LIMA: Peru’s Congress voted early Friday to remove deeply unpopular President Dina Boluarte from office as a crime wave grips the South American nation and quickly replaced her with 38-year-old lawyer José Jerí, the legislative body’s leader.
Lawmakers had set up a debate and impeachment trial late Thursday in the 130-member unicameral Congress after voting to accept four requests for a vote to remove Boluarte from office over what they said was her government’s inability to stem crime.
They requested that Boluarte come before them shortly before midnight to defend herself, but when she did not appear they immediately voted to oust her. In short order, 124 lawmakers voted just past midnight to impeach Boluarte. There were no votes against the effort.
The shocking turn of events came just hours after a shooting at a concert in the capital inflamed anger over crime roiling the country.
Unlike eight previous attempts to remove Boluarte, almost all legislative factions expressed support for the latest requests.
Boluarte, Peru’s first female president, took office in December 2022 after Parliament used the same mechanism to impeach her predecessor.
After Friday’s vote, Boluarte spoke on national television, recounting her administration’s achievements.
“I have not thought of myself, but rather of Peruvians,” she said.
Minutes into her speech, the broadcast was interrupted to show Jerí’s swearing in.
Jerí, the president of the Congress, was sworn in early Friday as the interim president to serve out Boluarte’s term. Elections are scheduled for next April and Boluarte’s term was to end July 28, 2026.
Jerí said he would defend Peru’s sovereignty and hand over power to the winner of the April election.
Boluarte was Peru’s sixth leader in just under a decade. A normal presidential term is five years.
She assumed power in Peru in 2022 to complete the term of then-President Pedro Castillo, who was removed from office just two years into his five-year term after attempting to dissolve the legislature to avoid his own removal. She had served as Castillo’s vice president before becoming president.
There were more than 500 protests demanding her resignation in the first three months of her presidency.
Plagued by scandals, her administration’s inability to address Peru’s incessant crime proved to be her undoing.
On Wednesday, she partially blamed the situation on immigrants living in the country illegally.
“This crime has been brewing for decades and has been strengthened by illegal immigration, which past administrations haven’t defeated,” she said during a military ceremony. “Instead, they’ve opened the doors of our borders and allowed criminals to enter everywhere... without any restrictions.”
Official figures show that 6,041 people were killed between January and mid-August, the highest number during the same period since 2017. Meanwhile, extortion complaints totaled 15,989 between January and July, a 28 percent increase compared to the same period in 2024.
The country’s latest presidential crisis erupted after a man opened fire and injured five people Wednesday during a concert of Peru’s most popular cumbia groups, Agua Marina.
Prime Minister Eduardo Arana on Thursday defended Boluarte during a crime-focused hearing before Parliament, but it was not enough to dissuade lawmakers from pursuing the motions to see the president out of office.
“Parliament’s concerns are not resolved by addressing a request for impeachment, much less by approving it,” Arana told lawmakers. “We are not clinging to our positions. We are here, and we knew from the beginning that our first day here could also be our last day in office.”
![]()
Peru’s Congress removes President Boluarte as a crime wave grips the country
Short Url
https://arab.news/6amgz
Peru’s Congress removes President Boluarte as a crime wave grips the country
- Peru’s Congress voted early Friday to remove deeply unpopular President Dina Boluarte from office as a crime wave grips the South American nation
From AI to Starlink: how drone tech is reshaping war in Ukraine
KYIV: As the war in Ukraine drags into its fifth year, drones have come to completely dominate the front line — a transformation in modern warfare that is being watched around the world.
Here is a look at the technology that is reshaping the war, four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion by pouring tanks and men over the border:
- Kill zone -
Ranging from cheap commercial devices designed for civilian use to explosive-packed miniature aircraft, drones are responsible for up to 80 percent of battlefield damage, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said.
“Modern warfare is now impossible without drones,” Koleso, a Ukrainian infantry soldier, told AFP in eastern Ukraine.
The front line has been transformed into a “kill zone” stretching up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) deep — “an area between two sides where nothing can survive because it’s constantly monitored by drones,” military expert Kateryna Bondar explained.
Soldiers can only operate there in small groups, moving fast and with their eyes fixed to the sky, hoping to stay undetected.
Heavy pieces of artillery, as well as sluggish tanks and armored vehicles, are too slow and visible — making them easy targets for both sides.
Unwilling to send more men that necessary into the kill zone, Ukrainian troops use ground drones to ferry supplies to dangerous areas and to evacuate wounded soldiers.
- Fibre optics -
Maintaining a stable connection between the drone and its operator, controlling it remotely, is a crucial task.
“That’s where the real race is happening — communications and connections,” Bondar said.
Initially, most drones operated on a radio connection.
But they proved vulnerable to electronic warfare — the practice of jamming and intercepting enemy craft, causing them to drop out of the sky or lose connection to the operator.
Russia has turned to drones controlled by ultra-thin fiber-optic cables, largely immune to electronic jamming.
In scenes that resemble a dystopian sci-fi movie, their widespread use has left swathes of frontline cities and fields entombed in webs of cable.
- Starlink -
In another alternative to radio control, Ukrainians have begun attaching Starlink terminals to drones.
This allows them to fly using a satellite Internet connection.
“We need to fly far away with a stable video signal and stable control,” said Phoenix, a commander from Ukraine’s Lasar Group, a pioneer in the use of Starlink.
Russian troops soon started copying, until Ukraine pushed Elon Musk last month to disable unauthorized Russian terminals.
The move disrupted both Russian and Ukrainian systems, military observers said.
The US-based Institute for the Study of War said the switch-off likely helped enable a localized, but rapid, Ukrainian advance in the southern Zaporizhzhia region in early February.
- Air defenses -
The spread of drones has forced a revamp of air defense systems.
Firing advanced missiles — which can cost millions — to down drones worth just a fraction of that is too expensive a response.
Alongside jamming, Ukraine has also developed cheap interceptor drones built specially to destroy other craft mid-air.
“We opened the chapter of the war of drones with drones,” said Marko Kushnir of General Cherry, a leading interceptor drone maker.
Roads near the front have been equipped with protective nets attempting to stop attacking drones, while trucks fitted with anti-drone cages and drone jammers speed along them.
Machine guns are also a last resort to shoot down drones from the sky.
Ukraine’s Western allies have increasingly looked to Kyiv’s experience after Russian drones made repeat incursions into European airspace in recent months.
- AI -
Engineers are racing to equip drones with artificial intelligence to improve their performance.
Ukrainian firms such as The Fourth Law (TFL) say they have developed so-called terminal guidance, which allows AI to take control of a device in the final moments before impact.
This is meant to improve the accuracy of strikes, especially as connection is typically lost in the final moments before a hit.
“Russia and China are also developing such technologies, and if our countries don’t... we will lose,” said TFL’s Maksym Savanevskyi.
But full autonomy remains some way off.
“AI is performing a helping function rather than substituting human,” said Bondar, the military expert.
“I thought they could simply remove people from battle equipment, that it could be fully automated. That’s a naive view,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now head of SwiftBeat, a company that supplies AI drones to Ukraine’s army.
“For the foreseeable future, you’ll have drones first, people second,” he told a conference in Kyiv.
All the way on the eastern front, Koleso said foot soldiers would always remain relevant.
“Until you plant the flag yourself, with your own hands, and take the position, it cannot be considered yours,” he said.
Here is a look at the technology that is reshaping the war, four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion by pouring tanks and men over the border:
- Kill zone -
Ranging from cheap commercial devices designed for civilian use to explosive-packed miniature aircraft, drones are responsible for up to 80 percent of battlefield damage, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said.
“Modern warfare is now impossible without drones,” Koleso, a Ukrainian infantry soldier, told AFP in eastern Ukraine.
The front line has been transformed into a “kill zone” stretching up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) deep — “an area between two sides where nothing can survive because it’s constantly monitored by drones,” military expert Kateryna Bondar explained.
Soldiers can only operate there in small groups, moving fast and with their eyes fixed to the sky, hoping to stay undetected.
Heavy pieces of artillery, as well as sluggish tanks and armored vehicles, are too slow and visible — making them easy targets for both sides.
Unwilling to send more men that necessary into the kill zone, Ukrainian troops use ground drones to ferry supplies to dangerous areas and to evacuate wounded soldiers.
- Fibre optics -
Maintaining a stable connection between the drone and its operator, controlling it remotely, is a crucial task.
“That’s where the real race is happening — communications and connections,” Bondar said.
Initially, most drones operated on a radio connection.
But they proved vulnerable to electronic warfare — the practice of jamming and intercepting enemy craft, causing them to drop out of the sky or lose connection to the operator.
Russia has turned to drones controlled by ultra-thin fiber-optic cables, largely immune to electronic jamming.
In scenes that resemble a dystopian sci-fi movie, their widespread use has left swathes of frontline cities and fields entombed in webs of cable.
- Starlink -
In another alternative to radio control, Ukrainians have begun attaching Starlink terminals to drones.
This allows them to fly using a satellite Internet connection.
“We need to fly far away with a stable video signal and stable control,” said Phoenix, a commander from Ukraine’s Lasar Group, a pioneer in the use of Starlink.
Russian troops soon started copying, until Ukraine pushed Elon Musk last month to disable unauthorized Russian terminals.
The move disrupted both Russian and Ukrainian systems, military observers said.
The US-based Institute for the Study of War said the switch-off likely helped enable a localized, but rapid, Ukrainian advance in the southern Zaporizhzhia region in early February.
- Air defenses -
The spread of drones has forced a revamp of air defense systems.
Firing advanced missiles — which can cost millions — to down drones worth just a fraction of that is too expensive a response.
Alongside jamming, Ukraine has also developed cheap interceptor drones built specially to destroy other craft mid-air.
“We opened the chapter of the war of drones with drones,” said Marko Kushnir of General Cherry, a leading interceptor drone maker.
Roads near the front have been equipped with protective nets attempting to stop attacking drones, while trucks fitted with anti-drone cages and drone jammers speed along them.
Machine guns are also a last resort to shoot down drones from the sky.
Ukraine’s Western allies have increasingly looked to Kyiv’s experience after Russian drones made repeat incursions into European airspace in recent months.
- AI -
Engineers are racing to equip drones with artificial intelligence to improve their performance.
Ukrainian firms such as The Fourth Law (TFL) say they have developed so-called terminal guidance, which allows AI to take control of a device in the final moments before impact.
This is meant to improve the accuracy of strikes, especially as connection is typically lost in the final moments before a hit.
“Russia and China are also developing such technologies, and if our countries don’t... we will lose,” said TFL’s Maksym Savanevskyi.
But full autonomy remains some way off.
“AI is performing a helping function rather than substituting human,” said Bondar, the military expert.
“I thought they could simply remove people from battle equipment, that it could be fully automated. That’s a naive view,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now head of SwiftBeat, a company that supplies AI drones to Ukraine’s army.
“For the foreseeable future, you’ll have drones first, people second,” he told a conference in Kyiv.
All the way on the eastern front, Koleso said foot soldiers would always remain relevant.
“Until you plant the flag yourself, with your own hands, and take the position, it cannot be considered yours,” he said.
Latest updates
© 2026 SAUDI RESEARCH & PUBLISHING COMPANY, All Rights Reserved And subject to Terms of Use Agreement.