The rights group implicates Dina Boluarte and other senior officials in the deadly repression of protesters who took to the streets after Pedro Castillo’s ouster in December 2022.
Protester in Lima on Feb. 4, 2023, holding the Wiphala flag representing some Andean native people. (Candy Sotomayor, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Pablo Meriguet
Peoples Dispatch
Amnesty International last week published an 86-page document regarding the series of human rights violations committed by the Peruvian state during the protests that took place between December 2022 and March 2023.
During this period, when tens of thousands of Peruvians took to the streets in rage against the coup carried out against President Pedro Castillo, more than 50 people died and thousands were injured.
The report alleges that President Dina Boluarte, who became the de facto president of Peru following the coup, as well as other senior state officials, either planned the police and military operations that violated the human rights of thousands of people protesting the coup or deliberately failed to stop the publicly known crimes.
For example, in Andahuaylas city in Apurímac, special forces used tactics that repeatedly violated human rights for several months without any order to cease such actions.
The same special forces chiefs were deployed in Juliaca, where on Jan. 9, 2023, 18 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded. In other words, according to Amnesty International, Boluarte may be implicated in calling for this type of repression or for not having done anything to prevent it.
Boluarte at the podium with her defense minister, Alberto Otárola, during a military academy graduation on Dec. 15, 2022. (Ministerio de Defensa del Perú, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
The report says:
“Although President Boluarte denied under oath before the Prosecutor’s Office that she had direct contact with the commanders and minimized her role in state repression, the report shows that, during the three months in which protests took place across the country, she met several times with the commanders of the armed forces and police, giving her multiple opportunities to condemn the widespread illegitimate use of force and order a change of tactics on the ground.”
Amnesty International continued:
“However, instead of using her frequent meetings with ministers, police, and military commanders for this purpose, she continued to publicly praise the security forces while vilifying protesters as ‘terrorists’ and ‘criminals,’ without providing evidence of this. Moreover, instead of holding her subordinates accountable, she decided to promote key officials to higher positions, even though they directly oversaw the police and military operations that caused multiple deaths.”
In addition, the report details that several commanders of the National Police of Peru signed documents stating that the protesters were “terrorists,” thus justifying the special forces’ intervention in the development of the protests through the lethal use of force.
Castillo in 2021. (Presidencia de la República del Perú, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)
Similarly, the Peruvian police did not sanction any of its officers for the serious acts committed against the protesters. In fact, it has shelved 18 files investigating these incidents.
Moreover, according to Amnesty International, President Boluarte promoted the police general who was behind the planning and execution of the repression of the protesters.
In the face of the serious accusations, the Boluarte government denied any responsibility for the human rights violations that took place during the protests against his government.
Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén told the press “We categorically reject each one of the sections of the report…even more so when it improperly tries to attribute to the president a mediate responsibility in the events that took place during the protests.”
However, Madeleine Penman, Amnesty International’s Latin America researcher, told the newspaper Voz de América that a legal analysis was made “of all the decisions and omissions made by the president during three months, and based on this analysis we have reached the conclusion that confirms that Dina Boluarte could be considered as the perpetrator-by-means (intellectual author) for the serious rights violations committed during the protests.”
In this way, another front of political questioning faces Boluarte after the Peruvian Congress allowed an investigation of the president for an alleged bribery case for having received —from the governor of Ayacucho, Wilfredo Oscorima — Rolex watches and luxury jewelry that she did not declare.
Pablo Meriguet is a correspondent for Peoples Dispatch.
This article is from Peoples Dispatch.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
At the moment, I am actually doing research in Lima toward my dissertation concerning what I have provisionally termed “rosa-golpista” military governments in Bolivia, Panama, and Peru (and secondarily, those in countries such as Ecuador, Honduras, and Suriname) during the Cold War, and how their rhetorical and policy postures contributed to motivating the rise of the Reagan Doctrine in the United States.
Last year, I made the following statement on a petition against proposals to station or deploy US troops on Peruvian soil:
“In order to build a more just and positive bilateral relationship, the United States should break away from its pattern of past subversion and intervention in Peruvian society.
This has included everything from logistical support for the Peruvian Air Force’s napalm-bombing in the 1964 Matsés Genocide and the 1965 suppression of the MIR-ELN guerrilla insurgency (the latter
also including ostensible CIA involvement) that incurred high civilian casualties, to training military officers including General Juan Velasco Alvarado involved in the 1968 coup at institutions such as the School of the Americas (later WHINSEC), to noted political scientist Al Stepan’s recruitment of disgraced Peruvian intelligence leader and death squad coordinator Vladimiro Montesinos as a CIA asset who received at least $10 million from the agency, to extensive US military/intelligence involvement in counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations within the framework of the “War on Drugs” (including the joint CIA-Peruvian Air Force operation that resulted in the tragic 2001 Peru shootdown of US missionary Roni Bowers and her infant daughter), to the $35 mil. worth of USAID financial support for the Fujimori government’s mass-sterilization of around 300,000 indigenous women as part of [Plan Verde] from 1996-98, to key US figures’ likely preexisting awareness of and possible involvement in the ouster of Pedro Castillo’s democratically-elected administration last year.”