[Inequality, poverty and discrimination lie behind explosion of
rural anger against rich Lima]
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‘WE’LL FIGHT UNTIL THE END’: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE CENTRE OF
PERU’S UPRISING  
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Tom Phillips in Sicuani
January 30, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Inequality, poverty and discrimination lie behind explosion of
rural anger against rich Lima _

A demonstrator shouts slogans before gathering at Tupac Amaru square
in Cusco, Peru, Michael Bednar/Getty Images

 

One by one, the rebel _campesinos _clambered up to the improvised
podium they had built atop a 6ft earth barricade, to declare their
determination to topple the president of Peru
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“Brothers and sisters, right now our Peru
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Nilda Mendoza Coronel, a 35-year-old farmer, told hundreds of strikers
who had gathered under a ferocious morning sun.

“We’ll fight until the very end, _carajo_!” Mendoza bellowed
through a megaphone. “No one will stop our struggle!”

Another speaker, Aparicio Meléndez, urged the crowd in the Andean
town of Sicuani to ignore reports that army troops were en route to
extinguish their revolt.

“We’ll stay here until they’ve spent their very last bullet,”
the 55-year-old grazier vowed as he looked out on the protest blocking
the 940-mile highway through the Peruvian Andes.

A two-word rallying cry had been painted on to the tarmac behind the
barricade: “People’s insurgency.”

Residents block roads, in Sicuani-Canchis, Cusco province,
Peru. Photograph: Aldair Mejia/EPA

Sicuani is at the heart of the seven-week-old insurrection against
Peru’s president, Dina Boluarte, and the country’s political
establishment that began in early December after its leftist
president, Pedro Castillo, was unseated and arrested
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being accused of trying to stage a coup.

Strange and violent political winds have been buffeting Latin America
and the Caribbean of late, with a far-right uprising in Brazil
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political and social meltdown in Haiti
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and protests
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the arrest of one of Bolivia’s most prominent opposition leaders.
But nowhere has the turmoil been more widespread or deadly than in
Peru, where at least 58 lives have been lost since Castillo’s
dramatic demise.

Huge swaths of South America’s fourth most populous country have
been paralysed by protests and roadblocks since Castillo’s downfall,
as his supporters – and those outraged at the government’s deadly
response – hit the streets to demand Boluarte’s resignation, fresh
elections and justice for the dozens allegedly killed by security
forces.

The Guardian travelled through the most affected region, between the
Andean cities of Cusco and Juliaca – where 17 people were killed
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the worst day of violence – to hear the voices of the mutiny against
the Peruvian government.

The gruelling 210-mile journey took three days and involved navigating
scores of checkpoints guarded by _campesino_ protesters, as well as
hundreds of barricades made from boulders, tree trunks, dilapidated
vehicles, glass and scrap metal.

Beyond the roadblocks, it was also a journey through the profound
social inequality, grinding poverty and discrimination that lie behind
the explosion of rural anger against what many protesters call the
corrupt, self-serving and largely white political establishment in the
capital, Lima.

“It’s as if we aren’t humans … It’s as if we are worth
nothing,” said Raúl Constantino Samillán Sanga, whose 30-year-old
brother was gunned down in Juliaca during clashes between police and
protesters
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“The whole of the Andes is now saying we’ve had enough – this
must change.”

The trip through the centre of Peru’s political earthquake began in
Cusco, once the capital of the Inca empire and, today, the South
American country’s most important tourist destination, with nearly 3
million visitors each year.

Demonstrators arrive from surrounding communities and gather at Túpac
Amaru square in Cusco, Peru. Photograph: Michael Bednar/Getty Images

The tourists have vanished since the uprising began, with Cusco’s
airport repeatedly shut down by authorities and the nearby Machu
Picchu closed
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this month.

“Everyone’s on edge and worried and a bit scared too,” said
Hannah Jenkinson, a British fashion designer who runs a boutique in
Cusco’s now largely deserted historic centre.

A few streets away, hundreds of demonstrators marched towards the
plaza where in the 18th century the Indigenous leader Túpac Amaru was
quartered and beheaded after rebelling against Spanish rule.

“She’s going down! She’s going down! The murderer’s going
down!” the crowds chanted of Boluarte as they surged through
Cusco’s cobbled streets waving Peru’s red and white flag.

Twenty-five miles south-east of Cusco, past pre-Incan ruins and
eucalyptus-dotted mountains, lay the village of Villahermosa – the
location of the first major roadblock along Peru’s Route 3S highway.

Dozens of villagers, including elderly women clutching
traditional _huaraca_ whips_ _woven from alpaca fleece, had blocked
the road with tree trunks and tyres to express their fury at decades
of government neglect and the recent wave of killings, most of which
have been blamed on security forces.

Juvenal Luna Jara, 22, said he had joined the rebellion one week
earlier, incensed that so many protesters had been killed in Peru’s
long-neglected rural south, which was at the centre of the brutal
12-year war waged by the Shining Path guerrilla group. As he saw it,
the majority of lives were lost in such regions
because _provincianos_ (country folk) were considered second-class
citizens, or worse. “It’s as if they were killing dogs,” he
fumed.

Hours earlier, Boluarte had implored protesters to accept a nationwide
truce. But there was no hint of compromise in Villahermosa as farmers
gathered to vent their rage at the president’s role in the ousting
of Castillo, a former union leader who was born into poverty and
was propelled into the presidency in 2021
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impoverished rural voters in places such as this.

Juvenal Luna Jara, 22, in Villahermosa, Peru. Photograph: Tom
Phillips

“If there’s no solution, the struggle will go on,” the villagers
roared before the Guardian’s vehicle was allowed to continue its
journey.

In village after village along the boulder-strewn highway, the message
was the same, as disillusioned and downtrodden farmers gathered by
their blockades to offer impassioned speeches about the state of their
nation and how their resource-rich mining region had been milked for
profits that were never seen.

Dina Quispe wept as she denounced how Peruvian authorities had
branded the protesters narco-funded _terrucos_ (terrorists) and met
their call for political change with repression and bloodshed.

“We have been humiliated and forgotten,” said the 41-year-old
saleswoman from the community of Checyuyoc. “They are killing our
brothers with bullets.”

Through her tears, Quispe voiced disgust that she shared a first name
withPeru’s first female president
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Boluarte has become a lightning rod for far deeper disillusionment
with the broken politics of a country that has had seven presidents in
the last six years and where a quarter of the population struggle to
properly feed themselves.

Quispe said to reporters: “Please, take this voice of protest from
deepest and humble Peru [to the world].”

A group of protesters block the Panamericana Sur highway, the most
important highway in the country. Photograph: Aldair Mejia/EPA

A few miles away in Sicuani, a town now almost completely cut off from
the outside world by the roadblocks, hundreds of Quechua women wearing
sombreros, _pollera_ skirts and dazzling quilts were on the march.

“We are fighting for our future and the future of our children and
our grandchildren,” said Roxana Chahuanco, 40, as locals prepared to
debate their next move after the government announced it would deploy
troops to clear the roads.

There, Mendoza Coronel evoked the Indigenous martyrs Túpac Amaru and
his wife, Micaela Bastidas, as she urged locals to intensify their
peasant rebellion against the “corrupt” Lima elites. “They look
down on us because we are the children of _campesinos_ and for being
men of the fields,” she said.

At the next village, a cow’s skull had been placed on a pole above a
barricade fashioned from two heaps of rubble and earth. “It’s
Dina,” joked one of the women policing the checkpoint.

From Sicuani, the highway climbed even higher into the Andes towards
the spectacular 4,300-metre border with the department of Puno, where
Aymara Indigenous communities are also in revolt against the new
government.

Boluarte further infuriated the region’s inhabitants last week when
she told foreign journalists “Puno isn’t Peru” – a declaration
the president subsequently claimed had been misunderstood.

“We _are_ Peruvians,” said one woman guarding a roadblock
outside the town of Ayaviri. “It was in Puno that the Inca empire
was born.”

Aerial view of relatives and friends of the victims of clashes with
the Peruvian police in the main plaza of the Andean city of Juliaca,
southern Peru.. Photograph: Juan Carlos Cisneros/AFP/Getty Images

After Ayaviri, the highway descended towards Puno’s largest city,
Juliaca, a dilapidated and edgy mining and smuggling hub, where
anti-government protests continue to rage as local families mourn
their dead.

Behind a metal door decorated with a black ribbon of mourning sat
María Ysabel Samillan Sanga, who lost her younger brother one Monday
in early January.

Marco Antonio Samillán Sanga was a medical student who had been
working as a volunteer medic in Juliaca when protesters tried to storm
the city’s airport and security forces responded with live
ammunition.

The 30-year-old student was shot through the heart as he attended to a
boy who had inhaled teargas – one of at least 17 people to die in
Juliaca that day
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“It was a massacre,” said his sister. “There is no other word
for it.”

Samillán Sanga wept as she remembered how her brother had worked his
way out of extreme poverty and into medical school. He had dreamed of
becoming a neurosurgeon and creating health programmes for Puno’s
rural poor.

Marco Antonio Samillán Sanga’s grave and his family and fellow
medical volunteers visiting the grave. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The
Guardian

“Right now, I feel like I’m being obliged to live … If it was up
to me, I’d die too because there are days I just cannot cope with
this pain,” she said, tears coursing down her cheeks.

Samillán Sanga also saw prejudice and discrimination at the root of
her brother’s death and Peru’s uprising. “We have feelings. We
are humans. We feel. We cry. We have emotions. And we are in pain,”
said her brother, Raúl Constantino.

A cow skull in a blockade. Photograph: Tom Phillips

The family said they feared government reprisals for speaking out but
would not be silenced. “I hope someone reads this and thinks: how is
the Samillán Sanga family?” said María Ysabel. “Because the
truth is we have been shattered. My family will never be the same
again.”

 

Read more: Violent protests in Peru evoke memories of darkest days of
civil war
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_TOM PHILLIPS is the Guardian's Latin America correspondent _

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* Peru
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* Pedro Castillo
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* Dina Boluarte
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* election
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* Indigenous Rights
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* voting rights
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* democracy
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* poverty
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* Inequality
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* discrimination
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