Thirty-six people were injured and 95 were arrested in a day of street clashes between striking protesters and army troops enforcing a 30-day state of emergency the government imposed to keep the country going.
With his popularity plunging, President Alejandro Toledo signed the decree to cope with growing labor unrest, as thousands of striking teachers, farmers and health-care workers brought the country almost to a standstill.
As army troops brought their fist down on protesters around the country on Wednesday, they tore down 35 barricades of rocks and burning tires that had blocked the country's main Pan-American Highway.
Soldiers fired in the air to disperse rock-throwing protesters trying to protect the barricades.
Clashes were also reported in several cities across the country. In northern Chiclayo, police fired tear gas at a crowd of about 5,000 striking teachers.
Ministers Alberto Sanabria, of the Interior, and Fernando Carbone, of Health, said 36 people were injured -- 16 police, 20 civilians -- and 95 were arrested in clashes around the country on Wednesday.
Troops and armored vehicles also took up positions at key points in central Lima to prevent demonstrations, while anti-riot police dispersed demonstrators staging a sit-in at the legislature building. One military detachment was stationed outside the headquarters of the General Confederation of Workers of Peru, the main union, reports said.
Toledo ordered the crackdown as a teachers' strike in Peru entered its 16th day, affecting some eight million children.
Leaders of the 280,000 teachers vowed to defy a government order to end their two-week-old strike, declared illegal late Tuesday just after Toledo said in a nationally televised address he was calling the second state of emergency in less than a year.
The president ordered all public schools to reopen and an end to highway blockades, citing the widespread labor strikes as violating "the fundamental rights" of all Peruvians. He said the armed forces would take charge of security in half of the country, including Lima.
Under the state of emergency, constitutional guarantees are suspended, including the rights to assemble, to privacy, to protest and freedom of movement. The state of emergency can be renewed for another 30 days, at the discretion of the president.
"We are responsible for defending this democracy we got back at such a high cost," Toledo said, referring to Peru's past history of military dictatorships and 10 years under President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s before he fled the country.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS