Violence Escalates In Peru: Democracy In Crisis? 

The capital city of Lima saw heightened displays of violence on Thursday as thousands of protestors from across the country clashed on the streets against a massive show of force led by local law enforcement. This article attempts to dissect what is going on in Peru, why violence is escalating, and what larger implications does it hint at? 

Popular protests in Peru hit their one-month mark, as acts of violence continue to be on the rise. The protest movement was triggered when the former President Pedro Castillo was ousted by the legislature last month, but it finds deeper roots in socio-economic evils that plague the citizens. 

The protestors marched to Lima in defiance of the state of “emergency” as declared by the government and in demand for the resignation of President Dina Boluarte, the current president and former vice president, who replaced Castillo after his removal. 

Similar demonstrations have also occurred in other parts of the country, such as in the southern city of Arequipa. The demands remain the same: a complete democratic overhaul, with the president standing down and the parliament being dissolved to make way for fresh rounds of general elections. 

Such protests have been met with heavy-handed repression by security forces, making clashes inevitable. Authorities reported that at least 54 people have lost their lives since the unrest began, and that number is not likely to come down. 

The violent crackdown on the protestors, whom the enforcement authorities often term “terrorists,” is a pressing reason behind escalating tensions.

While the authorities and a certain section of the national press have showcased the protestors as disruptors and criminals, on-the-ground reporting from CNN, Reuter’s, and the BBC indicates that such a generalization does not tell the whole story. 

It appears that the situation in Peru, as violent as it may be, is caused by decades of socio-economic inequality and a constant decline of trust in public institutions. In that realization, let us look at what triggered the unrest, why violence is continuing to escalate, and what impact it has on democracies worldwide.

What Triggered The Protest?

The country has been rocked by violent unrest since Congress and the Peruvian legislature removed the former President Castillo on charges of corruption and for his attempted “coup d’etat” of dissolving Congress and ruling by decree. He was put under pre-trial detention and immediately replaced by his Vice President, Boluarte. 

The ousting of President Castillo is also said to have had political motivations, since much of the Congress is under the majority of the opposition party – and Castillo’s policies had a leftist initiative. 

The people immediately responded by launching marches and demonstrations against the ousting of the former president, whom they regarded as “their leader.” Many of the demonstrators are supporters of Castillo primarily because they share a similar background to the former president, being of indigenous ethnicity and hailing from rural mountainous regions.

For them, Boluarte is not only their leader; she is not even like them. The fact that Boluarte was put up as Castillo’s replacement by the parliament also led to the demonstrators calling the current regime a “dictatorial” one. 

Why Is Violence Escalating?

Public Anger & Frustration Over Systemic Inequalities

While the angry protestors chant for the release of the former president currently, behind those chants and the persistence to push on lies decades of frustration over the decaying state of the country’s institutions and their unfulfilled demands for better living conditions, ever since democratic rule was restored in the country. 

Peruvian democracy has done great on charts that plot its GDP and economic growth. However, most citizens believe that they have not received one bit of advantage from the country’s economic rise, all while being deprived of basic facilities such as education, security, and proper justice. 

There has been a long history of the exclusion of people of Indigenous descent. Experts explain that the rural and indigenous populations feel that there is a “double system,” and the current protests boil down to such a difference: between the parts of Peru that are able to take advantage of the “economic miracle,” and the parts that aren’t, which are being left behind as a result. 

The major beneficiaries of the country’s free market gains are the elites belonging to the coastal mixed-ethnic regions. Historically, these are the same elites who have mostly ascended to positions of power, and have usually had interests at odds with rural and indigenous southern regions. 

That changed when Castillo, a former teacher from rural Peru, rose in popularity as a ‘man of the people’. The bulk of his supporters looked up to him with hope of bringing better prospects for them. 

When Castillo was removed, the major and violent protests occurred in these regions, and over time, these are the people who marched on to the capital and other major cities. They felt threatened that they might lose their only chance of popular representation. 

“We are from Chota in Cajamarca. We have come to Lima to defend our country, considering we are under a dictatorial government … which has stained our country with blood.” 

Yorbin Herrera, a protester from Cajamarca, told Al Jazeera.

To supplement this, there is Peru’s dwindling public perception of democratic bodies. The Congress is viewed with skepticism by the public, as a September 2022 poll shows that 84% Peruvians disapproved Congress’s performance. 

Not only do the lawmakers pursue their own interests in Congress, there have been multiple scandals of their involvement in corrupt practices. This has led to a boiling point where the protestors now demand a fresh sweep of Congress. 

The Congress has also been accused of not letting an act pass that allows the President, the people’s representative, to run for successive terms. A change to the constitution along those lines also forms one of the demands of the protestors.

The lack of faith in public institutions and continued frustration of not having their needs met has led to the citizens creating situations of political instability, in the form of a ‘revolving-door presidency’. Boluarte became the sixth President in less than five years.

Major wings of the government are considered to be ineffective and un-bothered about the livelihoods of citizens – a realization which became even clearer during the Pandemic.

 According to the UN, over half of the Peruvian populations lacked access to enough food in the months of the pandemic. Data from John Hopkins University also show that  Peru recorded the highest per-capita death toll in the world due to coronavirus. 

While many other countries extended support for their citizens in these tough times, Peruvian citizens found no safety net to fall back on. 

Due to these reasons, the current protests for the many demonstrators is not even about Castillo – it’s about Peru starting from a fresh slate. Many people who demonstrated against President Castillo a few months back, and protested for his resignation – have joined the current protests as well. 

Improper, Miscalculated & Repressive Response by Authorities

Peruvian authorities have been accused of using excessive force against protestors. Recently, they have moved on from riot control weapons and resorted to using firearms. 

The city’s head of legal medicine told CNN that the autopsies of 17 dead civilians killed during the protests in the city of Juliaca show wounds caused by firearm projectiles. This incident marked the ‘highest civilian death toll in the country since Peru’s return to democracy’ in 2000, as commented by an expert at an US based Think Tank. 

As local authorities amp up their repression, so do the mob elements in the protestors, where one such mob burned a police officer to death immediately after the police killed protestors in Juliaca.  This leads to a chain of perpetual escalations in violence. 

The authorities and law enforcement have also been resorting to a broader deterioration of public debate over the demonstrations, as they continue to label the protestors as terrorists – and use ethnic and derogatory slurs to refer to the major constituent part of these protests, the indigenous population. 

As experts warn, such language could generate ‘a climate of more violence’. 

As the death toll also reflects that the majority of the protestors killed are the indigenous folk, it can create links in public perception towards selective elimination of minority elements through state controlled bodies.

 Given how we have seen the uproars such associations can create (#BlackLivesMatter movement in the USA), it’s only likely to paint the Peru protests with deeper shades of red.

 Finally, the political establishment in Lima seems to be ignorant, or unwilling to understand the root cause of these protests. While terming these instances of civil unrest as ‘terrorist’ movements can help shelve it off for later, it fails to do anything to stop its growth and escalations in violence.

 The political leadership shows much resilience in actually having substantive discussion towards the demands of the public. 

In such conditions, violence is on the rise, and it is likely to remain that way.

What Does It Mean For Democracy?

The ongoing violence in Peru hints at a much broader and global political phenomenon: democracy is no longer invulnerable. The protestors are demonstrating out of deep-rooted grievances against a political system that has failed to deliver for the past two decades. 

It appears that the civil unrest is just a nasty altercation between repressive authorities and a public that has fallen out of love with democracy. More and more Latin American and Caribbean countries are seeing this trend, where the population is displaying their dissatisfaction with democratic rule, but except for Haiti, nowhere is it as low as Peru. 

While once the free-market was a path to economic emancipation, the public has found that it only made the rich richer. Peru’s natural endowments have made it prosperous, to the point where the term ‘Lima Consensus’ was coined to describe the free-market led economic growth – but such a prosperity remains reserved only for the elites, while the rest scrambled for pieces. 

The popular opinion is, not only did the free-market and liberal economies do nothing for them, – it also came at the cost of public institutions that refused to intervene and protect the people from the market’s unpredictable nature. 

This also forms the background behind a resurgence of left-wing leaders in Latin America, who now wish to “bring back its people” from the disillusionment of free-market capitalism and the authoritarian grips of right-wing populism. 

It appears that the protestors in Peru want the country to have a fresh start. The demand for new elections all across the nation reflects a need to restore a legitimate identity to public institutions. 

But the current leadership remains resistant to such demands and has instead declared a state of emergency until mid-February to curb protests. While it has been able to reduce the intensity of protests, it has failed to curb them altogether. 

Peru’s handling of the situation would be something to watch for in democracies all across the world, which have also become vulnerable to scrutiny and public distrust, especially after improper handling of the pandemic expanded their cracks of legitimacy. 

It appears that Latin America is changing, and the world needs to take notice in order to draw valuable lessons and parallels.