President Dina Boluarte of Peru was abruptly removed from office by Congress early Friday morning, following a unanimous vote for impeachment. This decisive action came in the wake of a shocking shooting at a cumbia concert and widespread public frustration over her administration’s inability to control rampant crime, which ultimately led her former allies to withdraw their support.
Lawmakers voted 122-0 to impeach Ms. Boluarte, who had become Peru’s most unpopular president in recent memory. They invoked a constitutional provision allowing Congress to declare the presidency vacant due to “permanent moral incapacity.”
Cheers erupted both inside the legislative building and among demonstrators gathered outside. In a pre-recorded statement released after the vote, Ms. Boluarte lamented, “At all times I called for unity, to work together, to fight for our country.”
José Jerí, the president of Congress, is now slated to assume the role of interim president until the general election, currently scheduled for April 12, unless a new leader is elected by the lawmakers themselves.
Ms. Boluarte’s impeachment marks a significant turning point, representing a sharp reversal for the right-wing and centrist parties that had supported her coalition government for the past three years. This support continued even as her approval ratings plummeted dramatically, from approximately 21 percent at the start of her term to a mere 2 to 4 percent.
On Friday, Congress passed four impeachment motions against her, with broad support from parties across the political spectrum.
Her downfall is directly linked to widespread public anger over escalating crime rates.
Peru is currently struggling with a dramatic increase in gang-controlled extortion and contract killings. National police data indicates that extortion cases have surged from just a few hundred in 2017 to over 2,000 incidents per month this year. In the last two years alone, dozens of bus drivers targeted by extortion rings have been murdered, and several concerts, stores, and other small businesses have been attacked with explosives.
As legislators prepared to debate Ms. Boluarte’s impeachment, television crews and groups of protestors gathered outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in Lima, fueled by rumors that she might seek asylum there once her presidential immunity was lifted.
One protester held a sign for the cameras that simply read, “We’re governed by shame.”
Earlier this week, Ms. Boluarte had advised Peruvians to ignore calls and messages from extortionists. “Don’t open those calls, those messages,” she urged. “Tell the police.”
However, her efforts, including repeated declarations of states of emergency, largely failed to control the violence. Experts also argue that several laws she championed to protect political allies inadvertently weakened the prosecution of organized crime.
In a recent harrowing incident on Wednesday night, local media reported that men on motorcycles opened fire with a machine gun on a popular cumbia band performing in Lima, leaving four members wounded.
Ms. Boluarte ascended to the presidency in 2022 after her predecessor, Pedro Castillo, the Marxist party leader she served as vice president, was impeached and arrested for attempting to illegally seize control of Congress and the judiciary.
Her refusal to resign after Castillo’s removal, contrary to her earlier promises for new elections, triggered violent protests that resulted in 49 civilian deaths during police and military crackdowns. She is currently under investigation by national human rights prosecutors.
To maintain her grip on power, Ms. Boluarte had depended on a fragile coalition of right-wing and centrist parties, weathering seven previous impeachment attempts by leftist lawmakers. Interestingly, the very parties that orchestrated her removal on Friday, led by prominent presidential hopefuls Keiko Fujimori and Rafael López Aliaga, had previously opposed her impeachment.
With national elections merely six months away, politicians across Peru have been scrambling to distance themselves from the deeply unpopular Ms. Boluarte.
Earlier this week, conservative presidential candidate Phillip Butters faced a hostile mob attack at a radio station in the southern region of Puno. He was defending his past support for the government’s crackdown on protestors following Ms. Boluarte’s controversial rise to power. Police had to escort him out, wearing a helmet, as protestors pelted him with rocks and debris.
This incident highlighted the extremely volatile political climate, leading some observers to believe it may have prompted certain right-wing lawmakers to finally abandon the deeply unpopular president.
But as Gonzalo Banda, a Peruvian political scientist at University College London, observed, “it’s only because electoral incentives have increased.” Following the recent unrest, he added, “I think the entire political establishment understood that there was no more time.”
Ms. Boluarte has also been accused of accepting Rolex watches as bribes, abandoning her duties for cosmetic surgery, and assisting the fugitive head of her former Marxist party in evading arrest – charges which she vehemently denies.
The scandal surrounding the luxury watches resonated deeply in a country battling a struggling economy and increasing hunger. This controversy undermined Peru’s reputation, which was once lauded for its democratic consolidation and for lifting millions out of poverty during a commodities boom driven by its mining sector.
“I think few presidents have faced political crises with such frivolity as Boluarte,” Mr. Banda commented.
He further elaborated, “She thought that after the initial protests, she had free rein, with a Congress uninterested in exercising political oversight. But everything is very precarious in Peru.”
Her impeachment is also set against a backdrop of longstanding political turmoil in Peru, where six former presidents have been imprisoned over the past two decades, with three convicted of corruption.
Since 2016, Peru has been rocked by successive corruption scandals. Two presidents, Mr. Castillo and Martín Vizcarra, faced impeachment; another, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, resigned to avoid removal; and almost all living former presidents have been investigated for corruption or human rights abuses. Alan García, who served two non-consecutive terms, died by suicide in 2019 just as authorities arrived to detain him.
In April, former first lady Nadine Heredia sought asylum at the Brazilian Embassy in Lima. This came after she and her husband, former president Ollanta Humala, were sentenced to 15 years for laundering nearly $3 million—primarily from the Brazilian firm Odebrecht—to finance Mr. Humala’s 2006 and 2011 presidential campaigns.
Other former presidents were also entangled in Odebrecht-related investigations: Alejandro Toledo received a 20-year sentence last year for accepting $35 million in bribes, while Mr. Kuczynski spent years under house arrest facing charges he denies.
Some charges were even more severe. Alberto Fujimori, who governed with authoritarian tactics in the 1990s, served over a decade in prison for human rights abuses and corruption before receiving a controversial pardon in 2023. He passed away last year at 86.
More recently, Mr. Castillo, Peru’s first left-wing president in a generation, has been charged with rebellion and abuse of authority for his attempt to dissolve Congress in 2022. Later that year, Mexico granted asylum to his family, leading the Peruvian government to expel the Mexican ambassador.
While Ms. Boluarte is deeply unpopular, Congress itself is widely mistrusted. Any actions by legislators to consolidate power further could ignite renewed unrest if perceived as exploiting the current crisis for political gain.
One demonstrator outside the congressional building held a sign that eloquently read, “Criminals sacrifice criminals to look like heroes.”