Lima Peru.- Juliaca, a Peruvian city of 260,000 inhabitants, continued this Friday the ritual of burying 19 people, including a police officer, who died this week as a result of violent protests calling for the resignation of President Dina Boluarte.
Jhamileth Aroquipa, a 17-year-old psychology student, and Elmer Leonardo, a 16-year-old aspiring soccer player, were the youngest deceased in this town in the Puno region, on the border with Bolivia, the epicenter of anti-government demonstrations.
“The loss at such a young age hurts me. She was hit by a 9mm bullet and it cannot be possible. We have not gone to the protests, we are peaceful people,” Demetrio Aroquipa, Jhamileth’s father, lamented to AFP while accompanying the corpse of the teenager.
“My daughter made an effort in her studies. We went shopping. We were two blocks from the protest and look what happens, we came back without my daughter.”
Elmer dreamed of being a soccer player in a region that tends to produce few professionals in that sport. “He had a very big dream: to turn 17 and travel internationally to represent Puno,” said his friend Ruth Karina Meza, 18.
“His mother went to sell salteñas (flour-based empanadas) and since she did not answer her cell phone, he, in desperation, went looking for her. He went in search of her mother and they put a bullet in her back,” the woman narrated. young.
Like the Aroquipas and the Leonardos, another 17 families mourn their dead between the ages of 16 and 40 in Juliaca, one of the cities where the violence unleashed has had the greatest impact since President Pedro Castillo was ousted on December 7 and replaced by his until then Vice President Dina Boluarte.
In Juliaca, the policeman José Luis Soncco also died, burnt to death, until now the only member of the Armed Forces who has lost his life in the riots.
The leftist Castillo was dismissed by Congress and imprisoned on December 7 after a failed self-coup with which he tried to close parliament, intervene in justice and govern by decree.
Castillo, who was being investigated for corruption, is serving 18 months in pretrial detention ordered by a judge on charges of rebellion.
