Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori began his third consecutive term in power to the sound of massive protests in the country's capital, Lima, and the smell of police tear gas. Fujimori was inaugurated on July 28 for another five year term, alongside vice presidents Francisco Tudela and Ricardo Marquez Flores.
But as Fujimori was sworn in before Congress, opposition legislators wearing gas masks and holding protest signs booed and shouted insults at him, then walked out in protest before he could deliver his address. Guests arrived with tear-streaked, reddened eyes, due to the abundance of tear gas being used by police against demonstrators outside.
Tensions were already running high in Congress, since 18 opposition legislators defected to Fujimori's Peru 2000 party, giving it an absolute majority. At the swearing in of the new Congress on July 24, opposition legislators shouted insults at the turncoats, and hurled coins at them to indicate that they had sold out to Fujimori.
Even conservative Lima archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani had harsh, thinly veiled criticism for Fujimori during his independence day homily on July 28. Cipriani made reference to "an immense, protecting power" over which people have no control and which is at the root of many of the country's problems. "The presence of such a power is unacceptable, and even less so its continuity, although it may seek to justify itself in the name of so-called effectiveness", warned Cipriani.
Some 40,000 people from all over Peru gathered in Lima on July 27 for a rally to protest the inauguration. March organisers set up tents throughout the city to provide food, medical and legal support for the marchers who came from out of town. Some student protesters prepared themselves for police repression by fashioning homemade gas masks using two plastic soda bottles and a sponge soaked in white vinegar.
The government deployed 35,000 police agents to control the demonstrators, and the main government building was surrounded with extra security measures, including electric fences, barbed wire, sandbags and water cannons.
The protests on July 28 were smaller than the hundreds of thousands expected, but no crowd estimates were available. As many as 172 people were arrested; most remain in custody, while 14 protesters who came to Lima from Loreto have reportedly disappeared. Nearly 200 people were injured, including some with bullet wounds and many with respiratory problems from the tear gas.
According to the opposition Lima daily La Republica, by 6pm on July 28 police had used more than 10,000 tear gas projectiles, firing some from rifles at the crowd and hurling others by hand. A number of people were hit and injured by the projectiles, including Socialist Workers Party of Peru activist Aldo Gil Crisostomo, who lost an eye, and Paul Vanotti, described as a British journalist from the California-based Public Media Center, who reportedly suffered fractures to his face.
Some demonstrators reportedly threw Molotov cocktails at police and burned tyres at street intersections. Protests were also held on July 28 in the cities of Arequipa, Tacna, Cusco, Chiclayo and Piura, and in New York and Buenos Aires, organised by Peruvian residents.
The July 27 and 28 demonstrations came after several months of almost daily expressions of protest in Lima and other cities, including mock crucifixions and funerals, noisy banging on pots and pans, and creative street theatre actions. In one such action, a group of women dressed in nurse uniforms with giant syringes used loudspeakers to offer Peruvians "a symbolic vaccination against the evils of dictatorship and corruption."
Every Friday in Lima, protesters scrubbed Peruvian flags with soap in the fountain of the Plaza Mayor, in front of the presidential palace, and hung them to dry on clothes lines, to symbolise washing off the "fraud stains."
During the protests in Lima on July 28, some individuals among the protesters used incendiary bombs to set on fire a Banco de la Nacion building near San Martin Plaza; the fire trapped a group of security guards, killing six of them. Across the street, the building of the National Electoral Board was also burned. Several other buildings were set on fire, and at least one was looted.
Protest leader Alejandro Toledo — who ran against Fujimori in the April 9 elections but dropped out before the May 28 runoff in protest over fraud — charged that intelligence agents had infiltrated the demonstrations. "We have received information that the intelligence service inserted 100 agents among the marchers, who have provoked acts of violence", Toledo said at a July 29 press conference.
National Police director General Fernando Dianderas denied the charges, and said a special prosecutor has been assigned to investigate the arson attacks. Fujimori alleged on July 29 that the protesters had planned to burn down the Congress.
La Republica attributed the July 28 incidents to "undercover agents and infiltrated criminals" at the march. At least one suspected infiltrator was seized by demonstrators on July 28 and handed over to observers from the Office of the Defender of the People: he was carrying a defence ministry card identifying him as a member of the air force. Another group of alleged infiltrators were discovered days earlier on a bus carrying demonstrators from Huancayo to Lima.
On June 28, several demonstrators were arrested and held incommunicado by Peru's intelligence service after allegedly witnessing police agents setting fire to a public phone booth.
[From Weekly News Update on the Americas, <http://home.earthlink.net/~dbwilson/wnuhome.html>.]