LOS ANGELES — In the two months since Peru’s leftist former president Pedro Castillo was arrested, driven from office and replaced by his vice-president, Dina Boluarte, protests in the South American nation have grown and spread from the Andean hinterlands to the streets of the capital, Lima.
At the same time, fissures have widened among the 720,000 U.S. residents who identify as being of Peruvian origin, including 91,511 in California, second to Florida’s 100,965.
The polarization here has mimicked Peru’s party-line divisions, pitting those who view Castillo — a former union leader and elementary school teacher who took office in July 2021 — as a champion of the working-class urban poor and the rural Indigenous, and those who regard him as a dangerous populist who tried to dissolve Congress in a coup.
