Protests dwindled in intensity in Peru on Saturday and thousands of tourists trapped in the interior boarded planes to escape unrest as President Dina Boluarte again vowed that she would not step down.
Some 4,500 tourists, many of them European and North American, rushed to the international airport in Cusco to catch flights after being stranded much of the week by simmering political unrest.
“By Sunday at the latest, all the stranded tourists will leave,” Tourism and Commerce Minister Luis Fernando Helguero told the Andina state news agency.
The state human rights ombudsman reported 70 roadblocks around the South American nation, and the toll from the unrest rose to 19 dead and 569 injured.
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But the minister of defense and the head of the armed forces both said protests were diminishing in intensity.
“We have gradually been recovering normality along the roads, at the airports, in the cities. Normality is returning but it is not yet achieved,” said General Manuel Gomez de la Torre, head of the military joint chiefs of staff.
Defense Minister Alberto Otarola cautioned that “organized violent acts” were aimed at damaging airports, highways, natural gas pipelines and hydroelectric installations.
“The trend is downward. But we remain on alert. The situation of violence hasn’t passed and the crisis goes on,” Otarola said.
‘What is solved by my resignation?’
Boluarte, the lawyer who assumed the reins of the country December 7 after leftist President Pedro Castillo tried to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, only to be ousted and thrown in jail, again insisted that she would not bend to protesters and step down.
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“What is solved by my resignation? We will be here, firmly, until Congress determines to bring forward the elections,” Boluarte told Peruvians.
On Friday, House speaker Jose Williams said the vote on the election schedule could be revisited during a forthcoming session of Congress.
In her televised address, Boluarte expressed regret for the protests that swelled across the country and the deaths, most of which came in clashes with security forces including the military, under a state of emergency.
If armed troops were on the streets, “it has been to take care of and protect” Peru’s citizens, Boluarte said, adding that the protests were “overflowing” with violent elements that were coordinated and not spontaneous.
“These groups did not emerge overnight. They had tactically organized to block roads,” she said.
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Protesters are calling for the release of Castillo, the resignation of Boluarte and closure of Congress, and immediate general elections.
Initially detained for seven days, Castillo was on Thursday ordered to spend 18 months in pretrial detention.
The leftist former schoolteacher stands accused of rebellion and conspiracy, and could be jailed for up to 10 years if found guilty, according to public prosecutor Alcides Diaz.
Boluarte declared a 30-day nationwide state of emergency and said she wanted to bring forward elections as a way to calm the uproar, but Friday’s measure fell short of passage in Congress.
Tourists in limbo
Several airports have been closed, but the international terminal in Cusco, the gateway city to the jewel of Peruvian tourism, the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, managed to reopen on Friday, allowing for some 4,500 stranded tourists to begin boarding outbound flights.
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Cusco’s airport is the third largest in Peru, and armed soldiers were seen Saturday standing guard outside.
Protesters tried to storm the terminal on Monday, and the airport remained closed for nearly four days.
Good news also came Saturday to some 200 tourists stranded in a town in the deep valley below Machu Picchu. They were able to board a train and travel as far as Piscacucho, where a boulder blocked the railway.
The tourists, many from Europe and North America, then walked two kilometers (a little more than a mile) to where waiting vehicles took them on to Cusco, AFP learned.
Rail service to Machu Picchu had been suspended since Tuesday.
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‘Criminal investigation’ needed
Some of the greatest bloodshed of the week occurred Thursday at the airport in Ayacucho, where soldiers protecting the terminal shot at protesters.
Soldiers “found themselves surrounded with the masses closing in,” rights ombudsman Eliana Revollar told AFP.
The army says its soldiers would have first raised their weapons and then fired into the air, but Revollar said shots were fired at protesters and an investigation is warranted.
The US Supreme Court gives the green light to Trump to dismantle the Department of Education
The US Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to go ahead with his plan of mass layoffs in the Department of Education, which until now was blocked by an order from a lower court.
The decision overturned a temporary blocking resolution issued by a federal judge in Massachusetts in response to a class action from about twenty states, teachers’ unions and school districts.
The opinion so far prevented the federal government from carrying out the plan it announced at the end of March to cut, this year alone, a third of the more than 4,100 workers in this portfolio.
The Trump Administration’s plan, which has admitted that it cannot close the Department because that is the responsibility of Congress, involves dismantling the agency to the point that it only maintains basic competences related, for example, to the management of aid, scholarships or student loans.
The long-term project is to cut half of the staff working in this portfolio with the idea of eliminating what the Government, which wants to return educational skills to the states, considers a waste of the federal budget.
As usual in cases that are resolved by emergency channels, the majority of judges in favor of the ruling did not explain the basis of their decision, rejected by the three liberal judges of the court, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
For the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, the judicial decision confirms “the obvious, that the president of the United States, as head of the executive branch, has the authority in the final instance to make decisions about personnel, the administrative organization and the day-to-day of the federal agencies.”
“As well as today’s ruling is an important victory for students and families, it is a shame that the highest court in the country has had to intervene to allow President Trump to move forward with the reforms that the Americans chose him to implement using the authorities granted by the Constitution,” the head of Education said in a statement.
Colombian Senator Uribe Turbay, shows clinical improvement and begins neurological rehabilitation
Colombian senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay, seriously injured in the head in an attack on June 7, has had a clinical improvement and a process of neurological rehabilitation began, reported this Monday the Santa Fe Foundation of Bogotá, where he has been hospitalized since then.
“During the last few days the patient has shown a favorable and stable clinical response, evidenced both in the recent diagnostic images taken (magnetic resonance, tomography, Doppler, among others), and in his response to surgical and medical interventions,” says the medical report.
According to the Santa Fe Foundation, “in this context, and as part of the comprehensive care process, the neurorehabilitation protocol was initiated.”
The medical report, the first disclosed by the Santa Fe Foundation in the last eleven days, points out, however, that the 39-year-old politician continues with a “reserved” neurological prognosis.
“Miguel Uribe Turbay requires continuing his management in the Intensive Care Unit, with mechanical ventilatory support and under sedation, as well as with hemodynamic and neurological monitoring for the early detection of any change,” the statement adds.
Uribe Turbay, a member of the right-wing Democratic Center party, was shot twice in the head and one in the left leg when he was leading a rally in a park in the Bogota neighborhood of Modelia, an attack that has revived among Colombians the ghost of political violence that marked the 1990 elections in which three presidential candidates were killed.
Due to the severity of the injuries suffered, the politician, one of the candidates of the Democratic Center for the 2026 presidential elections, has undergone several surgeries in Santa Fe.
The authorities, for their part, have made some progress in the investigation of the attack, for which five people have been arrested, including the hit man who shot him, a 15-year-old boy who was found with a Glock pistol used in the attack.
The other four detainees have been accused by the Prosecutor’s Office of participating in the preparation and cover-up of the attack, and among them is Elder José Arteaga Hernández, alias ‘el Costeño’, considered by the authorities as a key piece for being the alleged organizer of the attempted murder.
Zelenski proposes the Minister of Economy, Sviridenko, as the new prime minister
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed on Monday the current Minister of Economy, Yulia Sviridenko, as the new prime minister to replace the current head of government, Denis Shmigal.
“I have proposed that Yulia Sviridenko lead the Government of Ukraine and significantly renew her work. I look forward to the presentation of the new Government action plan in the near future,” Zelenski wrote in X after meeting with Sviridenko.
The Ukrainian president spoke with the current Minister of Economy about “concrete measures to double Ukraine’s economic potential, to expand support programs for Ukrainians and to increase domestic weapons production.”
Zelenski and Sviridenko also reviewed the economic agreements signed by Ukraine at the international conference for the reconstruction of the country held in Rome on Thursday and last Friday.
Several Ukrainian media had advanced weeks ago that Sviridenko would soon replace Denis Shmigal as prime minister. At the head of the Economy portfolio, Sviridenko, 39, has been one of the most visible and active figures in the Government in recent months.
