������Ƶ

LIMA: With an approval rating of just two percent, Peru’s President Dina Boluarte may be the world’s most unpopular leader, according to pollsters.
Protests greeted her rise to power 29 months ago, and have marked her entire term — joined by assorted scandals, investigations, controversies and a surge in gang violence.
The 63-year-old is the target of a dozen probes, including for her alleged failure to declare gifts of luxury jewels and watches, a scandal inevitably dubbed “Rolexgate.”
She is also under the microscope for a two-week undeclared absence for nose surgery — which she insists was medical, not cosmetic — and is being investigated for her role in a police crackdown that caused the deaths of 50 protesters.
Against that bleak backdrop, Boluarte’s never-high popularity hit rock bottom this month.
The Ipsos polling agency found she had a two-percent approval rating, down from 21 percent when she took office.
“We might be talking about a world record of sustained presidential disapproval,” Ipsos Peru president Alfredo Torres told AFP.
It is the lowest score Ipsos has measured in any of the other 90 countries it surveys, Torres said.
Yet as far as recent Peruvian presidents go, she is not just a survivor, but positively an elder stateswoman.
The South American nation has had six presidents in eight years and if Boluarte lasts to the end of her term next year, she would be the longest-serving of them all.

Backed by corrupt majority rightwing parties
Despite not having a party in Congress, she has managed to stay in power with the backing of Peru’s majority right-wing parties.
Analysts say voter lethargy and political expediency have so far helped Boluarte buck the trend of prematurely ousted Peruvian leaders.
“In Peru, there is a political paradox: Boluarte is the weakest president of the last decade,” political analyst Augusto Alvarez of the University of the Pacific told AFP.
But her weakness is “also her strength,” he said, explaining that a lame-duck president is politically useful for Congress.
“It is a great business to have a fragile president whom they (lawmakers) use” to entrench their own power and pass laws beneficial to allies and backers, said Alvarez.
Transparency International’s Peruvian chapter Proetica has cited Congress for “counter-reforms, setbacks in anti-corruption instruments... and shielding of members of Congress who are ethically questioned.”
Boluarte has other factors counting in her favor.
Congress is seemingly keeping her around for lack of a better, consensus, candidate.
Another plus for Boluarte: Peru’s economy has been performing well, with GDP growing 3.3 percent last year and 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2025 — a steep improvement from the 2020 recession blamed on Covid pandemic lockdowns.
Peru’s inflation rate is one of the lowest in the region.
“The economy continues to function, there is enormous resilience, and the population’s income is growing,” said Alvarez.
But this may have little to do with policy, observers say, and more with external factors such as rising copper prices. Peru is one of the top producers of the metal.

Little love for her from the street
On the street, there is little love for Boluarte, as Peru battles a surge in gang violence characterized by a wave of killings linked to extortion rackets.
Boluarte “has no empathy, she is an incapable president, she does not solve the security problem,” Saturnino Conde, a 63-year-old teacher, told AFP.
At frequent marches against the president, the catchphrase: “Dina, Asesina!” (Dina, Murderer!) has become a popular refrain.
But a full-out rebellion appears unlikely, say analysts.
Peruvians “feel it’s not worth it: if she resigns or is dismissed, she would be replaced by a member of Congress, but Congress also has a terrible image,” said Ipsos manager Torres.
In addition, “there is no other candidate that captivates, which is why people are not in a hurry to remove her from power.”
 

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory Friday in his immigration crackdown, giving his administration the green light to revoke the legal status of half a million migrants from four Caribbean and Latin American countries.
The decision puts 532,000 people who came from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the United States under a two-year humanitarian “parole” program launched by former president Joe Biden at risk of deportation.
And it marked the second time the highest US court has sided with Trump in his aggressive push to deliver on his election pledge to deport millions of non-citizens, through a series of policy announcements that have prompted a flurry of lawsuits.
But the opinion sparked a scathing dissent from two justices in the liberal minority who said the six conservatives on the bench had “plainly botched” their ruling and undervalued the “devastating consequences” to those potentially affected.
The revoked program had allowed entry into the United States for two years for up to 30,000 migrants a month from the four countries, all of which have dismal human rights records.
But as Trump takes a hard line on immigration, his administration moved to overturn those protections, winning a ruling from the Supreme Court earlier this month that allowed officials to begin deporting some 350,000 Venezuelans.
The latest case resulted from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceling an 18-month extension of the temporary protected status of the migrants, citing in particular the “authoritarian” nature of Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela.
The department gave them 30 days to leave the country unless they had legal protection under another program.
“The court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor wrote in their dissent.
The justices said the migrants face being wrenched from family and returning to potential danger in their native countries — or opting to stay and risking imminent removal.
“At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgment regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to that kind of practical impact,” Jackson said.
None of the other justices gave reasons for their decision, and the court was not required to make the vote public.
The district court that barred the administration from revoking the migrants’ status had argued that it was unlawfully applying a fast-track deportation procedure aimed at illegal immigrants to non-citizens protected by government programs.
At the Supreme Court, Justice Department lawyers said the “district court has nullified one of the administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions” by issuing the stay.
The high court’s decision means the Trump administration can go ahead with its policy change, even as the litigation on the merits plays out in lower courts.
Trump campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants, evoking an “invasion” of the United States by hordes of foreign criminals.
Among other measures, he invoked an obscure wartime law to fly more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador.
But his program of mass deportations has been thwarted or restricted by numerous court rulings, including from the Supreme Court and notably on the grounds that those targeted should be able to assert their due process rights.
And the administration has been berated over its efforts to restrict immigration from poor countries with human rights concerns like Afghanistan and Haiti, while accepting white South African refugees amid baseless claims that they face “genocide.”
The Trump administration systematically accuses judges who oppose his immigration decisions of plundering his presidential national security powers.