LIMA (AP) — Protests against the government of Peruvian President Dina Boluarte added a new death in the south of the country on Thursday, a 16-year-old teenager. They reached 49 deaths due to the convulsion that began in December, after Congress dismissed President Pedro Castillo for trying to dissolve this power of the State to avoid its removal.
The last victim was identified with the initials BAJ, aged 16, and died in the southern region of Puno, according to the report of the Ombudsman’s Office on Thursday at noon.
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Relatives said that he had been hospitalized for two days in critical condition for having a bullet embedded in his brain, in a transmission with the website of the Peruvian newspaper La República.
With this death, the number of deaths during the protests in Puno rose to 19, where the deadliest day of the convulsion in the Andean country had already been recorded on Monday, which included the death of a police officer burned in his patrol car after being attacked. by a group of protesters.
The Ombudsman’s Office reported on Thursday that there were mobilizations, strikes and roadblocks in 35 provinces, most of them in the southern regions of the country.
In addition, it registered 80 blockade points on national roads and a siege of protesters to a shopping center in the city of Arequipa, in another southern region of the same name.
In Lima, hundreds marched through the center of the city demanding Boluarte’s resignation and the closure of Congress. Some called for the release of Castillo, who remains in prison.
The regional governors of Puno, Cusco and Apurímac have called for the resignation of the president as a necessary measure to appease the demonstrations in the country.
In Cusco, a group of protesters tried to burn the headquarters of the General Inspectorate of the National Police in that region. They dumped fuel and set a fire. The police managed to disperse them and put out the fire that had started at the door of the premises.
In Puno, a delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights arrived to gather information on the protests and the social crisis, as part of its official visit that had begun the day before with meetings with Baluarte and later with other authorities. The IACHR was also in Peru in November, at the request of Pedro Castillo, when he was still president to address the crisis of political instability in the government of the ex-president who was removed in December.
In Apurímac, another southern region, a group of residents protested at the entrance to the Las Bambas mine.
The protests – which demand an advance of general elections, the resignation of Boluarte and the closure of Congress – gained new impetus this week, after resuming last Wednesday, after a partial truce for the year-end holidays. With Castillo’s removal, political instability in Peru has already claimed five presidents in six years.
Among the protesters who demand the resignation of the president, the closure of Congress and new elections, there are those who also demand that Castillo, the predecessor of Boluarte who was deposed and remains in preventive detention for eight months while being investigated for alleged rebellion.
Boluarte assumed the government after Castillo, who had been president since 2021, was removed by Congress after trying to dissolve this state power with a television message on December 7. The current president was vice president and she was elected on the same list with her predecessor. Parliament swore her in on the same day Castillo’s dismissal for being her constitutional successor.
Castillo was arrested when he was in a vehicle with his entourage on an avenue in the center of Lima. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, he was going to the Mexican embassy to seek political asylum.
