By Sofía Martínez – Alternativa Socialista

While the oligarchy celebrates national holidays with parades and empty speeches in the center of Lima, thousands of Peruvians will take to the streets again this July 28 to demand a true transformation. Decades of accumulated rage due to neoliberal looting, institutionalized corruption and bloody repression fuel this popular mobilization. Although silenced by the mainstream media, it strongly expresses that the people do not forget or forgive Dina Boluarte’s massacre or the political kidnapping of the country at the hands of the most discredited Congress in our recent history.

The political situation in Peru is marked by an organic crisis of the regime born of the Fujimorista Constitution of 1993. Neither the Executive nor the Legislature has any legitimacy. Dina Boluarte, imposed after the parliamentary coup of December 7, 2022, embodies it brutally: she governs with blood and fire, handing the country over to transnational capital and strengthening civic-military authoritarianism. The Congress is a nest of reactionaries, mercenaries and gangsters who legislate for their own interests, shielding each other while they advance in the destruction of labor rights, the privatization of public services and the dispossession of indigenous territories.

In this scenario, the 2026 elections look like a trap set by the regime to oxygenate itself without changing anything important. The government talks about ”democratic renewal”, but what is being prepared behind the scenes is a recomposition of the elites to keep the neoliberal model intact. The names of old and new opportunists are already being mentioned: recycled technocrats, laboratory outsiders, “anti-system” businessmen, comedians, show business people and even retired military men who present themselves as saviors of our fatherland. They all have the same objective in mind: to contain the popular rebellion and preserve the dictatorship of capital.

At the same time, the country is bleeding to death under a rising crime wave that is hitting the popular sectors the hardest. In the face of the government’s inaction against organized crime and extortion networks that operate with impunity on the streets, transport workers’ unions have announced a National Strike for July 24 and 25. This measure, which transcends corporate demands, reflects the desperation of an abandoned sector that is not guaranteed minimum security measures for to keep working. Instead of protecting the working people, the regime represses them with militarization and a state of emergency instead of attacking the structural roots of the violence: institutional corruption, state abandonment and the economic power of drug trafficking.

As if this were not enough, the Congress has recently approved an infamous amnesty law that seeks to exonerate the military and police involved in human rights violations during the internal armed conflict from any criminal responsibility. That’s not only a direct attack to our country’s historical memory, but an open declaration of impunity. Faced with this, relatives of the victims have been carrying out sit-ins and multiple actions in front of the Justice Palace, demanding truth, justice and reparations. Their struggle reminds us that there will be no peace without memory, and that reconciliation can only take place on the basis of trials and punishment of those responsible for genocide and state repression. This reactionary offensive seeks to erase the crimes of the past in order to pave the way for present authoritarianism.

From a revolutionary socialist perspective, we cannot fall into this electoral illusion. It is not by means of rigged ballot boxes, nor by the “democracy” of the rich, that we will achieve our demands. A fundamental solution is necessary. And it can only emerge from the organized mobilization of the working class, the peasantry, the youth and the indigenous peoples. The struggle for a free and sovereign Constituent Assembly, which buries once and for all the legacy of Fujimorismo, must be promoted from the streets and not from parliamentary pacts. But even that flag will only be a step towards the strategic objective: a government of the workers and the people, which expropriates the large economic groups and democratically plans the economy according to the majorities.

Today, more than ever, it is necessary to build a revolutionary left-wing political alternative that does not capitulate to reformism or subordinate itself to impotent electoralism. An organization that unifies the scattered struggles, that raises a socialist program and that prepares a new wave of popular insurrection. Peru is far from stability; we are at a stage where everything is in dispute. The urgent task is to organize the social force capable of give it an end.

Out with Boluarte, dissolution of the Congress and punishment of the murderers of the people!

For a Constituent Assembly from below, with workers’ and people’s power!

For a workers’ government!