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Protests broke out across Peru last week with thousands lashing out at President Pedro Castillo over soaring prices ranging from food to fuel, according to reports.
The Financial Times reported that some protesters blocked roads leading to Machu Picchu, the famous tourist destination. The report said 4,200 tourists called off their trips due to a 48-hour strike in the Cusco region.
The protests have been going on for about a month and resulted in the deaths of at least six people in clashes.
Inflation in Peru has hit 7 percent and many in the country have not recovered financially from the COVID-19 outbreak. Food, housing, and energy inflation jumped over 11 percent in the past year.
Sugar and food oil also rose 50 percent and 35 percent during that same time period.
Copper Protests
Castillo is also facing a copper crisis in the country as indigenous protesters near one of its largest mines have forced a production stop. These protesters claim they were not adequately compensated and that the mine hurt crops and soil in the region.
The protests have impacted other mines in the country and about a fifth of the country’s copper output will be off-line as a result. Peru accounts for about two percent of the world’s copper.
The president announced a state of emergency and Castillo said he will send military forces to the mine to ensure that it becomes operational again, Reuters reported.
Peru’s Prime Minister Anibal Torres said on Wednesday that the problem must be “solved now” and called the protesters “irrational” after they demanded $5 billion in compensation.
The protesters, who lived in the Apurimac region, say the Chinese mining firm MMG, which operates the mine, failed to meet agreed-upon social investment commitments.
“We were relocated 11 years ago, we left our land, the old Fuerabamba, where Las Bambas now operates. We fulfilled our part of the deal, but the company has not yet fulfilled theirs. We have returned to our land for those reasons, because of those breaches,” one protester told the outlet.
TREND FORECAST. TOP TREND FOR 2021: “YOUTH REVOLUTION,” as we had forecast in December 2020, the uprisings and revolutions that were sweeping the world before the COVID War will accelerate dramatically, as billions of young people with the energy to fight, sink deeper into economic despair.
In response to increasing uprisings as economic conditions deteriorate, governments will again impose restrictions to protest, as they did with COVID War, making it illegal to take to the streets in the people’s fight for their lives.
Thus, we maintain our forecast that protests will escalate into civil wars, and civil wars will spread to regional wars.”
There have been working-class protests in Sri Lanka, Peru, Paraguay, Spain, and Indonesia over the past month due to the jump in living costs—hurt more by the Ukraine War.
As Gerald Celente has often noted, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.” Therefore, as economic conditions further deteriorate, so too will the New World Disorder Top Trend for 2020, escalate.