"You cannot always live on homicides and violence (...)
It is not hate that will speak tomorrow, but justice based on memory.
? Albert Camus. Chronicles
Every day, since time immemorial, the sun rises behind the Andes. Its powerful rays have warmed and inspired generations of Peruvians. To the current one, his gaze lights up with the brilliance of the resistance that burned on December 7, 2022.
The perpetual snow massifs have been silent witnesses -since that day- of the awakening and action of the beast that seemed asleep because it acted underground but has now been unmasked: repression.
That repression that opened our eyes when Pedro Castillo was removed - vacated in Peruvian legal terms - by a right-wing Congress allied with the vice president, Dina Bolauarte.
Boluarte, today president of Peru, has dusted off the manual of coups d'état. He took power not by voting but by agreements from the top. The decision breathed rebellion into the hearts of a people who are always ready to take to the streets and protest -once again- against the imposition.
The Boluarte presidency is sustained by an incendiary and unstable power: weapons.
To the demands of a people fed up with being ignored and the indolence of the center, they responded with violence, weapons and bullets. His thirst for legitimacy is quenched with the blood scattered in the streets.
Although the annoyance spread throughout the country, the rebellion permeated further south: thousands took to the streets in repudiation of the Chalhuanquina administration and Congress, by those who do not feel represented.
To the demands for the resignation of the president, the closure of Congress, the advancement of general elections, the call for a Constituent Assembly that drafts a new Magna Carta, the official response in more than three months is repression.
The current violence reopened the unhealed wound of the internal conflict between the Communist Party of Peru ?Sendero Luminoso? and the state.
Although the clash ended in 1992, it did not have a political solution that would lead to national reconciliation. The wounds have not stopped festering and are far from closed.
Because of the pending local war, the State got used to responding to the protest with extermination. It assumes the people as an internal enemy, so the current response is not surprising: persecution, prosecution, threats, smear campaigns, blows and bullets.
Dina Boluarte, the first Peruvian president, has inscribed her name in national history with blood ink.
That is why, together with the photojournalist Manuel Ortiz, this coming Friday, March 17, we will present "#PerúResiste" an itinerant photographic exhibition at 7:00 p.m. at the TierrAdentro CDMX restaurant, which is located on Calle de Milan number 22 in the Juárez neighborhood of the Cuauhtémoc Delegation.
This exhibition will include unpublished portraits and testimonies of victims of indigenous communities affected by the Peruvian State.
At the time of publication of this exposition, at least 1,200 people will have been injured and 52 murdered, according to the Ombudsman's Office. The data is far from exact due to the fear of relatives and activists that has pushed them to remain silent in the face of the brutality of the State and that they have not reported other murders and injuries.
Your fear is not paranoia. Hundreds of those injured by the police and the militia during the protests were not treated after falling, they have even been persecuted by the Prosecutor's Office even in the hospitals where sinister personnel look for them to sign blank sheets.
This exhibition is just a glimpse of what thousands of Peruvians who fight for their rights and freedom experience daily. We present what the inhabitants of Juliaca -the economic center of Puno- in southern Peru have suffered.
The flesh of young people, workers, adolescents and even small children has been lacerated by the shots of the State, which has turned a deaf ear to the request for dialogue and prefers to describe the protesters as "terrorist" or "violentist" and, therefore, represses them.
These portraits are of indirect victims. They carry in their hands the photographs of a murdered or wounded family member.
The expression on their brown faces speaks in silence of broken dreams, rage in the throat, and impotence in the face of the re-victimization to which the State of Boluarte submits them.
Despite this, the determination to demand justice does not disappear from the light of their eyes, directed at the perpetrators of the crimes: police, military and their superiors, those who, although they did not take up arms, gave the orders for the extermination.
The eyes of those portrayed denounce the rejection of the elites that was born long before 2022; It dates back to the independence and colonization of Peru.
Contempt for peasants, indigenous people, the poor and workers, is the compass of the Peruvian elites who direct the hegemonic media that promote a story loaded with racism and class hatred against the mobilized.
This work, which is exhibited online and in person in CDMX, Bogotá, Colombia; San francisco California; the cities of Redwood City and East Palo Alto in California; New York and Washington in the US, is part of the monitoring and documentation activities of the current human rights violations in Peru, carried out by organizations Global Exchange and Social Focus, in collaboration with media and allied organizations such as Peninsula 360 Press, TV Windbreaker, Journalists United and the Center for Latin American Socio-legal Studies ?CESJUL?.
At the cut, a peaceful political solution is not on the horizon. The deaf ears and unseeing eyes of the State summon the population every week to protest for the minimum floor to which they are entitled: justice for those murdered and political participation in decision-making.
The question to the government of Peru -which we would extend to other governments in Latin America where the violence of the State against the people grows day by day- is: What will a country that sows the dead reap?
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