Above photo: Demonstrators take part in a protest against former President Dina Boluarte after the congress approved four motions of impeachment against the former preuvian president in Lima on October 9, 2025. Jorge Cerdan / AFP.
The Anti-Democratic Legacy of Fujimori’s ’93 Constitution.
Peru’s congress has perfected the art of the constitutional coup, disposing of presidents the moment their usefulness expires. The removal of Dina Boluarte continues a decades-long strategy to subvert popular will.
On October 9, 2025, the Peruvian Congress once again voted to vacate the executive; this time the usefulness of their puppet Dina Boluarte had run out. With more than 80 deaths under her belt during the 2022-23 uprisings predominantly in the Southern mineral rich regions of Peru, Dina Boluarte was sacrificed to the altar of a dictatorial right wing Congress. With 122 votes in favor of vacating the region’s most unpopular president for “permanent moral incapacity” amid growing crime and protests in the capitol city demanding action. Congress swiftly approved the new Interim President, president of the Congress, José Jerí. Within days of taking power, the new “president” (perhaps more accurately named Congressional coup figurehead), faced the same level of mass protests as had taken place during the Boluarte regime.
Less than a week after taking office, on October 15th, Jerí would unleash the national police on the continued protests (called for by Generation Z, but including many of the same organizations and people that had been protesting since the illegal ouster of President Castillo). An undercover police officer shot and killed Eduardo Mauricio Ruiz Sanz, a rapper known as Trvko from the San Martín de Porres neighborhood. Twenty protesters were also gravely injured, including Luis Reyes, who is a rapper by the name of Flipown from Cajamarca, who was pronounced brain dead after being shot with a tear gas bomb in the head.
Just as in the previous coup regime, the Jeri government has used brute force to maintain power against a population that demands the closure of a corrupt right wing Congress, the release and restitution of democratically elected President Pedro Castillo and perhaps more importantly, a popular constituent assembly to overturn the neoliberal right wing constitution rammed through during Alberto Fujimori’s regime that has allowed for this parliamentary power grab whenever the executive no longer serves them.
The 1993 Fujimori constitution gives Congress the power to vacate a president for “moral incapacity,” a designation not well defined that gives the parliament extraordinary powers to subvert the democratic will of the people according to their interests. Because of this provision, Peru has had 8 presidents in under 10 years, following congressional coup after coup. Interestingly enough, this same designation was used to finally oust Alberto Fujimori in 2000 after he had fled to Japan and was later brought back to justice (only to be pardoned during the previous Boluarte regime).
Since then, Article 113 of the Peruvian Constitution has been used to overthrow and install interim presidents as the right wing dominated Congress sees fit. In 2016, president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (popularly known as PPK) signaled his government’s intention to deepen trade with China and align Peru with the Belt and Road Initiative. Despite having worked at the World Bank, been educated in the US, and having a decidedly neoliberal orientation, PPK understood the economic powerhouse China was becoming.
By March 2018, corruption scandals forced PPK to resign after two motions to vacate him for moral incapacity due to his ties to the Odebrecht scandal. The month before, in February 2018, SOUTHCOM released its posture statement, which declared China’s Belt and Road Initiative a security concern for the US.
The next president, Martín Vizcarra, PPK’s protege, was also ousted for corruption charges during his time as governor of Moquegua, one of the southernmost departments in the country. His vice president, Mercedes Aráoz, became the shortest serving president in history, with only one day in office before resigning. Vizcarra was returned to office, but only for a year until the next motion to vacate him passed.
Following Vizacarra’s vacancy, Manuel Merino took office for only five days. In those five days, massive protests erupted in the capital city that led to the murder of two young men, Bryan Pintado and Inti Sotelo by 11 members of the Peruvian National Police. These cases have never been prosecuted and the families continue to demand justice, along with the families of the massacres in Barrios Altos, La Cantuta and others during the Fujimori regime, and the families of martyrs of the 2022-23 coup regime. The next day, Merino was forced to resign following the deaths of Bryan and Inti.
The next interim president, Francisco Sagasti, would serve out the remainder of PPK’s term until the next elections in July 2021. Another World Bank employee, Sagasti, indebted Peru for the next 100 years by issuing bonds through the Ministry of Economics and Finances to “contend with COVID-19 and finance the public sector.”
Finally, on July 28, 2021, the Peruvian people voted in Pedro Castillo, the first rural campesino from outside of Lima, on a popular mandate to close the coup Congress, nationalize and industrialize mineral and other resources, and convene a constituent assembly to overturn the dictatorial Fujimori constitution that signed over all Peruvian resources by law to the private sector. By the first round, his opposition from Fujimori’s hard right party, Fuerza Popular, the eternal loser and daughter of Alberto Fujimori, Keiko Fujimori, was already claiming fraud. After the second round, which Castillo won, it took the electoral board over a month to pronounce him as president after a vicious recount campaign, in which many of the Fuerza Popular Congress members maintained that there was electoral fraud and never saw him as the legitimate president.
As this reporter has written since the December 7, 2022 coup against Castillo, this congressional coup against the people of Peru was carried out to maintain US hegemony in the country and in the region. Despite the recent opening of the Port of Chancay, which further solidified Peru-China trade, the possibility of overturning the 1993 Constitution and closing out Congress proved to be too much for the old guard. The elites in Lima, their puppet politicians, their media conglomerates, and their US/western masters moved to oust Castillo and prop up his vice president, Dina Boluarte. What they didn’t imagine was the country’s forgotten, mostly indigenous rural communities coming out in masses to defend their vote and demand restitution.
Boluarte ordered the armed forces to stamp out the protests by any means necessary. Over 80 people were killed in various regions, predominantly in the South of Peru, with total impunity for the regime. However, these crimes weren’t why Congress voted to vacate Boluarte, but rather for the growing and intensifying crime wave that has riddled the country. In fact, these so-called gangs should be seen as the paramilitary groups they are- working in tandem with the state to provide justification for increased militarization. Much like in Haiti, Ecuador and other countries in the region, “crime” has been used to increase militarization and colonial control from the US/EU/NATO.
It is in this long context of congressional coup after coup that Peru finds itself with yet another puppet leader. José Jerí, now being dubbed “Peru’s Bukele,” comes into office with previous accusations of sexual assault, having already declared a 30-day state of emergency in Lima and Callao, supposedly to stamp out crime, but really to go after protesters. In fact, in just the first day of the state of emergency, five people were murdered by “gangs.”
What is certain is that the struggle for popular control of the country, not under neocolonial puppets, will continue despite the number of deaths, injuries and states of emergency. Protest in Lima has now hit a critical mass that was mostly in the outside provinces of the country, and it is up to the working poor of the Peruvian masses to finally overturn this Congressional coup regime and its US constitution.
