The Peruvian Congress voted on Friday morning to remove President Dina Boluarte from office, on the grounds that she was not dealing effectively with a crime wave sweeping the country.
The Congress immediately installed its own leader, Jose Jeri, in Boluarte’s place as president, as she did not have a vice president in place.
Boluarte’s unpopularity had been building and there were no less than eight previous efforts to remove her from office, but the sudden end of her presidency still came as a surprise. Boluarte was deposed at just past midnight after refusing to appear before Congress and testify in her own defense. The specific charge leading to her ouster was “permanent moral incapacity.”
The Peruvian Congress has 130 seats and 122 of the lawmakers voted to remove her. The highest approval rating she was able to score in a recent poll was four percent. A crowd of demonstrators gathered outside the Congress building burst into cheers when the results of the vote were announced.
Boluarte took office in 2022 precisely the way she would leave it less than three years later: her predecessor Pedro Castillo, an avowed Marxist, was removed from office after making an unsuccessful attempt to dissolve Congress.
The big issue in Castillo’s day was corruption, a problem his Vice President Dina Boluarte promised to address when she replaced him. She wound up being investigated for corruption on several occasions herself, including a scandal over allegedly accepting expensive watches as bribes that was dubbed “Rolexgate.”
Some of those corruption investigations could be revived now that she has been stripped of her presidential immunity. In addition to being Peru’s first universally accepted female president, Boluarte was its eighth president in ten years, counting Mercedes Aráoz, who served as president for one month in 2019 during the impeachment process against then-President Martín Vizcarra. Many Peruvians supporting Aráoz did not consider her a legitimate head of state and she remains absent from many lists of presidents, but she did govern between September and October of that year. Three of Boluarte’s predecessors are currently in jail.
Peru has experienced a shocking rise in crime, especially gang murders and extortion, under Boluarte’s administration. Protection rackets became big business for organized crime. Gangsters have been using WhatsApp messages to demand protection money from business owners. Those who refuse to pay find their shops burned to the grown or blown to pieces with dynamite. Motorcycle-riding hit men have racked up an incredibly high body count.
One of the reasons Congress met to remove Boluarte from office was that a major public transportation union went on strike to protest the wanton murder of its drivers by extortion gangs.
The hot new trend in Peruvian extortion rackets is for gangsters to demand protection money from bus drivers, then ride up on motorcycles and pump the bus full of bullets if the driver refuses. Over 40 public transportation drivers have been murdered this way, most recently including a bus driver named Daniel Jose Cedeno Alfonso, whose slaying was a galvanizing event for the transport union.
Boluarte responded by suggesting Peruvians should stop reading their text messages, so they do not see the demands for extortion money.
“Don’t open them, because that’s where the point of extortion immediately comes in. Do not answer, do not open messages, inform the Police. The Police will carry out the investigation,” she advised.
The transport union leaders called off their strike after meeting with Boluarte officials and receiving promises of enhanced protection for their drivers, but the fatal political damage was already done.
The Associated Press (AP) observed that the final indignity visited upon Boluarte was TV Peru, the national television station, cutting off her farewell address after just a few minutes to show Jeri getting sworn in.
Before TV Peru cut her off, Boluarte told the nation she assumed the presidency with “courage and love” for the country, and claimed she has always placed the good of Peruvians ahead of her own interests.
“I have not thought about myself, but about the more than 34 million Peruvians who deserve growth with democratic stability, and with a government that works without corruption, as we have been doing in my government,” she said.
Boluarte said the crime problem that brought down her administration “has been brewing for decades, and has been strengthened by illegal immigration, which past administrations haven’t defeated.”
“Instead, they’ve opened the doors of our borders and allowed criminals to enter everywhere… without any restrictions,” she complained.
Boluarte was in the midst of recounting her administration’s achievements when the cameras switched over to Jeri’s swearing-in ceremony. Jeri promised he would be guided by “empathy” during the presidential transition, and he vowed to succeed where Boluarte had failed on crime.
“The evil that afflicts us at this moment is citizen insecurity, the main enemy that afflicts us. Criminal organizations, they are our enemies today and as enemies we must declare war on crime,” he said, promising to use every means at his disposal to fight gangsters, including the Peruvian armed forces.
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