Former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo’s pre-trial detention was extended to 18 months on Thursday as deadly protests dragged on for a second week.
Seven people were killed Thursday in Ayacucho, in the south of the country, during clashes between soldiers and supporters of the ousted president, according to regional health authorities. A clash near Ayacucho airport notably left two dead, according to the Ombudsman of the Republic of Peru, Eliana Revollar.
Two people were killed on Sunday, five on Monday, and the death toll now stands at at least 15 in protests that gripped the country after President Castillo was arrested on December 7.
On Thursday, a judicial panel within the Supreme Court ordered the extension of his period of pre-trial detention, the time to continue the investigation into the criminal charges brought against him. He is accused of rebellion and conspiracy. On December 7, the Peruvian Parliament impeached President Pedro Castillo for attempting to dissolve Congress so as to prevent an impeachment vote against him. The 53-year-old former teacher was arrested hours later by his bodyguard as he went to the Mexican embassy to seek political asylum. Vice-President Dina Boluarte was sworn in afterwards, becoming the country’s sixth president in just five years, but Castillo’s supporters refuse this institutional change.
Castillo accuses the United States
From the Marco Puente Llanos barracks in Ate, on the outskirts of Lima, where he is being held, Pedro Castillo has denied all the accusations and continues to claim that he remains the legitimate president of the country. In a new handwritten letter, he accuses the United States of having hatched this crisis. “The visit of the American ambassador to the Palace of the government was not free, nor in favor of the country. It was to give the order to take the troops out into the streets and massacre my defenseless people; and, incidentally, leave the way open to mining operations,” he accuses.
His supporters continue to mobilize. Protesters continued to block roads on Thursday, despite the government declaring a state of emergency a day earlier. This state of emergency grants special powers to the armed forces and the police and limits the freedoms of citizens, in particular the right of assembly, in a large part of the country but mainly in the agricultural and mining regions, which support Castillo.
Eliana Revollar claimed that the armed forces used firearms and dropped tear gas canisters on protesters from helicopters. As a Defender of Rights, she demanded an immediate end to these practices.
To ward off the risk of an uprising, late Thursday the government imposed a curfew in 15 provinces, mostly in rural parts of the Andes. Local television showed a line of dozens of vehicles stuck on the side of a major coastal highway south of Lima and hundreds of protesters placing rocks on roads in the Puno and Arequipa regions and in the tourist hub from Cusco.
The political crisis presents a risk for the production of the main copper mines of the Andean nation, the second largest world producer of this metal. Highway blockades, particularly in key southern mining areas, have begun to complicate supplies to and from mines, such as the massive Chinese-flagged Las Bambas mine, which produces around 2% of the global copper.
“We were taken hostage in Peru”, says a Frenchwoman
Tourism, another economic pole of the country, is affected. On Tuesday, the train that leads from the ancient Inca capital Cusco to the prodigious site of Macchu Picchu was put on hold for fear of demonstrations. Hundreds of tourists were stranded. About 100 kilometers south of Cusco, six buses carrying around 60 people were still stuck Thursday in Checacupe, an isolated mountain town near the border with Bolivia.
Wilmaris Villarroel, a Costa Rican mountaineer whose bus was stopped on Tuesday en route to La Paz, told Reuters on Thursday that residents did not want to let the group, which includes the elderly and children. “They said if we tried to get through they would burn us alive,” Villarroel said. The police maintained a minimal presence and efforts to get help from foreign embassies in Peru were unsuccessful, according to the young woman. In a video she shot, verified by Reuters, and shared on Instagram, travelers from Argentina, Chile, France, Japan, England, Peru and the United States call for help international. “We were taken hostage in Peru,” a young woman says in French in the video.