By Adalberto Santana on January 17, 2023
streets of Lima, photo: AA
It would seem that, at present, right-wing expressions in Latin America and the Caribbean have rebounded. This statement could be inferred from the most recent events that have taken place in some countries of the region at the beginning of 2023, as it happened in Brazil with the failed coup d’état against President Lula da Silva, or in the violent protests of the Bolivian right wing in Santa Cruz against the government of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). But undoubtedly where they have had a partial triumph is in Peru with the imposition of Dina Boluarte as president of that Andean nation and her subsequent generalized repression against popular protests.
Peruvian rightists against the insurrectionary masses
Since the coup d’état of December 7, 2022 against the democratically elected president, Pedro Castillo, the Peruvian right-wing has strengthened its grip on government through repression. The coup was generated in Peru by the decision of the real sectors of power, placing in the first magistracy the vice-president Dina Boluarte, new president who in less than two months has generated an alliance with the traditional sectors of those Peruvian right-wingers who had lost the presidency in the elections of June 2021. They have exercised power by generating a harsh wave of repression that has resulted in 54 deaths up to mid-January 2023, in the confrontations that the police and the armed forces have deployed against the protests carried out by broad sectors of peasants, indigenous people, students, miners, informal merchants and diverse popular groups of the Peruvian social formation.
The protests of broad popular sectors, which have been generalized in almost all the Peruvian territory, have had as fundamental demands: the resignation of Dina Boluarte herself and the closing of the Congress dominated by the majority of the parties and by the power groups of the traditional right wing. But they have also demanded a new constitution to overthrow the constitutional order established by former president Alberto Fujimori. But a fundamental point of the various marches and road closures by residents of various Andean communities has been the release of President Pedro Castillo, a president who has undoubtedly enjoyed popular support and not the 27 percent approval rating given by the IPSOS survey last November.
Even at the Latin American level, other governments in the region have expressed their condemnation of the Peruvian coup, such as the presidents of Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Gustavo Petro of Colombia, Luis Arce Catacora of Bolivia and Alberto Fernández of Argentina, as well as those of Honduras, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, among others. Condemnation for which the same Dina Boluarte and the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself, in an official communiqué pointed out: “On this date, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has ordered the call to Lima for consultations of our Ambassadors in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico, in reaction to the interference in the internal affairs of Peru by the highest authorities of the aforementioned countries, whose statements question the presidential succession carried out”. Lets remember that the same government of Boluarte declared persona non grata the Mexican ambassador Pablo Monroy Conesa, to whom she gave 72 hours to leave the country by virtue of the declarations of the Mexican president, which according to another official communiqué of the same Peruvian Foreign Ministry were: “especially serious because of the circumstances in which the country faces a situation of violence incompatible with the exercise of the legitimate right that attends every person to demonstrate peacefully.” Let us think that what most irritated the Peruvian coup perpetrators was the protection and asylum granted by the Mexican government to the family of President Castillo.
In the same logic of the coup government, was the prohibition of Evo Morales and other leaders of the Bolivian MAS to enter Peruvian territory, a situation in which the former Bolivian president himself said through Twitter: “The political crisis affecting the brother Peruvian people, especially deep Peru, was caused by the permanent conspiracy of the Fujimori right wing and right-wing media against a government elected at the polls whose ‘unforgivable crime’ was to represent the poorest”.
Undoubtedly, the repressive situation of the Peruvian coup has been condemned worldwide and nationally, even the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office itself initiated an investigation against the de facto president and even against the prime minister, Alberto Otárola and other government officials involved in the repression for “genocide, aggravated homicide and serious injuries”. All this in the context of the brutal repression against various opponents throughout the country. Even the International Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has expressed its condemnation of the violence generated by the security forces as well as by those sectors that have protested against this same state repression.
The reality currently in Peru is that the oligarchy of the Andean nation has regained control of state power and has reinforced with the media an intense campaign against the popular sectors that have generated a great social protest that continues now in Lima after determined caravans from all over the country. This situation of discontent has not reached such a level of response in more than 20 years in the political life of this South American country. In such a situation it seems that the Peruvian right wing has dug in at all costs. As is the tendency, if the situation is reversed as it happened in the Bolivian case, the indigenous masses, peasants, workers, students and social and popular movements will be able to change the correlation of forces so that in the short and medium term they will once again regain greater spaces of political power in Peru.
Source: Telesur, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US