Peru's embattled president could have eased the crisis. What happened? - CNN

Officials say 56 civilians and one police officer has died in the violence, and hundreds more have been injured, as protesters call for fresh elections, a new constitution and Boluarte’s resignation.

“One has to understand Boluarte’s own ambitions, she was clearly willing to sacrifice her leftist ideas and principles in order to build a coalition with the right to hold onto power,” Jo-Marie Burt, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America and an expert on Peru, told CNN.

” (Boluarte) had to make a choice: either she went the Castillo way and spent the next four years fighting a Congress that wants to impeach her or she sided with the right and got power,” Alonso Gurmendi, a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, who is a Peruvian legal expert, told CNN.

Autopsies of the 17 dead civilians found wounds caused by firearm projectiles, the city’s head of legal medicine told CNN en Español.

Human rights groups have accused Boluarte of using state violence to stymie protests and on January 11, Peru’s prosecutor launched an investigation into the president and other key ministers for the alleged crime of “genocide, qualified homicide, and serious injuries” in relation to the bloodshed.

As the protests show no end in sight, Boluarte on Wednesday dialed down the inflammatory rhetoric when she spoke at a special meeting on the Peruvian crisis at the Organization of American States (OAS).