Peru: 6 soldiers drowned in a river during a demonstration

LIMA (AP) — Six soldiers have drowned while trying to cross a river in the Andes to avoid confronting protesters demanding the resignation of Peruvian President Dina Boluarte and members of Congress, authorities said Monday.

The Ministry of Defense said in the afternoon that efforts to rescue the soldiers were over after the body of the last missing person, Corporal Carlos Quispe, was found. The joint command of the armed forces said earlier that the soldiers, who were stationed in the town of Ilave, were trying to arrive as reinforcements in Juli, a nearby town where protests on Saturday left five civilians injured next to a police station and a burned court

The ministry denounced the “hostile attitude…on the part of violent groups that prevented them from passing”, which led the military patrol to seek another route which included crossing the Ilave River through another area .Ilave and Juli are towns in the region. Puno, where anti-government protests are the most violent in the country, in this region, 18 civilians were killed on January 9 during a police response to a demonstration near the airport.

The Ministry of Health reported that five other soldiers had been treated for hypothermia. Videos shown on local television showed groups of protesters rescuing, loading, clothing and feeding soldiers rescued from the shivering river. Most of the soldiers are sons of peasants from the region. Many relatives of soldiers are part of the protests.

Peasant Samuel Canazas, father of deceased soldier Franz Canazas, 20, told La República newspaper that “usurping President Dina Boluarte was to blame”. Dressed in a black cloth hat and a thick jacket of the same color, the man wanted to take the body of his son to his peasant community called Olla to bury him. He said he couldn’t because they told him the body had to be autopsied.

Another soldier, Yerson Mena, 19, was left barefoot among the watching protesters, shivering near the river he escaped from and died. His mother arrived later and they both hugged. The woman fed him by mouth, while his father Agustín Mena took off the sports shoes he was wearing for his son to wear.

“I want to know who ordered them to cross the river, I want to see his face and the cum in his face, he said. He won’t go back to the barracks anymore… My son is young, he has a life”, he added.

The Ilave River is powerful in February due to the rainy season. For this reason, the order to cross it, issued by the military leaders, was called into question.

The office of the ombudsman said it had asked the general command of the army to investigate the circumstances in which the deaths occurred and recalled that it is up to the military authorities “to guarantee the life and integrity of the personnel whose are in charge”.

The army has controlled internal order in the Puno region since early February. This measure caused friction with citizens who repeatedly demanded that the men in uniform stand down. The suspended constitutional rights are the inviolability of the home, freedom of movement and freedom of assembly.

Protests in Peru began on December 7 when Boluarte took power after his predecessor Pedro Castillo, of whom he was vice president, was removed from office by parliament after trying to dissolve Congress. Protests spread to Lima in January with the arrival of settlers from the Andes, mainly from the south, but protests died down by mid-February.

Boluarte assures that he will not resign until his successor is elected, but the Congress has set aside four projects to advance the elections, including one for the government. The last two proposals fixed the call to the polls in October and December, but they were rejected.

The protests have so far claimed a total of 66 lives, mostly protesters, according to the ombudsman’s office. Of this total, 48 are civilian victims of direct clashes with the security forces.