the crisis worsens in Peru

With our correspondent in Lima, Juliette Chaignon

The images are looping on social networks. An armored National Police vehicle rams through Gate 3 of the University of San Marcos in Peru’s capital.

Dozens of police officers, helmets, shields in hand, enter the campus.

For three days, the students occupied the premises. They piled up food donations there and allowed the demonstrators, who came from the center and the south of the country, to sleep on the spot, against the advice of the university.

A few minutes after entering, the police ordered demonstrators to lie down on their stomachs. And to be silent. In a press release, the management of the establishment justifies the intervention by the context of the state of emergency.

More than 200 students and demonstrators are still being held back by the police. Some of them in the anti-terrorist services. Saturday evening, in Lima, demonstrators therefore protested in front of the prefecture to demand their release.

The national committee for the defense of human rights denounces arbitrary action and abuse of power by law enforcement “. The organization also deplores police custody without access to a lawyer.

“It’s another world”

The country notably closed Machu Picchu, an Inca citadel in the Andes. Four hundred and eighteen tourists stranded there will be repatriated. Tourism constitutes an important part of Peru’s income. More than a hundred roads are still blocked in the country.

Peru was, until now, the fourth destination in Latin America. And Peru’s tourist receipts allowed this country to finance a significant part of the purchases of imports in foreign currency. Given that Peru is currently undergoing a very serious food crisis, one can think that the repercussions are likely to be dramatic since Peru’s tourism companies, in particular its hotel sector which was very export-oriented, risk going bankrupt. And Peru was in the process of developing new tourist sites next to all of Cuzco and Machu Picchu, which made it possible to diversify and therefore spread international tourist receipts throughout the country, and this site is today called into question by these dramatic events, concludes François Vellas, expert with the World Tourism Organization.

The interim president still refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the protests. Dina Boluarte denounces demands that would only concern the return of ex-president Pedro Castillo, recently deposed, and would have no social significance. But the image of the former head of state is intimately linked to the racial question and the divide between urban and rural areas.

Pedro Castillo, he certainly had a small percentage of votes in the presidential election, at the start it still represented several million people, so these people identified with someone. The region where he is from, that is to say Cajamarca for example, we no longer speak Quechua because Quechua was completely banished during the conquest. Quechua, it is spoken in the south of Peru, Quechua and Aymara, where the social movements have been the strongest, it is Cuzco, Puno, Arequipa. If this population does not reach the capital, it has the feeling of not being heard. In himself, Pedro Castillo represents the people who live in conditions where there is no electricity, there is no water. It’s another world. And on the other hand we have the traditional Spanish Creole group which denies this identity and this social suffering. It is a social war, in fact, the one that is being played out, analyzes Isabelle Tauzin, professor at Bordeaux Montaigne University.

The population fears in particular the return to a military regime of the type that the country has known in the past.

The current president, previously she was vice-president. By the Constitution, she became president. And the potential successor to the current vice president is the president of Congress. His name is José Williams Zapata, he is a retired general, he was implicated in a massacre, the Accomarca massacre, which occurred in the 1980s. So he really represents, in the head of Congress, the power of the armed repression of the 1980s. Personally, I think that what can happen is that once Dina Boluarte has carried out this repression, and that is what people also fear on place my interlocutors, Peruvian academics, is that an armed regime is gradually being put in place. What the demonstrators want is an electoral calendar that is acceptable, and not, to begin with, postponing the elections to 2024, which Dina Boluarte proposed, concludes Isabelle Tauzin, professor at Bordeaux Montaigne University.

►Read again: Peru at an impasse: the demonstrations continue, the political deadlock persists