On December 7, 2022, after two years of intensifying hostility by a right-wing parliamentary congress, President Pedro Castillo, who is widely favored by the working class and poor in the country, was forced from power and arrested as he and his family sought asylum. Since then, the illegitimate regime of Dina Boluarte (with 5% poll approval, the lowest in the hemisphere), and the Peruvian Congress summarily violated its promise to hold new elections and instead has unleashed a series of anti-Indigenous legislation that seeks to erode land rights and make way for mining concessions.
Once removing Castillo, Congress has sought to remove protections of uncontacted peoples threatening the survival of 7,500 people in isolation and vitally important rainforest (cited). Mining concessions, logging, and other ‘free trade’ contracts were railroaded through APEC with President Biden accompanying Boluarte to promote the exploitation of mineral resources at the expense of human rights and democracy.
Despite the rhetoric of ‘no more backyard,’ Biden/Harris played an active role in destabilizing the region and pursuing a profits-before-people agenda. In September of 2021, USAID signed a $321 million dollar agreement with Peru to support “capacity to provide security” through the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL). Among the programs of crop fumigation, business and corporate zone ‘protections,’ and mining infrastructure, USAID also funds the Peruvian National Police both directly and for “police services” for 29 existing mining contracts (see report). General Laura Richardson, head of the U.S. Southern Command has said quite clearly that “rare earth elements, largest oil reserves” are essential to “our national security,” suggesting that military intervention would be necessary. Raising even more suspicion of U.S. direct involvement, Lisa Kenna, met with the Minister of Defense of Peru, Gustavo Bobbio Rosas, to discuss “business” just prior and during the coup (cited; cited2). While dozens of bodies were literally in the streets in January, the U.S. approved ongoing aid to security forces and further normalizing the coup by blaming Castillo. The latest move by the Peruvian Congress, is to declare that even peaceful protest assembly will be subject to imprisonment and fines, while popular demands grow stronger and even more resilient for renewed elections and intensified demands to release Castillo.
The crisis in Peru reveals an underlying contradiction over and again: U.S. ‘interests’ in the region do not uphold genuine democracy. In response to the protests, Boluarte with US support has called popular mobilizations “narco-terrorism,” dispatching troops in a “frontal fight” across the country to “root out drug-trafficking.” Elva Navarro, a witness of the police repression, described it as “massacres against the people,” with police behaving with a total disregard for humanity (cited). Navarro and others expressed their fears of exercising their democratic rights to assembly and are calling for an immediate moratorium on all arms sales, teargas, pellets, and any military support to Peru under the Boluarte regime.
While military and police repression drive people away from any meaningful process of reclaiming their rights works wide, USAID ‘infrastructure’ hinges on an extraction industry that causes violence and irreparable harm to people and the environment.
A future course in U.S. electoral politics will either reverse directions for a u-turn towards a morally tenable foreign policy to immediately cease intervention and militarism and to insist on the return of the democratically elected leader, Pedro Castillo, or it will even more brazenly show the world its intent for imperial control over critical mineral resources at the expense of human health and Earth. In the meantime, the Peruvian people, joining others in the hemisphere, will continue to struggle for peace until a free and fair process for self-determination can move forward.
With armed guards continuing to patrol public plazas throughout the city, repression is being used to quell the widespread disapproval of Boluarte and to deny the Peruvian people their rights to democracy.
Two days after the arrest of Castillo, 12,000 police were in the streets, shooting at protestors and preventing any kind of assembly. Anthropologist Elmer Torrejón Pizarro who witnessed the massive protests on January 19th wrote, “I saw no criminals next to me, much less terrorists. I observed young university students and mostly peasants, women and men from the south” (cited). Since December, seventy-seven protestors have been killed, most by fatal gunshot wounds amidst repressive measures by the Peruvian National Police and armed forces.
A preliminary report from an independent delegation of human rights observers in February 2023 documented human rights violations throughout the country by the National Police of Peru and the Peruvian Army, who have engaged in “abusive and disproportionate use of lethal weapons,” including lead shots fired at close range, tanks deployed against non-violent protestors, and sexual abuse committed by security forces (cited). In their recent report, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard added that these were not isolated instances by ‘rogue officers,’ rather “a deliberate and coordinated state response” (cited).
Even under the highly questionable circumstances of December 2022, the Biden/Harris administration immediately endorsed Boluarte, effectively legitimating the new leadership as a transitional government despite the suspect conditions of Castillo’s arrest. In fact, just days after an unarmed 15-year-old boy, David Atequipe Quispe, was shot and killed by a policeman in the back, the former CIA analyst and then-spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, Ned Price, blamed the protestors, and condoned the ‘rule of law’ as pretext to jail the president in order to ‘restore democracy” (cited; cited). In mid-January the Washington Office on Latin America called on the Biden/Harris administration to reverse its position and cease all support for Boluarte, noting that the U.S. stance had been contradictory and vague on the denouncement of the regime’s violence (cited). Shortly thereafter a perfunctory message was posted on the U.S. embassy’s facebook page, where its followers freely expressed their blatantly racist support for the coup.
Such a plain attempt to criminalize and repress democratic dissent should have raised alarm for the Organization of American States (OAS) and the U.S. State Department whose concerns for democracy headline diplomatic occasions in regards to Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the Biden/Harris administration has been silent, tacitly green-lighting the violence, even praising the security response by Boluarte.
Angela Marino is an Associate Professor at the University of California Berkeley and faculty lead of the Critical Perspectives of Democracy + Media Lab (DemoxMedia.org).