violence is really reaching unsuspected levels”. .
In Juliaca, dozens of families of victims dressed in black line up at the morgue to receive the body of a loved one. “My brother died because he was shot, he was killed by the police,” a man told La Decana radio.
The regional government of Puno declared three days of mourning on Tuesday, while calling for the resignation of President Dina Boluarte. A march organized in the region by several collectives of citizens and peasants is due to arrive in the capital Lima around January 12.
The deaths bring to 40 the number of people who have died in anti-government protests for nearly a month.
In addition to the resignation of Dina Boluarte, the demonstrators demand a new Parliament and the immediate holding of elections, already brought forward from 2026 to April 2024.
Although from the same Marxist-inspired party (Peru Libre) of former President Castillo, Dina Boluarte is considered a “traitor” by the demonstrators.
It is in this context that the government appears before the Parliament, controlled by the right, on Tuesday, to ask for a vote of confidence, a constitutional requirement to be able to remain in office.
Peru is due to receive a mission from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Wednesday, dispatched to the country to investigate the protests and the response of law enforcement.
Dina Boluarte is the sixth person to hold the presidency in five years, in a country that is experiencing a permanent political crisis punctuated by suspicions of corruption.