The President of Peru declared a state of emergency at the borders on Wednesday April 26 and ordered the deployment of the army to reinforce checkpoints and block migrants traveling from Chile.
Hundreds of migrants who have lived in Chile, mainly from Haiti and Venezuela according to the United Nations, are trying to leave the country and have been stranded for weeks at the border between the Peruvian city of Tacna (south) and Arica, in northern Chile. As Chile tightens migration controls, many say they want to return home or move further north to the United States.
The Peruvian government has already sent 200 police to reinforce border crossings in a bid, it says, to curb transnational crime. On Wednesday, President Dina Boluarte said soldiers would be deployed to reinforce police at border crossings with Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia.
“The national police will maintain control of the internal order with the support of the armed forces,” she told reporters. The government did not specify what the state of emergency would entail in terms of restrictions on individual and public freedoms, or how long it would remain in place.
HRW warns of possible executions during protests
The human rights association Human Rights Watch (HRW) also alerted in a report published on Wednesday to the possible execution of dozens of people by the Peruvian security forces during the repression of anti-government demonstrations which made a fifty deaths between December and February.
“The Peruvian military and police are responsible for deaths that could amount to extrajudicial or arbitrary executions, as well as other brutal abuses against protesters and bystanders during protests between December 2022 and February 2023,” the report said. .
The dismissal at the beginning of December of former President Pedro Castillo, accused of having attempted a coup d’etat by wanting to dissolve the Parliament which was preparing to oust him from power, and his replacement by Dina Boluarte, his former vice-president, sparked a wave of violent protests that were harshly suppressed across the country.
