Five years, six presidents: In Peru, resilience is exhausting

Last Wednesday around noon, Nicol Sarmiento was working at her office job in Lima when a co-worker told her the president was closing Congress.

The move by Pedro Castillo, a leftist former schoolteacher who took office just 16 months earlier, was widely condemned as an attempted coup. By the time Ms. Sarmiento took her lunch break, Mr. Castillo had been impeached and arrested, and an hour later, his vice president took office to replace him.

“It happened so fast,” says Ms. Sarmiento. “We were all in shock.”

But it wasn’t an entirely new sensation. Over the past five years, Peru has had three Congresses and six presidents, including its newest leader and first female president, Dina Boluarte, an attorney and former civil servant whose government is looking to be short-lived. There have been seven impeachment attempts since 2016. A flood of corruption scandals