By Noah Hurowitz

In a recent query commissioned by the newspaper El Comercio, the polling firm Datum Internacional found that just 5 percent of Peruvians approve of Boluarte’s performance, while an astounding 92 percent say they disapprove of her administration -a level of unpopularity that cuts across all socioeconomic and regional demographics with little variation.
Boluarte’s approval rating has never cracked 20 percent, according to data gathered by Datum, but she has reached a new nadir of unpopularity amid a devastating wave of crime and extortion that has pushed the capital, Lima, to a breaking point.
“If you look at what day-to-day life is like, people are increasingly afraid of crime, of extortions, of drive-by killings -aside from the fact that the economy is not doing very well,” said Jo-Marie Burt, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government who has lived and taught in Peru.
“Life is very precarious, people are unhappy, and there’s a feeling that the government is not really doing very much.”
Boluarte’s government has made token efforts at restoring order, but the president herself has been keeping such a low profile that she recently went 100 days without speaking directly to reporters.
“You basically have a president who is in hiding,” Peruvian journalist Marco Sifuentes told The Intercept. “People notice that.”
Despite coming to prominence as a leftist, Boluarte has remained in power with the support of a strange coalition of ideologically diverse -but mostly right-wing- parties in Congress. The main factor unifying this alliance is their own self-interest, Burt said.
“The political system has been captured by a bunch of thieves and they’re running the country into the ground,” Burt said. “They’re not legislating for the people. They’re legislating to strengthen their own power to continue stealing from the country and enriching themselves.”
As of May, more than half of legislators in Congress were facing active criminal investigation, according to the news website Infobae. But with their power virtually unchecked, legislators have been busy passing laws defanging oversight from other branches of government and protecting the financial interests of lawmakers and their cronies, according to a March report by the DC-based nonprofit Freedom House, which downgraded its rating of Peru from “Mostly Free” to “Partly Free”.