Peru Killed 50 Protesters Since 2022. Zero Convictions. That's Not a Failure — It's the System Working

On October 15, 2025, Peruvian police shot and killed Eduardo "Mauricio" Ruiz Sanz, a 32-year-old hip-hop artist, during a demonstration in Lima against interim president José Jerí. Dozens more were injured, several by rubber bullets fired directly at journalists covering the protest. It was the kind of killing that reads, in isolation, as an isolated tragedy. It is not. Ruiz Sanz is the fiftieth name on a list that Peru's state has spent three years refusing to close.

The list starts in December 2022, when Congress removed President Pedro Castillo in what much of the region still calls a parliamentary coup, and Dina Boluarte — his own vice president — took power backed by the same congressional bloc and security establishment that had spent years trying to unseat him. The repression that followed the ensuing protests killed 49 people, mostly in the southern Andean regions where Castillo's rural, Indigenous base is concentrated. Three years on, Human Rights Watch's 2026 World Report confirms what organizers have said all along: nobody has been convicted. As of this year, 70 percent of the investigations into those killings remain stuck in the "preparatory phase" — prosecutorial limbo with no end date.

That impunity isn't an accident of an overloaded justice system. It's policy. In August 2025, Boluarte signed an amnesty law shielding security forces and officials from prosecution for crimes committed during Peru's internal armed conflict — enacted even after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights explicitly ordered Peru to halt it pending review. A month later, Congress shelved a constitutional complaint against Boluarte herself over her role in the 2022–23 killings, arguing there was no proof she'd personally ordered the shootings — a defense that would get any beat cop's supervisor nowhere, but works fine for a head of state protected by the same body that appointed her.

Boluarte is gone now too — ousted by Congress in October 2025 on the vague charge of "moral incapacity," replaced by José Jerí, the congressional president who inherits both the security apparatus and its habits. Within days, his police killed Ruiz Sanz and injured more than 70 protesters. Jerí responded not with reform but with a 30-day state of emergency in Lima and Callao, suspending constitutional rights in the capital under the same security framing that failed to reduce homicides the last time Boluarte tried it. The personnel change at the top does nothing to the machine underneath: a police force, a prosecutor's office, and a Congress that have all learned that killing protesters carries no cost.

None of this is happening because Peru's institutions are broken. It's happening because they're doing exactly what they were built to do when the people in the street are poor, Indigenous, young, or all three. The "Gen Z" protesters filling Lima's streets over pension reform, extortion, and corruption are discovering the same lesson the 2022–23 movement learned in blood: in Peru, the state's monopoly on violence isn't checked by courts that take three years to not convict anyone. Solidarity with Peru's protest movement means naming that the amnesty law, the shelved complaint, and the fresh state of emergency aren't separate stories — they're the same wall, built one brick at a time to make sure the next Ruiz Sanz doesn't get a trial either.

Sources

Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026: Peru
Peoples Dispatch: Peru's latest president José Jerí faces mounting pressure after killing of protester
Orinoco Tribune: Repression Escalates as Protests Continue in Peru
The Guardian: Peru to declare state of emergency after protests against new president
Wikipedia: 2025 Peruvian protests