LIMA – It was a big day for Peru’s accidental president, Dina Boluarte, whose official schedule has been blank for months.
On Thursday, the high-profile Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima thrust Boluarte — among the world's least popular presidents, with a mere 4% public approval rating — into the bright lights of a convention center packed with world leaders, prominent CEOs and visiting dignitaries.
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It's not just that Boluarte, long a low-profile and low-paid civil servant, has never before rolled out the red carpet for powerful leaders like U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping since taking office in December 2022. It's that she has hardly been seen outside her brick mansion in weeks. Local journalists count more than 100 days since she last spoke to a reporter.
Her recent reclusion is not especially surprising. She became president because she was the vice-president of Pedro Castillo, a former rural schoolteacher with no previous political experience who was ousted when he tried to dissolve Congress and disband the courts. A wave of violent protests rocked the country, marring Boluarte's first weeks in power.
The president's popularity tanked even more in March, when the sight of Rolex watches gleaming from her wrist prompted police to raid her home and prosecutors to launch an investigation into her alleged unlawful enrichment.
A survey by polling company Ipsos showed her approval drop to just 4%. The poll was conducted Oct. 10-11, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. No president in Peru has had a worse rating in at least 40 years.
Powerful lawmakers satisfied with their lavish salaries have resisted calls to impeach her but quietly absorbed most of her duties, leaving Boluarte with little to do.
The latest lightning rod for public ire has been a growing trend of violent extortion by criminal gangs in Lima's hardscrabble outskirts. Protesters accusing the government of indifference to rising crime have taken to the streets across Peru.
On Wednesday, protesters blocked highways and rallied in Peru's southeast Arequipa region, drawing a police crackdown that left six injured by rubber bullets. Lima residents also took advantage of the international spotlight to stage protests this week while Biden and 20 other world leaders prepared to gather for the APEC summit.
After a string of killings targeting bus drivers who failed to pay extortion money last month sent a chill through Lima, public transport drivers launched several strikes that paralyzed the city of 10 million. The government has declared a state of emergency and promised a strong response, but the persistence of violent attacks has sharpened anger against Boluarte.
Fearing all that could go wrong in yanking Peru's wildly unpopular leader out of the shadows and onto the world stage this week, the government left nothing to chance.
Authorities declared Thursday through Saturday as nonworking holidays and closed schools, ordering millions of school children and civil servants to stay home the entire week to keep the streets clear. At a highway underpass near the convention center hosting APEC on Monday, workers scrubbed the spray-painted slogan “Dina Asesina,” or “Dina, the Murderer” from a concrete wall.
“The event is certainly important for Peru, but the government is so scared of losing control of the streets that it’s overreacting, putting inappropriate measures in place,” said Eduardo Dargent, a political scientist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
Officials have pleaded with citizens not to protest.
“It would be very regrettable if, in the days that we receive visitors from the world's 21 most powerful economies, we show a bad spectacle, a spectacle of conflict,” Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzen said in a recent press conference. President Boluarte went further, branding protests “traitors."
On Thursday, protesters said that the specter of conflict at APEC was exactly what they wanted.
As Boluarte, donning a sparkly pink dress and pearls, greeted Chinese President Xi with a ceremonial honor guard and trumpet flourish, riot police scuffled with anti-government protesters a few blocks away.
“She's trying to take advantage of this moment in front of the TV cameras to pretend she's the president of Peru,” said Betty Mendoza, a 35-year-old protester brandishing portraits of the 50 civilian demonstrators killed in the 2022 social unrest.
“She does not represent us,” Mendoza said of Boluarte. “We did not elect her.”
At one point Thursday, masked protesters surged toward a line of police near the conference site, shoving officers who pushed back and beat them with batons. Medics rushed to attend to several teenage boys clutching their heads and yelping in pain.
“My grandson is growing up in a country where violence is being normalized,” said 54-year-old Freda Reyes, who had come to protest from the eastern working-class district of Santa Anita where she said 10 of her neighbors had been killed by criminal gangs this month.
The last time Peru hosted APEC, in 2016, a wave of protests similarly sprung up around the country. At the time, workers were striking over their low salaries and Lima residents venting over their city's notoriously derelict public infrastructure.
That remains a concern. On Wednesday, a fire raced up the sides of a multi-story plastic toy warehouse and engulfed six other houses near the presidential palace, causing no injuries but raising a pall of black smoke visible from the red carpet where Boluarte was bestowing a medal on her Malaysian counterpart.
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Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.