President Dina Boluarte Impeached Over Peru Crime Surge
Peru’s Congress delivered a seismic blow to the executive branch early Friday, impeaching and removing President Dina Boluarte from office amid a brutal crime surge that’s turned neighbourhoods into no-go zones and eroded public trust to rock bottom.
The late-night session in the historic Palacio Legislativo stretched past midnight, with lawmakers from fractured parties uniting in a rare show of consensus. By dawn, the vote tallied an overwhelming 110-12 in favour of ousting Boluarte on charges of “permanent moral incapacity”.
It was the final nail in a presidency plagued by protests, corruption scandals, and now, a homicide rate that’s spiked 30% this year alone, fuelled by gang wars spilling from the shadows of Lima’s shantytowns to the Andean highlands. Boluarte, 63 and once a trusted vice president under Pedro Castillo, stepped down stone-faced as aides whisked her away in a black SUV convoy.
“This is a dark day for democracy,” she muttered to reporters clustered like vultures outside the palace gates, her voice cracking under the weight of three years of chaos. No tears, just the faint echo of the chants from 2023’s deadly street battles still ringing in her ears.
Enter José Jerí, the unassuming Congress president from the conservative Fuerza Popular bloc, sworn in as interim leader before the ink dried on Boluarte’s exit papers.
At 52, with his wire-rimmed glasses and rumpled suit, Jerí cut a professorial figure amid the marble halls, far from the firebrand Boluarte.
His first act? A sombre address promising “swift action on security”, vowing to deploy 5,000 more troops to hotspots like Callao port, where extortion rackets have strangled small businesses.
The streets of Lima buzzed with a cocktail of relief and rage as news broke. In San Juan de Lurigancho, Latin America’s most populous prison-adjacent slum, vendors hawked extra editions of El Comercio while mothers clutched rosaries, whispering prayers for sons lost to narco crossfire.
“Finally, someone’s listening,” said Maria Vargas, 42, wiping flour from her hands after a sleepless night barricading her chicha stall. Across town, in the posh Miraflores district, expats at Café de la Paz raised cautious toasts, their bubble of safety pierced by headlines of carjackings up 50%.
This impeachment caps a whirlwind of instability since Castillo’s 2022 ouster. Boluarte’s tenure saw over 60 deaths in anti-government riots, a mining sector in freefall, and now this crime tsunami, with homicides hitting 1,200 monthly, per INEI stats.
Critics, from leftist firebrands to right-wing hawks, piled on: “She fiddled while Peru burnt,” snarled opposition MP Sigrid Bazán, echoing the bipartisan fury that sealed the deal. Jerí’s honeymoon won’t last.
With snap elections looming in April 2026, he’s got months to tame the beast—beef up the woefully underfunded police, crack down on Venezuelan migrant gangs blamed for 40% of Lima’s hits, and maybe, just maybe, restore faith in a Congress approval rating hovering at 8%. Picture it: Dawn patrols in Ventanilla, where widows light candles for the 15 slain last week; boardrooms in Arequipa hashing emergency funds; and Jerí, bleary-eyed in the presidential suite, poring over dossiers till the sun crests the Pacific.
For Boluarte, exile beckons, perhaps a quiet hacienda in the sierra, plotting a comeback or fading into footnotes. Peru, meanwhile, exhales. But in this powder-keg nation, where coups are currency and crime is king, the surge isn’t over. It’s just wearing a new face.