Peru Has Impeached One President and Killed Two Protesters. The Ombudsman Still Calls Each Death an Investigation

Peru has now impeached one president for shooting protesters and installed another who did the same thing within a week of taking office. That is not a coincidence of bad luck. It is what happens when a state's only fixed institution is the police, and every civilian government treats a live round fired into a crowd as a public-relations problem rather than a crime.

Dina Boluarte took power in December 2022 after Pedro Castillo's failed self-coup, and the security forces she commanded killed at least 49 to 60 civilians in the following months, according to Peru's own Ombudsman's Office, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch documentation — mostly in the Andean south, mostly Indigenous and rural, mostly shot with military-grade ammunition in provinces the capital treats as expendable. Amnesty later concluded the chain of command up to the presidency could be criminally liable. Nobody was convicted. Boluarte finished nearly three years in office anyway, propped up by a Congress that needed her more than the country did, until Gen Z-organized protests against a pension privatization scheme and endemic extortion finally made her unmanageable and Congress impeached her in October 2025 — not for the killings, but for what it called "permanent moral incapacity."

Her replacement, José Jerí, lasted less than a week before his own police killed a protester. Eduardo Ruiz, a 32-year-old hip-hop musician, died of a gunshot wound during an October 15 demonstration against Jerí's government; more than 100 people were injured, dozens of them police, in clashes the Ombudsman's Office called the worst since Boluarte's ouster. Jerí posted regret on social media and promised an "objective" investigation — the same script, the same office, the same non-outcome that followed the 2022-23 massacre. He then declared a state of emergency, the reflexive move of every Peruvian government since 2022 when the street stops being manageable through Congress alone.

What connects Castillo's fall, Boluarte's killings, and Jerí's first week is not a rotating cast of individually bad presidents. It's a state whose civilian institutions have hollowed out to the point that the only lever any government reaches for is armed force against the people who elected it — or, in Jerí's case, didn't. Peru's Congress has a single-digit approval rating; the presidency Boluarte left behind polled at 2 percent. When no institution has legitimacy, the gun becomes the only thing that still works, and "investigation" becomes a word governments use instead of consequences.

The protesters calling this out — organizing through TikTok and Discord under the Gen Z banner that has also driven uprisings in Nepal, Indonesia, and Morocco this year — aren't naive about what they're up against. They know an announced investigation is a way of saying nothing will happen, and they know Ruiz's death sits on the exact same ledger as the 50-plus killed under Boluarte, just with a different president's signature on the condolence post. The continuity is the point: as long as impeachment removes individuals but never touches the security apparatus or the impunity built into it, the ledger keeps growing no matter who's nominally in charge.

Sources

Wikipedia: Peruvian protests (2022-2023)
Amnesty International: Peru killings could implicate president, chain of command
Reuters: One dead, dozens injured as Peru's new president faces widespread protests
AP News: Peru Gen Z protests leave at least 1 dead, 100 injured
The Conversation: Young people around the world are leading protests against their governments
IntelliNews: Wave of youth protest tests Peru's fragile political stability