Dina Boluarte on Wednesday became Peru’s first female president amid a political maelstrom when her predecessor and former boss, Pedro Castillo, was ousted in an impeachment trial and detained by police after he tried to illegally shut down the Peruvian Congress.
Boluarte, 60, who started the day as vice president and next in line to replace Castillo, faces the unenviable challenge of healing a divided nation where the presidency has been locked in battle with Congress for more than a year.
“I request a political truce to install a government of national unity,” she said in her first speech after being sworn in as the nation’s sixth president in just five years.
Photo: AFP
She pledged to form a broad Cabinet of “all bloods.”
“I ask for time, valuable time to rescue the country from corruption and misrule,” she said.
A lawyer by training, Boluarte was relatively unknown to most Peruvians until recently. In 2018, she won less than 4 percent of the vote in a Lima district’s mayoral election and lost a bid for a parliamentary seat last year.
However, she shot to prominence alongside Castillo as the vice president on his ticket when the pair pulled off a shock election victory last year for the far-left Peru Libre party.
Born in Apurimac, one of the regions in Peru’s mountainous south where Castillo saw his strongest support, Boluarte spent years working at the National Registry of Identification and Civil Status, which records births, marriages and deaths.
Once in office, Castillo tapped Boluarte as his development and social inclusion minister, a role she managed to keep until recently amid several Cabinet shakeups.
“Although she is previously inexperienced in politics, I think that after a year and a half of being a minister — roles that tend to be short-lived — she has gained a lot of policy experience that will serve her now,” political columnist Gonzalo Banda said.
Boluarte has proven to be someone who “goes with the flow,” analyst Andres Calderon said, noting how she quickly distanced herself from her socialist party’s polarizing Marxist founder Vladimir Cerron.
Boluarte in the past few weeks also distanced herself from Castillo, resigning from her role as minister after he replaced his prime minister in what some saw as an escalation in his showdown with Congress.
That move suggests she “has a better reading on politics and is more accommodating than her predecessor, which could help her stay in office until 2026,” Calderon said.
The first president to come from a poor farming community in the nation’s history, Castillo arrived in the presidential palace last year without any political experience. He changed his Cabinet five times during his year and a half in office, running through 60 different Cabinet officials, leaving various government agencies paralyzed.
Peru has since 2016 been entrenched in political crises, with congresses and presidents trying to eliminate each other in turn. Former Peruvian president Martin Vizcarra dissolved Congress in 2019 and ordered new elections. That new legislature removed Vizcarra the next year. He was replaced by Manuel Merino, who lasted less than a week as president before a crackdown killed two protesters and injured 200 more. His successor, Francisco Sagasti, lasted nine months before Castillo took over.
Additional reporting by AP
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