A deeply divided country with the world’s highest COVID death rate, Peru has suffered a series of political crises. After the latest, it is now governed by its seventh president in less than seven years.
December 2022 has seen a president’s failed attempt to dissolve Congress and subsequent jailing, and now large-scale protests met with a military crackdown. Divisions between the capital, Lima, and the rural, largely indigenous interior have been heightened by President Pedro Castillo’s exit. The military is playing a more active, openly political, role.
WOLA Senior Fellow Jo-Marie Burt explains how Peru got here, the political divisions, the role of the international community, and the dangerous—but avoidable—possible outcomes of the present crisis.
In her latest column at the Peruvian daily La República, Dr. Burt warns of a new government “that, with its discourse focused on acts of violence that have taken place, seeks to reduce recent protests to the actions of a small group of extremists—which must be investigated—in order to ignore the will of thousands of Peruvians who have taken to the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the current situation.”
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